• Question: what is the coolest experiment you have ever done?

    Asked by jacksmith to Duncan, Grant, Julie, Nik, Rachel on 11 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by gigglesreekie, 5uperdyl, dom1234, unicorn9, amd2000, florrieisnotonfire.
    • Photo: Grant Campbell

      Grant Campbell answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Freezing bread dough in liquid nitrogen (temperature -196 degrees C) is certainly cool – literally, and because of all the nitrogen vapour that comes off! I used to freeze it so that I could then take thin slices of the frozen dough and measure the sizes of the bubbles, in order to understand how the bubbles that we see in bread start out in the dough. These days we use X-rays to measure the bubbles – back then I had to invent this more difficult technique.
      (Then, the holes that you see in the slices of dough are smaller, on average, than the bubbles from which they came, so I had to do some clever maths to calculate the actual bubble size distribution.)

    • Photo: Duncan Gaskin

      Duncan Gaskin answered on 17 Mar 2013:

      Like Grant I’ve used liquid nitrogen in some of my experiments. For one I had to freeze a Guava fruit in liquid nitrogen for a day, then take it out and hit it with a hammer to chip bits off!

      We also have rooms that are as cold as fridges (4 degrees Centigrade) and working in one of these is pretty cool (well ok pretty cold!)

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