Thursday, August 16, 2007

Science Practicals

Science, they say, is all about ‘experimenting’. Well, thank my lucky stars that the colleges don’t think so, or I would be failing. Somehow, experimenting is not my cup of tea, and things tend to go horribly wrong when I experiment with stuff. I am extremely careful, and I try not to experiment at all (who cares what happens to potassium carbonate when you add concentrated sulphuric acid to it?), but if I am forced to…well, my teacher has to bear the consequences.

My greatest achievement is that I managed to survive without breaking a test tube last year. That is pretty difficult to manage…usually; I end up with something very different from what is considered ‘normal’. For example, the day when my chem. Experiment when horribly wrong, and only my test tube turned motty-green, emitting a horrible, green coloured gas, with my teacher screaming, “Not the test for Ist group acid Radicals, my girl, try with Hydrogen Sulphide!” Everyone else’s had the required “Curdy white precipitate”, and people were closing their noses…well, you get the picture.

The worst and the most boring of all practicals is physics….I almost never get the values right. It’s gives a dose of frustration, really…it makes me tear my hair out. It’s wonderful that Hemavathi, my classmate is by my side, saying, “That’s not right,” “That’s not how you should do it!” Well, the circuit connections go wrong when I try, and I can’t time the number of oscillations of the pendulum (we calculated the acceleration due to gravity on earth to be 11.8 when it has to be 9.8 meters per second) The so called ‘Scientific temperament’, blah..blah…blah…it lacking. Hmm…I wonder how Thomas Alva Edison experimented with nearly a hundred substituents of carbon for the bulb, before he got it right. If I were him, the world would still be dark at night.

Coming to Bio…my favorite. I was a good artist in school and there is nearly no experimenting, so it’s fun. I can sit for long hours, sketching the cross-section of the liver’s hepatic cells until I reach perfection. But there are yucky parts too…Cockroach dissection! I nearly vomited when they did that. They pair up 2 people, and I never even touched the cockroach, let alone dissect it! My friend Thunga was perfectly happy doing it, and I totally freaked out when I observed that the ‘unconscious’ or the ‘dead’ cockroach (It’s hard to make out with cockroaches, actually) was either regaining consciousness, or coming back to life while she was dissecting it. Somebody actually scared me we would have to dissect a toad this year, until I learnt that there were joking.

Well, that’s practicals for you. In my next blog, I wish to continue on what went wrong in practicals, and how I coped with it.

4 comments:

Mysore Madhu said...

Laxmi

Looks like not many science students around!

Let me share some of my practical experiences with you.

I wont say it is straight, but we had a way out for getting the appropriate values in Physics. For Example: there was an experiement to calculate the specific density of wter using the drop weight method. You collect a set number of drops of water in a beaker which has been previously weighed. you again weigh the beaker after collecting the drops of water and then calculate the density. The whole expriment does not take more than 15 minutes. We always got the wrong answer after 3 tries. So the scientist (he may be a litte off track!) in my head woke up and gave a solution. Using the rules a arithmetic, I transpolated the formula, where the answer was a known factor and the known (or measured factor - the weight of the water) was the unknown. So we got the approximate amount of water that needed to be collected. Then changing the value of that anwer - which was the amount of water to be collected and then made the paper calculation to get the approximate value of the "density of water". Unfortunately I scored max marks for that ingenuity.

Hope you get what I did?

Mysore Madhu said...

Laxmi

Looks like not many science students around!

Let me share some of my practical experiences with you.

I wont say it is straight, but we had a way out for getting the appropriate values in Physics. For Example: there was an experiement to calculate the specific density of wter using the drop weight method. You collect a set number of drops of water in a beaker which has been previously weighed. you again weigh the beaker after collecting the drops of water and then calculate the density. The whole expriment does not take more than 15 minutes. We always got the wrong answer after 3 tries. So the scientist (he may be a litte off track!) in my head woke up and gave a solution. Using the rules a arithmetic, I transpolated the formula, where the answer was a known factor and the known (or measured factor - the weight of the water) was the unknown. So we got the approximate amount of water that needed to be collected. Then changing the value of that anwer - which was the amount of water to be collected and then made the paper calculation to get the approximate value of the "density of water". Unfortunately I scored max marks for that ingenuity.

Hope you get what I did?

Lakshmi Bharadwaj said...

Yes...got it, but that took a while. In the case of density of water, you can atleast expect it to be around 1000 kg per metre cubed, but, say, if I wanted the electrical resistivity of a wire or something like that, then, I would'nt know what to expect. So, I wouldn;t know if my values were actually right or wrong...I just go do the expt and get it wrong. But whereever it is possible, I follow your method...paperwork. Nothing better than good old paperwork...did that with the vernier callipers and screw gauge last year. Thank you for all the information, I am grateful.

Maddy said...

Talking of edision, i have been to his house, which is now a museum in Naples FL. A real scientist, he was tasked to make a rubber substitute by the US government at war, he brought in seeds & saplings of all tropical plants (1000's of miles away)that produced resinous gum and planted them in a tropical place, florida. Today it is a glorious tropical garden, with mangoes, jackfruit and what not...he never found a rubber substitute, but he tried and tried, the hard way, no short cuts...so keep trying, you will reach where you want..it is more perspiration and less inspiration most of the time.