SUMMER EXPERIMENTS : GONE WRONG

Sometimes experiments doesn't turn out the way you planned. Maybe you added too much of something or your calculations were not right. Or you forgot the pot on the stove - with a batch of sugar in it. At least we got the opportunity to test the fire alarm.

Anyway - what's done is done (a normal expression i Sweden) and there is not so much to do about it. The pot was covered with hard and black charcoal and I thought it was lost forever. The pot I mean. When I started to clean it my first thought were: "Well, this was easy to remove!" But I couldn't have been more wrong. It seemed impossible to remove. I tried boiling water, detergents for dishwasher (which is corrosive) and letting it stand with water for many days in hope to make the sugar disolve. But nothing worked! Just when I was about to throw the pot in the bin I thought of something I learnt in chemistry class many years ago: Lika löser lika. It means that you can disolve something with more of the same compounds. I thought I would give it a shot - to disolve sugar with sugar. I poured some sugar and a little bit of water into the pot and brought it to boil and then: MAGIC HAPPENED! With a bit of scraping with a spoon the sugar just let go of the pot, super easy! The pot was not as clean as new, but good enough.

Science is truly amazing!