| The Amazing Silica
Gel! The Chemical Child With a Crazy Little Secret! |
 All you need is a laser pointer, a dark room and a bead of Silica Gel. NOTE: For the best results find some round Silica Gel beads that are fairly large, about 1/16". |
Silica gel, Silicone
Dioxide, SiO2 seems ordinary and
innocuous enough but did you know it
has an amazing and fascinating little secret or maybe I should say
secrets? Have you ever wanted to explore another world?
Well Silica Gel's world is a good place to start. What makes Silica Gel so amazing? It is a world
full of interconnecting caves, tunnels and caverns. Just a single
teaspoon of dry Silica Gel is jam packed with porous surfaces and a
huge amount of empty space. If you
could slice open each and every tunnel in a single teaspoon full
or Silica Gel and lay the surfaces out flat you would be able to cover
an entire football field and have enough left over to cover both end
zones also. Each Silica Gel ball or granule is chuck full of
space and because of this when it is dry it makes an excellent
insulator to keep out heat or cold. If you are like me and you hear amazing
facts like the ones you just read about you might be a little
suspicious and take it with a grain of salt thinking some one just made
it up. Here is a simple experiment I invented that will let you see for
yourself that there really are millions of tunnels and caves in a
single bead of Silica Gel. All you need is a laser pointer, a bead of
Silica Gel and a dark room. with a white or light colored wall or
ceiling. Now the fun begins! Simply
place a single bead of Silica Gel in front of the opening of a laser
pointer and project an image on the ceiling. Looks like a galaxy with
millions of stars doesn't it? Each point of light is a tunnel and most
of the tunnels are not being projected because of the angles they are
at in relation to the laser beam. So you are only seeing a very small
portion of this amazing sphere of the Silica Gel world. This would make
an excellent science class demonstration and might be used in some way
as a science fair project. For horizontal projections you will need to
use sticky tac or a similar substance to hold the bead in place. |
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Using a green
laser pointer shining through a bead of Silica Gel this image was
projected on a light colored door.
There
are so many dots that the camera sees most of them merged together but
in real life tens of thousands more dots are distinguishable to
the naked eye and millions more overlap each other. Each dot is
a tunnel or
pore in the Silica Gel bead. Most of the tunnels or pores do not even
show up because of the overlapping or they fall outside the laser beams
path. It is easy to
see
that there is probably more than enough surface area in a teaspoon full
of silica gel to cover a football field, the end zones and
probably
all the benches. So as they say on Myth Busters, this myth is
confirmed. Look up: Laser, collminate. What is culminated light? |