Chemistry doesn’t just happen in test tubes!

The speaker, Peter Borrows, illustrated this talk with many pictures of the world around us, focusing on things we have all seen but usually don’t notice.

Stalactites growing from concrete beams supporting multi-storey car parks or motorway fly-overs. Brick or concrete walls looking like show caves in tourist areas. Green algae growing on the mortar between old bricks but not on the bricks themselves. Yellow lichens growing on the sandstone caps to brick pillars but also not on the bricks themselves. Fossils standing a millimetre proud of the surface of a sawn sandstone block. The bubbles lifting the paint on iron railings. The perfectly legible granite grave stones, contrasting with illegible sandstone ones immediately adjacent. The cracked stones where iron railings had been set into holes drilled into stone bases around graves and held in place with lead. Red, blue and yellow bricks. The honey-coloured Tudor fire place and the blue, purple and red colours where the log fire had been laid against it. The green colour of the lightning conductor snaking down from the church spire. The yellow and white lines painted on the road. The notices alerting people to gas anodes (sic!) just above the beach on the Hampshire coast. The bubbles on the marshy pond. The pink line on the covid-19 lateral flow tests and its connection with medieval stained glass. And more.

There was one demonstration (with a relevant health & safety explanation) in which phenolphthalein solution was poured on a lump of old concrete, before and after it was smashed open.

Because of all the pictures the file is too big to go on Sched but if you email the presenter at peterborrows@cantab.net he will give you access to it. The sometimes-surprising chemistry was explained with relevant equations. There isn’t room for that here but most of it can be found in old copies of SSR:

• Borrows, P., 1984, The Pimlico chemistry trail, School Science Review, 66 (235), 221-233.
• Borrows, P., 2006, Chemistry outdoors, School Science Review, 87 (320), 23-31.
• Borrows, P., 2013, Concrete thinking ... and forensic science?, School Science Review, 94 (348), 12-13.
• Borrows, P., 2023, Some lessons from covid, School Science Review SSR in Depth, 104 (387), 5-7.

and in chapters in two books

• Borrows, P (1997) Create Your Own Chemistry Trail in The Salters’ Chemistry Club Handbook (Volume 1), ed. Holman, J. pp. 50 – 51. London: The Salters’ Institute of Industrial Chemistry.
• Borrows, P (2004) Chemistry Trails in Learning Science Outside the Classroom, eds. Braund, M. and Reiss, M. pp 151 – 168. London: RoutledgeFalmer.