Seeing Electrons with the Naked Eye!

okay this video is awesome in it I'm gonna show you how you can see directly electrons but not only that but you remember the liquid metal Terminator the metal that had a life of its own yeah that's real and I'm gonna show you how to do it no special effects whatsoever and even more I'm gonna show you how to turn metal into gold something that the alchemists fail to do and I'm gonna do it in about 15 minutes using some of the most abundant compounds in the universe you see the most abundant element in the universe is hydrogen by mass the universe is about 75% hydrogen and by number of nuclei it's about 85% hydrogen so the compounds of hydrogen are the most common molecules in the universe so the most common molecule in the universe is h2 hydrogen helium really doesn't make any compounds now next on the list oxygen is the third most common atom in the universe and the hydride of oxygen is water the second most common molecule in the universe it's maybe unsurprising at this point of course that two-thirds of the atoms in your body are hydrogen carbons the next most common element in the universe and the hydride of this is methane which crops up again and again all over the solar system neon and iron really don't form much in the way of high tides and next on the list is the nitrogen and the hydride of nitrogen is ammonia and it's maybe not unsurprising at this point that if you take a look at the outer planets they basically reflect this they're mostly hydrogen and helium with a bit of water meeting and ammonia so what is ammonia cool so this is ammonia no this is the tube that comes out of it's a gas so as you get this going and we on the field here the gas going oh yeah even now you get a good whiff of ammonia and it's it's kind of like getting hit in the face it's oh yeah that's how sharp it is it's really sharp but relatively short-lived and then it's Morris the same if it gets in your eyes it stings like crazy but isn't enough for a long period of time it's but without that anyway so that demonio coming out of there and as you can see it's a pretty reasonable gasp so how do you make this into a liquid well there are two principal ways that you can do it the first is you get it really cool which you would do with a block of coming outside like that or you can pressurize it which you would do in a cylinder so a block of come outside and we need to break some bits off that you can just about move the stuff with your bare hands but you get frostbite ruling out burns freezes your fingers really pretty quickly and it does all sorts of weed stuff out so I'll show you in a second but just rake up yeah coming out so like this but you want a few blocks so here I've got a thermometer there's 22 degrees Celsius a moment that's room temperature that's a block I've come outside that's basically the the gas vaporizing and does all sorts of weird stuff right so that's basically the temperature of the carbon dioxide is minus 78 but obviously pushing stuff in the cap monoxide to piñas because this is a solid and doesn't have a very good connectivity so one window is I'm just going to get some ethanol and pour the ethanol on to the dry ice at which point it does some interesting stuff so that's now my carbonated ethanol fizzy ethanol but the good thing is it should have a temperature of - plenty so this is now a liquid that's actually really cold I only need like - thirty to liquefy the ammonia so this all now easily liquify ammonia so here I have my tube with ammonia if I actually just blow my ammonia into this pot here absolutely diddly-squat happens until I stick it into the liquid the ethanol - ice bath which point yes should find yes start again up condensing in there it does actually condense really quite quickly yeah now it's basically liquid ammonia the reverse way so I can demonstrate that this is actually liquid ammonia the maybe the simplest is I'll just pour it into another little ampule just how quickly it boils off you see this is actually still quite cold cool so that's liquid ammonia now if you get sued IAM and add it to water the second most common molecule in the universe you get a pretty decent explosion which is related to the electrons from that sodium going into the water this was explored at some length on this channel and actually resulted in a publication in a very prestigious science journal so what happens is the electrons get sucked off the metal into the water where they have a very short lifetime because the water reacts with them so quickly now when we did this work we found we had to work with sodium-potassium alloy because it was possible to get this really clean metal surface with it which is again remarkable if you think about it you take sodium which is a solid and potassium which just solid and you mix the two together and you get a beautiful liquid metal it goes a little something like this so what I've got here is some potassium and some sodium they've both got about the same density and so the ratio of the volume has basically gives me the ratio on which I'm mixing them in which is approximately four parts potassium to one part sodium you see there's always boil and crap on here so I'm just going to wash them that off and chop up the potassium into little bits or smaller bits and put them in a second pot of hexane so the sodium are going to chop up smaller because sodium is actually much harder to as a metal these here is easy enough to cut it's sort of like hard butter yeah that's all sodium and potassium in there now comes the interesting bit is when you actually squish these two together I want to go on the microscope there oh yeah see a liquid you push two solids together you get a liquid liquid metal no glass transfer from one to the other using a syringe these incredible things yet this beautiful metallic liquid in syringe I see what you know she and actually metallic sodium potassium our in the syringe there there's a and one single drop ethanol see when that does wash was a bit vicious vigorous and after that you've got this beautiful metal you hardly tell is matalas all this are shiny Hill right so when sodium-potassium alloy reacts with water you get a pretty decent explosion cool so that's the reaction with water the second most common molecule in the universe what about with ammonia the fourth most common molecule in the universe well something even more remarkable happens you see in water the electrons drift into solution very quickly but react with the water but in ammonia they drift into solution very quickly but they don't react they just sit there as solvated electrons and it's not hard to spot when this happens okay so there we have some freshly condensed liquid ammonia there we have some sodium-potassium alloy and what yeah I think it's gonna happen when we put metal the air for badlion to the sodium-potassium alloy instantly go below my crazy blue you know nice and cool now if we put another drop in there anything interesting else happens it starts getting metallic yeah absolutely crazy beautiful metallic liquid now that blue color you're looking at is single solvated electrons in solution mister concentration gets much higher you get this wave transition to this sort of metallic liquid which is actually a really concentrated solution of these solvated electrons in ammonia now those solvated electrons are almost unique in the whole of chemistry you see what normally keeps the negative electron mostly in one place is a potential well a sort of electrostatic hole into which the electron falls and that potential well is caused by a positive charge specifically a tiny atomic nucleus that's basically what keeps the electrons there and that's the case for almost all the electrons in your body this on the other hand is completely different here that potential well you know the electrostatic box that keeps the electron all in one place is actually caused by the solvating ammonia molecules in fact it's just one of the most remarkable things to sit there and watch when you understand what's going on is you get some liquid ammonia and you put a bit of electrolyte in there seven lithium chloride awesome and then you pass electricity through the solution you will electrolyze the solution and the electron system we fall off the electrode and going to solution but maybe one of the most remarkable things here is when the concentration gets really high with these solvated electrons where the concentration gets so high that they essentially form a band structure and it goes from like this dark blue solution to one that's more bronze or gold in color now imagine another experiment that we're just gonna get a tube and we're gonna pass an inert gas through and we're gonna put a single drop of sodium-potassium alloy in there the sense of scale that's the tip of a hypodermic needle and then we're going to dip all of that into our alcohol and carbon dioxide cold bomb and then we're gonna add ammonia to that inert gas stream so what happens is the ammonia starts condensing on the surface and you get these really cool effect and it's also helped by the fact that we can actually turn off the flow of ammonia a which point the ammonia starts evaporating into the inert gas stream and you just get some of the most beautiful things that I've ever seen inside [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I hope you enjoyed that if you did please consider giving this video a thumbs up and subscribing and if you really like what this channel does and what a support competent independent media like this you can support this channel directly through patreon with the links below [Music]

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 1,416,556

Rating: 4.8369708 out of 5

Keywords: sodium, potassium, alloy, ammonia, solvated, electron, blue, metal, gold, chemistry, physcis, beautiful, cool, amazing, pretty, liquid

Id: rKTe1wom4q8

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2017

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Credit goes to: Thunderf00t