 This is called Translating Failure, and Christy Pete is the artist and she's going to make a snow globe out of glycerin and water and glitter. And this is Professor Keith, or I can't pronounce his last name. That's not right, everybody calls me Professor. And he teaches chemistry, and he's going to explain in scientific words and language what's going on. And these are some of his students, and they're going to draw. This is an art class, the part which this is part of. So they're going to draw some chemical compounds on the paper while this is all taking place. The chemical compounds don't really have anything to do with what we're talking about, but it'll still be interesting. So here we go. So the one thing that I thought was interesting when I was asked to do this project by Professor West was, I guess the basic misconception of the general population that somebody as a scientist or as a chemist specifically could just look at a picture and identify what's going on incorrectly and experiment. So that was something that we actually had to talk about for some time before I could actually, what do you say, give a good explanation as to what was going on. And in fact, I had to do the experiment myself because what you'll find as a chemist is if you just look at other people's results you don't oftentimes know the details of what happened. So really what I thought was going on was a reaction. But a reaction has two things actually chemically combining to each other, so that means that there's an actual bond forming. And that's not what's happening in this particular experiment. In this particular experiment what's actually happening is that you're making a solution so like a mixture. So effectively you have pure water in there and whatever these glitter particles are made of that's another thing. Oftentimes maybe as an uninitiated scientist you might see something like glitter and ask one of your friends who's taken a chemistry class or something to that effect. Well what is that stuff? That's not what a chemist does. They can't just look at something and say, oh that's obviously composed of this or that. But we do do experiments and when we look at experiments like this we make observations and we infer from the things that we previously understood maybe what's going on and then we do further experimentation. So I was able to, with Professor West's help and Wilma Burkwick, my lab tech to procure some of these items and do these experiments. Just like what you're seeing right now, so I did them under different conditions. Just water. Previous you saw she added the glycerol to it. So the glycerol is the thicker substance or glycerin is the common name of that same substance. And what you can see what is happening here is it's actually making the water more dense with a solution. And it's actually making the particles be able to move or the glitter particles be able to move around in suspension a little bit more. So with pure water you don't get that effect. But with both of them you see at pure water and the pure water glycerol mixture you see a concentration of the glitter particles occurring at both the top and the bottom of this snow globe experiment. Some of the things that my students are doing up here are drawing some chemical structures. These are actually what some of the molecules that you have inside of you. But I think progesterone might have been drawn up there earlier. I don't know all of the molecules that we drew. Or some medications that you might hear people taking. Or maybe some illicit narcotics and other things that organic chemists investigate and learn about. We had this same problem. So what you can see here is that at some points in time even chemists and artists come up with the same solutions to the same problems even though our background is completely different. And just like the artist the chemist makes a complete mess of his work space. But this is the beauty of art, right? Getting dirty. In chemistry you really don't want, unless you know that the things are innocuous, the chemicals that you're working with are innocuous you certainly don't want them spilling all over yourself. Look at the difference in garb that we wear too, right? Head to toe covered in safety. Even doing an experiment with water and glitter. So that's how, what do you say, retentive, I guess, fill in the previous word chemists are. Are there any questions? This was called translating failure. So why do you think we might have called it that? What? Was there initial failure? There wasn't initial failure and there's a bit of a mess that remains. What I might ask is maybe a rhetorical question. What's the best way to learn things? Messing up. Messing up, yes. Especially if you're a tactile, hands-on person or one of my chemistry students is always trying to tell me reactions and I would say, write it down, right? Start to do it and then you'll be able to fail in a good way, fail forward, right? So you can fail and learn from your failures. That's what you always want to do. I think we all learned something. Okay, thank you for coming. Thank you.