Daily Archives: September 6, 2010

ChemWizards

The Green Flame of Boron

The Green Flame of Boron

For a day, we joyfully kept our periodic tables, calculators and scratch  papers away. We turned the perils of chemistry into a distant, almost nonexistent memory. We swore to promote chemistry to everyone (of course, I mean chemistry minus the difficulty) by performing pseudo-magic tricks we found scattered around the WWW. One of the interesting and most-applauded trick is shown above. That’s a strange mixture of boric acid and methanol, which is then reacted with oxygen. The flicker of their eyes when they first saw this colored flame spelled “Wow” with pure amazement. And it was, for us, priceless. :)