Have You Ever Enjoyed Playing Amateur Scientist?

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Have you ever enjoyed playing amateur scientist and doing experiments just for the heck of it? Kind of similar to playing the lottery. Very improbable that you would make any kind of breakthrough but hey you never know. I've done this all through my life right up to now with the videos I am putting on YouTube. I never had an interest in playing sports such as football but simply preferred this. Do you think this is more pronounced in Aspies than NTs?

All my life! I have volunteered with programs that use amateurs to count meteors, band and count birds, work at archaelogical sites. No expensive Earthwatch for me. I also have my own telescope, microscope, reagents, geological pick and trowel, etc. Throughout history many of the most helpful discoveries have been made by amateurs, thinking outside the party-line box, following their hunches out of passion, not for a paycheck on someone else's timetable. That's pretty characteristic of an Aspie. More power to you, Silver_Meteor!

It was my childhood obsession with chemistry and physics that got me into electronics.
I spent many hours reading and memorizing stuff from The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments
by Robert Brent.



A PDF is available at this link: http://chemistry.about.com/library/goldenchem.pdf

Lately I have been toying with the Idea of building a home lab.

I had a home chemistry lab at my father's farm where I grew up and used to beg / borrow a few things from my college and also bought lots of chemicals from the local pharmacy and agricultural stores. The lab was in an outbuilding. Did lots of fun and interesting stuff from making soap to various things that went BANG.

I guess it would be impossible to buy many of the chemicals that my local pharmacy in the UK happily provided; many are probably illegal to sell to the public now either for health and safety reasons or fear of bomb making.

The most interesting experiments were the ones that didn't go as expected and provoked a little more research. For example I tried storing some concentrated NaOH solution in an aluminium saucepan and was initially baffled why it bubbled like crazy and dissolved the metal. A little research showed it was hydrogen gas being liberated - lots of it. So I was then able to do experiments with hydrogen gas too.

Years later I also got into electronics and made lots of stuff from a twenty channel burglar alarm to sound synthesisers - that was fun too, the electronics were simple circuits for example the synthesisers were astable circuits modulating astable circuits etc. The electronics mags often had adverts for cheap components e.g. big bag of mixed elecrolytics or resistors for a pound or two.

I enjoy playing with fire, LOL. Have you ever tried melting a plastic Coke bottle (preferably empty) with a gas lighter? It's very fun!

The fumes kinda stink, though, so other people living in the house might be a bit pissed off.

Back in 1969 I had both the Golden Book cited earlier and a Skil-Craft chemistry set.
Recently I found a near mint condition Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments for $3.00
at the York Emporium....I can probably get almost $500.00 for it now.

Fortunately amateur chemistry is not dead but it is having a rough time in these
over-regulated and hyper-litigated times.

Here are a couple of things I found in my quest for scientific freedom:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1wuD6tw7OM[/youtube]

Also from MakeZine: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/1 ... guide.html

YouTube is full of videos of kids doing asinine things with pool chlorine and rubbing alcohol in plastic
bottles. Type "chlorine bomb" into the search field on the You Tube site to see what I am talking about.

Knowledge is power: power hurts, power helps...Power is only as dangerous as the person wielding
it. Let's be careful out there.

I had one or two "close encounters" of the dangerous kind when experimenting. Usually from reactions that did not go as expected.

On one occasion I was making nitroglycerine and I hadn't provided adequate cooling. The reaction is quite exothermic and got unstable. Suddenly my large beaker started pouring out lots of brown nitrogen dioxide fumes and I quickly evacuated my little lab expecting a very large bang and a furious father for demolishing his out building. Fortunately the reaction just burned itself out without exploding. Subsequent attempts at creating it were more successful

Another experiment that did bite me was unexpected. I wanted to make some zinc sulphide. I knew it was used as phosphor on the back of screens and could be made to fluoresce if hit with high speed electrons. Anyway, I'd got some zinc dust and sulphur powder. Logic told me that these should be able to react simply be mixing them together and applying some heat - i.e. a lit match. I didn't anticipate the speed of the reaction though and with an big flash and cloud of smoke I didn't have any skin on my thumb any more.

I subsequently went on to use this mixture to make some rockets. Not overly spectacular, but I got one to 300 feet in the air. (As calculated by its time to drop s = ut + 1/2 at^2 as I seem to remember - but the physics is a distant memory now).

I've done some experiments in computing, built my own working E-mail server, flashed router firmwares etc. Also I've written a few programs for the heck of it, most recently a few different prisoners for prisoners dilemma in Clojure.

As an amateur radio operator, I love being the scientist role (though I am training to be an archaeologist in real life.) I love building my own equipment and everything. I sincerely hope, once more, that I do not sound arrogant in this. However, I think that everyone should enjoy and not be embarrassed by whatever they do - how much fiction, after all, is based on the brilliant discovery by a man in his basement?

Hey Kids! You might want to try some of these at home.....



Click the pic for more info.....

You know, did he ever publish a set of cards, each with an experiment on them? I had such a set, and they certainly seem similar to this web page, though perhaps that's a coincidence.

He sells a set of element cards here---> http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTab ... cards.html

You know that special paper they make till receipts out of? When you burn it, it glows a bit green and makes a few little sparks. Is awesome.

You mean like that thermal paper?