Dropping caesium in water

Remember my post last week about Brainiac dropping caesium in water? I reposted my concerns to a mailing list of people who do science demonstrations, make museum exhibits, and so on, and we had a jolly little argument about whether it was plausible or not. We went roughly fifty-fifty, I think.

Then the chap who did it posted. Turns out, dropping 10g caesium in a bath of water does very little indeed, and (two years later!) they did indeed blow the heck out of a bath with stage explosives. What you see in that film is entirely faked.

[sigh]

4 thoughts on “Dropping caesium in water”

  1. Sigh too, I really thought that was a dangerous, and exciting experiment. Damn those TV types, bending the rules and making things look right rather than be right.
    What’s dangerous as I see it is how much belief is placed in what appears on the square box these days, “Oh, it’s on telly, it must be true…”

  2. Myth busted!
    http://www.badscience.net/?p=270
    Sky’s ‘fraud’ blown out of water
    By Alex Baracaia, Evening Standard
    28 July 2006
    A TV science programme stands accused of faking experiments to make them more exciting.
    Brainiac, the award-winning Sky One series fronted by Richard Hammond of BBC2’s Top Gear, faces criticism from scientists who say its makers turn to special effects when their experiments do not work.

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