From: Richard Guy Newsgroups: alt.humor.best-of-usenet Subject: [sci.chem] safe disposal of sodium metal Date: 30 Mar 1997 08:30:04 -0700 [Submitter's note: Geoffrey Wilkinson won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Sodium and potassium can be distinguished by their flame colours.] Subject: Re: safe disposal of sodium metal From: "Rebecca M. Chamberlin" Newsgroups: sci.chem Eric Lucas wrote: > > if there's a pond near you, just go and chuck it in, > then sit back and watch the fireworks. This is especially impressive if > that pond is a big make-out spot for local teenagers. (Potassium is > more impressive, too). (For the humor-challenged, no I'm *not* > advocating he do this.) Reminds me of a story of the late great Geoff Wilkinson. It seems that on one rainy day in London, his graduate students decided to entertain themselves by tossing chunks of potassium out the lab window, into some puddles on the rooftop 2 floors below them. An irate professor (probably a theoretician) saw the fireworks from his office one floor below, and stormed upstairs to Wilkinson's office. He announced that sodium was being thrown out the lab windows, demanded that the guilty parties be summarily executed, and stormed back out. Wilkinson confronted his students and demanded to know whether they had been throwing sodium out the window as charged. No sir, they replied, it was potassium. Wilkinson muttered "Bugger doesn't know his flame tests..." and dismissed all charges.