Real Or Fake? Inside An Art Forensics Lab | Artrageous With Nate Ep 4 | Perspective

I was fortunate enough to get to tour the Indianapolis Art Museum's forensics lab maybe a eight or so years ago as part of the ASM material science summer camp that I got to teach in Indianapolis for science teachers in the area.

The bearded guy, Dr Gregory Smith, gave us our tour that year, and it's one of the better tours that I've gotten from any of the tours I've taken from the camps around the country - especially from among the 'clean' tours. 

Dr Smith did a great job telling a story of what they do in the lab as well as how they help the art conservators and museum staff both take care or restore the artwork and also to verify that the artwork is really what is purported to be.

Other than that tour and attending a wedding in the museum's gardens, I've not been to the Indianapolis Art Museum. I do wish I would have gotten up there for the Chemistry in Color exhibit.

Electron Color

Source - https://xkcd.com/2734/ 

See, it's funny because the teacher is scientifically correct in the second panel...but the teacher still knows what color electrons are.

From wikipedia, the radius of an electron is somewhere between 10^-18 and 10^-22 meters.  The wavelengths of visible light fall in the range of 3 x 10^-7 and 7 x 10^-7 meters. This means the an electron's radius is something like a trillion times smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

But most diagrams of the atom show protons and neutrons to be red and either blue or green. The color of the electrons in the diagrams I found at the top of Google's image search were less consistent - grey, yellow, dark blue, green, or even multicolored.

Clearly in Miss Lenhart's world, though, electrons are yellow.

Reimagining the Periodic Table

This week's video recommendations comes to us from one of my current students, Nick, who has a refreshing curiosity about chemistry. He also recommended the taste test of the alkali metals video and says he's tasted some of those alkali salts - which is not to be recommended, folks.

I've seen the forms of the periodic table that are shown - cut and pasted really - in the above video and even have a Lego version of Giguere's 3d periodic table in my classroom.

I really like the above video because it shows that there's still more than one way to show the periodic law.