Delta’s American Chemical Society (ACS) club and the Chemistry department hosted a Chemistry Magic Show on Oct. 26 during College Hour to celebrate National Chemistry Week.
The show was held in the Science and Math Building (SCMA) Atrium.
“National Chemistry Week is a weekly celebration all over the country along with other chemistry departments and colleges where they do different activities for it, and we have been doing it for seven years now. Sometimes we do presentations for the weekly celebration but this time we only decided to do the chemistry show,” said Co-Advisor of the American Chemical Society Club Trinidad Arraya.
All students who participated are part of the American Chemical Society Club, and the club is open to all Delta students who have an eye to learn about chemistry without needing to be in a chemistry or science class.
Along with professors and staff, the students were able to demonstrate experiments related to chemistry and most of them were in the style of magic tricks.
Delta’s ASC also was awarded an Honorable Mention from the American Chemical Society for their efforts to host chemistry shows at local elementary and high schools. It was their sixth consecutive award.
The show started with an invisible ink demonstration, in which student Marilyn Solsona sprayed phenolphthalein on a poster and then followed with a bottle of sodium hydroxide. Ink started to appear on the poster, welcoming all guests.
A new demonstration added for this year’s show involved student Abner Arias asking the crowd to guess what color a substance inside a set of glass bottles would turn into when different substances were added.
To each of the six bottles, he added sodium hydroxide to show the colors, which were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink.
Abner then dropped these colors into a large beaker and asked the crowd to guess the last color. Adding a last bit of acid neutralized everything — the mixture turned clear.
A methane bubble demonstration with Chinl Phou, Jasslen Gill, and Rene Nerio followed.
After taking safety precautions, the trio held their hands together with soap on it and then ignited the mixture with a long lighter fire by student Jael Medina.
The resulting thermal reaction showed that soap can help the fire.
Liquid nitrogen also made an appearance, with students freezing and then shattering bananas, flowers and balloons.
Associate Professor Mary Ellison closed the show by popping hydrogen balloons with a long lighter.
All these experiments also used strong chemicals like acid and liquid nitrogen or open flames, so they are not recommended to copy at home.
Delta’s ACS does offer home demo experiments that are safe at home to do on their website https://sites.google.com/view/sjdc-fall2020-chemshow.
More information about the show is also available on their Instagram page @sjdc_acs.
