Childhood Experiments: Stories about being scientists before we were ready

This week we present two stories from people who decided to experiment with science when they were still teenagers.

Part 1: In high school, Saad Sarwana decides to go from nerd to bad boy with a prank that he learned in chemistry class.

Saad Sarwana is a Physicist and Stand-up Comedian. As a physicist he works in superconductor electronics and is the author of over 40 peer reviewed publications and the inventor behind two US patents. As a comedian he has been doing standup and Improvisational comedy for over 20 years, and even won a Moth StorySlam. For 6 years and over 100 episodes Saad was on the Science Channel TV show “Outrageous Acts of Science”. He is also the creator and host of the 'Science Fiction and Fantasy Spelling Bee'. Previously he has told Physics and Math inspired stories for the StoryCollider. This chemistry inspired story completes the Trilogy! He lives in Westchester County, NY with his wife and kids.

Part 2: As a college student, Andrew Akira Hansen loves chemistry so much that he takes his experiments out of the lab and into the parking lot... and the shower... and anywhere else he could.

Andrew Akira Hansen is an external chemist and a boy who finds himself falling more and more deeply in love with the natural world as he survives each day. Chemistry is the language he’s learned to love it with. After finishing his bachelor's degree at Knox College he messed around in Southern Illinois University Edwardsville's master's program for chemistry. From there, he’s worked a variety of chemistry-adjacent jobs he never imagined he’d find himself in, including space camp instructor, beer scientist and slime master (not all official titles). His path in chemistry has been winding, and he can't wait to see where it takes him.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Saad Sarwana

I stood there quietly. My guilty conscience was making my heart beat so loud it was almost about to jump out of my chest. I was standing in the principal's office with my friends and it was possible we were about to get expelled. We had messed up. We had messed up bad. All our hard work could be ruined. I only had one person to blame for this, my chemistry teacher Mr. Jabar.

It all started a few weeks earlier. We were in our final year of high school and I was hanging out at my friend's house. Present in the room were the president and vice president of the High School Math Club, the vice president of the Physics Society and the winners of various science awards in school, basically, the school nerds.

We were hanging around discussing how the cool kids would probably pull off a high school prank on one of their final days. Someone said we should do one too. Why not? We'd never done anything like this before, so we immediately started brainstorming.

That's when I remembered something our chemistry teacher had told us when he was teaching us about iodine. He had started teaching at the school about 20 years ago and he was reminiscing that when he had started, he had done this great demo mixing iodine with ammonia to make these crystals. And when you step on them, they pop. It was perfectly safe but somehow the loud noises was too distracting for the other students so he wasn't allowed to do it anymore.

That sounded like a great idea. So we said, “That's what we'll do. It's sciencey. It goes with who we are.”

Now, this was pre-internet days so we had no idea where to source the materials or what ratios were involved, but we did have access to this one book you could use to find anything in the world, practically anything. You might have used it when you were younger. It's called the Yellow Pages.

So we looked under chemicals and found ‘Industrial Chemical Wholesale’. That sounded good. We called the number.

Saad Sarwana shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in NYC in November 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.

“Hey, do you carry iodine and ammonia?”

“Sure. How much do you want?”

We immediately hung up. There was no caller ID in these days.

So we scouted the location. It was in the industrial area of town. It wasn't like a storefront so you couldn't just walk in and just check out with a barcode scanner. It was set up for business‑to‑business transactions with purchase orders and so two kids off the street couldn't just walk in and walk out with chemicals. So we had to come up with a plan.

We decided to go with the play-dumb approach. We found some stationary from a local pharmacy, which is basically just a notepad with the pharmacy letterhead on top, and we wrote in our best adult handwriting, ‘One bottle of ammonia. One bottle of iodine.’ That sounded like a reasonable amount. We had no idea how much we needed.

Since I was one of the more innocent-looking ones in the group, I was told to go in and pick up the stuff. My hand was visibly shaking as I handed the storekeeper the paper.

“My dad asked me to pick this up.”

I was in and out in seconds. He didn't suspect a thing.

Since this was a wholesale store, I had like a big gallon-sized bottle of iodine in one hand and an even larger bottle of concentrated aqueous ammonia in the other.

The next day was the penultimate day of school. We all went in early and we mixed the two chemicals in a small plastic container which we got from the cafeteria using a plastic spoon.

We could see the crystals being formed as we stirred the mixture. Once we had the crystals, we poured it on the asphalt blacktop. The crystals were purple so they were completely invisible on the black background.

Being scientists, we immediately tried to test it out. I stepped on it. Nothing. I stepped on it again. Nothing. We had crystals but I couldn't hear anything.

Finally, I heard a small pop as I stepped near the edge of the mixture. We must not have used enough. So we mixed the whole batch up and poured it all over the blacktop.

Now, this pathway connected two school buildings and is crawling with students as they walk in between buildings between classes. The way we had spread this thick layer of crystals, you couldn't get between one building to the other without stepping on it.

The school bell rang. We went into first period. While we were in first period, the sun came out and the crystals began to dry. Imagine the loudest thunder you've ever heard and then double it. You still won't come close to how loud it was. It was completely insane. It was complete pandemonium. There were bangs going off everywhere.

Now that it has been a bunch of years, I tried to look up what happened on the internet and it's a very common experiment. Ammonia reacts with iodine to form nitrogen triiodide. In the wet form, the crystals are very stable. It's only when they dry up is when they become unstable and even the slightest contact causes a large explosion.

The warnings online also say don't use more than a gram of iodine. We had used the whole bottle.

Kids being kids were doing what they would after the end of first period. They were stepping on it. But at this point, everything was just partially dry so there were sections which were still wet. And the wet sections would get stuck to the bottom of people's shoes. They would then walk to a completely different part of the school. And in that section it would dry up and suddenly, in the middle of a hallway, bang!

Our prank had worked. It had worked a little too well because, now, everyone was wondering who was responsible and trying to find out. It was pretty easy to figure it out. We were the ones with the iodine stains on our hands. We were caught purple handed.

So there we are in the principal's office. This was a complete outlier situation for us because we weren't really the troublemakers in the class. We were the people who went into the principal's office to get awards not to get expelled.

And she didn't really know what to do. It was the last few days of school and we'd been good students so she just told us, “You know what you've done. What sort of example are you setting?” And she gave up.

And she said, “I'm going to put it on your permanent record,” which meant nothing. We'd already gotten into college. The only person who'd see that report card would be our parents and we were going off to college so we could use emotional blackmail to get around that.

So, we got away with it, right? I don't even know if the cool kids did a high school prank that year, but I do know one thing. For that last summer between the end of high school and college, we were the cool kids.

I'd gotten a few academic awards in school but I have never been congratulated by my peers for any of them. But after this, I had strangers come up to me and say, “That was cool!”

I had girls who had never even spoken to me come up to me and say, “Did you do that? That was awesome!”

One of the girls who congratulated me later went on to win an Oscar, technically two Oscars. I was congratulated by an Oscar winner. For those of you who watch Seinfeld, that's like George Costanza-Marisa Tomei level.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you have an opportunity to do something with no consequences, do it. You might never get that chance again. Thank you.

Part 2: Andrew Akira Hansen

We're in a small, cramped dorm bathroom. There are light blue tiles on the wall and the floor. They're the same. And it is filled with the murmuring of our friends. They're gathered around us in a circle. And in the center of all that murmuring, there is this escalating arpeggio of laughter from two giggling fools. E and I are staring at each other through begoggled eyes with wild grins as we start to just sprinkle in these crystals into this water-like substance and slowly, just as we planned it, this blood-red substance starts to bead at the bottom. And it moves differently than the water above it. It's thicker. It's denser. It's heavier.

This is bromine. One of my… it’s related to chlorine, actually. But my one of my greatest analytical professors and mentors once told me that he loves bromine because bromine moves like water but it hits like iron. And it's a little reactive.

As we made it, E and I were just ecstatic. We were giggling, like, “Aha-ha-ha-ha!” Because, as we swirled it around, this blood-red liquid moved slower than the water and it and it twirled with it without mixing. And there was this silvery mirror, a phase boundary between the water and the bromine that separated it. We had done everything right and we were so excited.

But slowly but surely, that very defined boundary between the bromine and the water started to grow hazy, because we had made a miscalculation. Bromine, as it turns out, dissolves into water.

So we set it aside for later. We still chalked it up as a success but we decided to seal it up and store it in E’s bedroom in the cabinet next to his clothes and we were going to come back to it. There's no problems. Not at all, because this semester was awesome.

Andrew Akira Hansen shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Ready Room in St. Louis, MO in July 2019. Photo by David Kovaluk.

E and I were in organic chemistry, one of the most notorious weed-out classes for a chemical major and we loved it. We had this professor. We'll call her Professor Oak. And something about the way she put it just clicked for us. She took all of these complex terms, symbols, trends, exceptions and nitchy whatsits, and seemingly by an act of transmutation she gave E and I a peek into what it is to fundamentally understand the chemical world.

It was electrifying and that motivated us to start experimenting outside of class, outside the lab. In dorm bathrooms and parking lots, you know, wherever there was space. We were adamant that we weren't going to steal any chemicals from the lab or any class where we had an ethos. Everything that we had we were going to acquire from consumer goods. We would engineer our own experimental setups, because the old masters that we admired so deeply, this is what they had done. They had figured it out on their own. They took fundamental principles and they ran them as far as they could.

And that's what we wanted to do because we thought we got it. We thought that's what Professor Oak wanted us to pick up.

So with bleach ammonia, drain cleaners, root killers, you can do a lot of things. And a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We weren't shy about this knowledge either.

And one of the most boggling things about the story is that we, every day after class in organic chemistry, we would go up to Professor Oak and we're like, “Professor Oak, that lecture was amazing. The way the mechanism, the electrons moving like this, like this. Oh, so cool! What do you think about this? What if we mix this with this? What do you think might happen?”

So I was working on a final for ancient Egyptian warfare. I was writing a paper. I had 45 minutes left. I was going against the line but I had hit my groove. I was going to make it.

And I got a call, several calls. They double-tapped me. I hung up the first time. From the campus administration. I was told to promptly march down to the Dean of Students’ office and they wouldn't tell me why.

I was like, “Really? I got like a paper I got to finish.”

Like, “You will come now!”

And I was like, “Okay.”

So I walked and I was like, “What the hell? What's going on?” As soon as I walked into this small, dusty, overcrowded office, I saw E sitting there and our eyes met and our brains rapidly started connecting the dots.

We figured we were here for our out-of-lab experimentation but we didn't know how we got here, because no one had gotten hurt or no campus safety reports and all of our friends we trusted, so we were like, “Ah, crap. Did they tell someone and they accidentally blabbed it on?” Like that chain of things.

So E and I were looking at each other. And because I often have a little bit more audacity than him, I turned to the associate dean of students and I was like, “Why are we here?”

Her face bloated like a toad’s and her eyes bulged and she croaked at us, “Oh, you'll find out.”

And just like a freaking movie, like just after that, my vision panned to the right to the door behind her and in walks Professor Oak. Things start to get a little hazy for me here.

I dimly remember the associate dean reading off this laundry list of things and charges that were going to be brought against us. This was a post-9/11 world with a hint of chemophobia and they can throw a lot of things at a 20-year-old student. In retrospect, that was quite terrifying.

But the way my brain is set up is that I deeply, deeply respect my mentors and people that I admire. And so as Professor Oak sat across from us in silence, staring at us, I felt her coal eyes just burning into me. I didn't even feel betrayal.

A lot of people have asked me that. Like, “Ah, your professor that you trusted turned you in. Aren't you mad about that?” No. I'm not set up like that. All I felt was shame.

The next day, E and I found ourselves in a dark room, sitting small at the other end of a polished wood table with the dean of students, the campus administration and all of our chemistry professors sitting across from us. Again, I had drawn lots and had gotten to speak our part.

I was just finishing up. I was, “You know, we didn't mean to cause any trouble or scare anyone. We're very thankful and lucky that no one got hurt, and we're sorry.”

And without skipping a beat, the dean of students who kind of looks like a cross between evil Spock and Professor X just jumped right in and he was like, “You're right, Andrew. You are lucky. And you are stupid. That's why we're suspending you indefinitely.”

I'm the good son. That's not how it's supposed to go. I have this sort of moment where I'm standing outside of myself watching it take place like a movie as I lead the HAZMAT teams into E's bedroom to the closet to take our chemical stash. And all of our friends that had previously been gathered around us laughing with excitement as we showed them why we love chemistry were now staring in horror.

As it would turn out, the operative term in indefinite suspension would be ‘indefinite’, as in undefined. As in whenever the campus administration had deemed we had learned our lesson we could come back. So whilst engaged in the extreme sport of dodging parental aggression caused by my unplanned life changes, like, “Hey, Dad, can you pass the salt?’

“I don't know, Andrew. Are you going to blow up the building with it?”

You kind of have to take that in stride.

So we wrote apologies and we got led back in, but I still had to talk to Professor Oak. Professor Oak was after all my faculty advisor. The next couple years of college would be pretty awkward if I couldn't look her in the eye or ever speak to her again.

So I did what every boy should do whenever they have something important to say to somebody they respect, and I asked her to coffee. In that meeting, she cut the crap. She got right to the point. I wanted to go in blubbery and apologize, you know, “Please, please, please. I'm so sorry.”

And like, “Andrew, I know you're sorry and I forgive you. What we're here for is to talk about why I turned you in. Do you understand?” She's always a teacher.

“Because what I did was dangerous.”

“Yes, but do you understand why I'm mad at you?”

“No.”

“It's because what you and E said you were doing was research, and it wasn't. You had no question. You had no focus. You weren't even following the scientific method. That is you took all of the power and knowledge that I had given you and you had misused it.”

God, that hit right home. A) I was right. She did understand us. But she was also right. And

She's like, “Do you know how I know what you did was dangerous? Do you know how I know what the hazard of brominated water in a dorm room is? Do you know what happens when it comes into contact with something like aluminum foil?”

“No. No, I don't.”

“It explodes, Andrew. And it explodes not just in a normal fireball. It explodes in a purple witch fire that spews acidic and toxic fumes and liquids all around it. And in that dorm room bathroom that you had decided to do your experiment in, thinking that maybe the ventilation of the bathroom might help you, dorm room bathrooms circulate. They don't take air outside of the building. They just push it into the next bathroom. If you had fucked up at all, some innocent person would have gotten doused with chlorine or bromine.

And your goal, as noble as it might have been to try and show the world why it was that you love science, why you love chemistry and the power of it, it was too broad. Somebody could have gotten hurt. Do you think it was worth the risk?”

I didn't. She had me.

And she hit me. It wasn't fair because she showed me that (a) she had done exactly the experiment she had kicked me out of college for, and (b) here she was still mad at me.

And as time goes on, I've told this story plenty of times to my various chemical masters and some of them have waved it off like, “Pfff, you got kicked out of school for basically making special bleach. Well, here's what I did…”

I always defend her because what she saw in me is that passion, is that fire. And that fire needed to be tempered. And the only way to temper that was by understanding how much I cared about those around me.

As I go on in my chemical career, and I did go on in my chemical career, this is not the last time I'd have a spot of trouble in chemistry. There's a long history of that. A lot of different stories for various ways that I have messed up and not done exactly what the book says you should do. But my head, though it is bloody, it is unbowed. And I move from each failure with undiminished enthusiasm, because there is no greater teacher than trouble. Thank you.