We are now heading into the home stretch of the term, with only 5 more lessons to go.
And watch this space! We are about to announce some exciting events (and even a product!) for the holiday season. Stay tuned to be the first to know.
SCIENCE BEHIND THE WAND
While in the Wizarding World, a simple “Evanesco” or an invisibility cloak is enough to disappear from view, in the real world, invisibility requires a mastery of light. Using refraction, the bending of light as it travels from one medium into another, we will make test tubes and rods actually disappear and reappear right before your eyes. Sure, it will only do so in slippery oil rather than thin air, and it only works with clear glass. So, to make the opaque vanish, we will have to get tricky. Using the clean reflections of mirrors, we will build a Room of Requirement in which we can hide things from plain view.
MYTH BUSTERS
Is it really impossible to pull apart two interleaved phone books? After explaining what phone books are to children who can’t fathom a time before the internet, we will explore friction - the only force keeping these heavy tomes together. By getting objects with different surfaces and shapes to slide, we will discover what role smoothness and (more importantly for our myth) surface area play in this resistance to motion before using nothing but friction to lift up whole bottles of rice with a simple pencil. Then, by interleaving notebooks and measuring the effort required to separate them, we will hopefully build up enough courage for a phone book-tug-of-war.
PERIODIC PIONEERS
The Halogens of Group 7 are great at making salts. Take a little chlorine and add a dash of sodium, and voila, a salt no dish will ever go without. But on their own, the halogens are toxic as they are vibrant. In large doses, they can wreak havoc - ask anyone who has swum in an over-chlorinated pool - but in small amounts, though, they make effective disinfectants. But rather than rubbing iodine tincture on our open wounds, we will be brewing it with starch, vitamin C, and peroxide to concoct a potion that will go from clear to black in a flash!
