APRIL FOOLS! Oookay, that was lame, I apologize for the low quality of this post.
Yesterday, P and I were trying to dissolve a powered drug in hydrochloric acid, and somehow we ended up with about 5 mL of solution with a pH of -0.5. To give you an idea, lemon juice is about 2.5 and battery acid is 0.3 on the pH scale. Our lab safety manager had to call someone to remove "hazardous materials" and got pretty pissed at us for doing something so dumb.
Today, we poured some water on the floor and ran to get him. "We spilled 12 M hydrochloric acid on the floor!!" He looked at it, swore, and ran down the hall to call HazMat or whatever.... April Fools, safety manager, April Fools. He was pretty mad at us. I'm pretty sure that someday when I spill lye all over myself and my skin is burning off, this girls-who-cried-wolf prank is going to bite me in the ass, but until that day, me and my intact skin think it was pretty funny.
Did anyone out there do something incredibly clever today??
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4 comments:
sorry hun, but a solution with a pH<0 is physically impossible (pH = -log[H+]) it was probably below the detection limit of the pH meter
good story, though
the chemistry PhDs in my lab verified it-- we were using 12 molar HCl (strong acid), so
-log(12) = -1.08
i stand corrected.
looks like i need to have a talk with my old chem-eq prof
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