They Made it All Up!

As promised, I bring you more stories from my CTY chemistry class.

One time we were trying this experiment in class, where the teacher, an old balding man who was slightly crazy and always made drug references, had filled a cone shaped flask with a blue liquid, stoppered the top and put a thin glass tube through the stopper. "I'm going to put my hands around the flask and because the gas expands, a drop of the blue liquid should shoot out the top of the tube." As he puts his hands around the glass he says "I am so hot..." We all laugh. We continue staring at the tube, but nothing happens. "Guess you're not hot enough!" One student remarks.

Another time the teacher was writing an equation up on the board involving a chemical "S₂O₈".
"What's its name?" He asks. There was a silence.
The person sitting next to me speaks up, "Zoë?"
"Close," He says. "Sodium thiosulfate. Maybe Zoë was its given name. So why can't we do anything with it?"
Another great silence and the person sitting next to me tries again. "Because you don't like it?"
"Yes, I don't like Zoë," the teacher concludes.

Us talking the second to last day:
"I talked to the god Ares," our teacher is saying for some reason.
"Mr. O, how do you know all this?" a kid asks about the story he's telling.
"I make it up. If it sounds good, it's true." Mr. O says.
"We're talking about the gods, right? Not the chemistry?" another student asks.

Edit: Apparently sodium thiosulfate is Na₂S₂O₃. Just FYI.


Sachi