May the destroyers of our world rain their cosmic force upon you! Seriously speaking, this is a place from which I get to both curse and praise the world without actually affecting it in any physical way.

18.2.09

Silver

Today we stayed back for makeup chem practical, where we conducted our first displacement reactions. Nothing too interesting, except when we managed to displace silver. For anyone not studying Chem, silver is one of the least reactive metals, which is why it can be found in a more or less pure state, much like gold. Since it is so unreactive, whenever it is in a compound silver can be pushed out, or displaced, from the compound by a more reactive metal, like a brilliant discipline mistress chasing away Mrs Look from this school with her awesomeness. Someday.
Anyway, once the silver has been displaced, it will be precipitated out of the solution onto the nearest solid. In our case, the nearest solid was the strip of metal we added to the silver nitrate solution. For magnesium, the silver was deposited as a black solid, nothing interesting. Same for zinc. The really odd bit was when copper was added to the solution. There, the silver was deposited as some fluffy beige solid, like one of the test-tube brushes. When shaken, the whole solution became a purple suspension. The best part is when we poured out the solution. The silver twinkled entertainingly as it went down the sink. I almost regretted washing it away.
Life is really boring when I consider such things like this to be interesting.

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