When I walked into the lab today, Daniele was having a discussion with Dr. Watson, so I decided to go out into the hall and take a closer look at the displays and some of the posters. One display showed a multitude of rocks that could be found around New York State. I spent a while looking at the slate (which I have often seen while hiking or in my grandma's backyard) and took a little pride in being able to recognize a few (by which I mean a very few) number of the rocks on display. Right before Daniele was done with her conversation, Heather walked in and we began to clean out the barite crystal that we had put in the furnace last week. This crystal was not enclosed by the sulfur because the capsule had cooled while resting on its side, causing the sulfur to dry along the sides of the capsule rather than encasing the crystal. After easily removing the crystal, we spent the rest of our time in the lab making two new capsules, one containing barite and the other celestite. We started with the barite crystal. I hunted through our drawer in the lab, eventually finding the barite crystals we had polished a few weeks ago. I quickly made the capsule with my ever increasing Bunsen burner abilities. Finding a celestite crystal to do an experiment on was a little more tricky. As I explained last week, the celestite crystals are very prism-like and have lots of small flat surfaces. That makes it difficult to find one large flat surface that would be sufficient for an experiment.
After finally finding a crystal, Daniele showed me a huge block of synthetic quartz. I have to admit I have a soft spot for shiny things and the quartz had me enraptured. It was a huge block about the length of my hand and almost perfectly clear. It looked a lot like glass except it's density was different along with the texture. Daniele then showed me more crystals that the lab had bought and collected over the years, including bright green yag.
Our crystal was not cut like this one above, but it gives you an idea of what yag looked like when previously I didn't even know yag was a word.
She also showed me some beautiful crystals each about the size of my thumb that had cost a whopping $1500. I was blown away that the crystals that were being experimented on in the lab could cost so much. Daniele then talked about how many crystals could be grown using a seed, which would then be built upon layer by layer until the crystal had formed. We then had to quickly wrap up our conversation on crystals because I only had 10 minutes to evacuate and seal my celestite crystal. After sealing the capsule with an expert's touch, I carried my two capsules to the furnace. There we put both capsules on one thermocouple so we could run the experiment simultaneously and only use one furnace. We ran the experiment at 500 degrees Celsius, and hopefully we won't have any complications. I hope to have some new date to look at when I return to the lab with our growing data on our sulfate crystals.
Kelsie, you, of all people know the value of perseverance, which you seem to be making good use of now. I am confident that you will get the sulfur to do what you need it to do!
ReplyDeleteI am impressed with how routine your flame skills have become. You could go on to be a welder in life. (Don't tell your Mom.)
Looking forward to your next blog post.