What’s the most fun experiment you’ve ever done any why???

Question: What's the most fun experiment you've ever done any why???
- Keywords:
  experiment,
  fun
Asked by helsy to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 14 Mar 2011 in Categories: General.
- Sheila Kanani answered on 13 Mar 2011:
  
  Oooo great question! Most experiments I’ve ever done have been rather boring, because school and uni have so many health and safety issues so we can never play with cool stuff!
  I’ve done some great experients at Space School though, playing with liquid nitrogen and dry ice, and building and launching rockets. One of my favourite experiments is to build and design a planetary lander, using an egg as the payload. Then you ‘launch’ the lander out of a window and see if the egg survives the drop. I like it because, believe it or not, its a useful analogy of how things really are done in the space industry.
  I also love making comets using dry ice, see my link for a video of me doing this!
  http://www.teachers.tv/videos/planetary-scientist
- Suzie Sheehy answered on 13 Mar 2011:
  
  Probably the best experiment I’ve been involved in is the one I currently spend some time on – it’s a new type of particle accelerator which no-one has ever built before. That means that just about everything about it is new and challenging – but almost everything we do with it is groundbreaking. I helped design it, so it’s really rewarding to see such a big project that I helped design come to life (it cost £8 million!).
  It’s fun because I get to actually sit in the control room and control the machine myself, it’s a lot of responsibility but the other people I work with are great fun and I really enjoy it.
- Adam Tuff answered on 14 Mar 2011:
  
  This is a really hard question, but the one that was definitely the most fun was an experiment we were showing off to students about the effects of being in a vaccuum (like when in space).
  
  We had a big glass dome in which we placed a “space man”…the space man was actually made of marshmallow wrapped in tin foil, but it was basically a good representation of a space suit and a person underneath.
  
  The space man’s suit wasn’t very good though, and it wasn’t air-tight (it was just tin foil!), so when we created a vacuum inside of the dome, the space man exploded in a mess of pink sticky goo…which is why you should always wear a space suit wth no holes!
- Geoff McBride answered on 14 Mar 2011:
  
  Making the device that went on the SMART-1 spacecraft involved many experiments [around a dozen] to develop the manufacturing processes. It was fun because it was difficult.
- Robert Simpson answered on 14 Mar 2011:
  
  For my Chemistry A-Level I dissolved pennies into nitric acid (to see what pennies are made of) and one day I forgot to turn on the fume cupboard and ended up causing a small evacuation of the building 🙂 The beaker of acid really bubbled and smoked and I had to run. It was great fun!