The Deutsches Museum

 I spent most of my time today in the Chemistry exhibit and I had a world of fun in there. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to discover when I entered, but I was more than delighted with the hour I spent walking around and looking at everything. The exhibit started off with the history of Alchemy (chemistry) in Germany and the set up of the labs was so cool to see. Distillation was the biggest procedure that alchemists performed back then, but the extent of distillation didn’t end with alcohol. Scientists would distill pretty much anything they could just to understand the properties a chemical had and how it behaved. The study of combustion reactions was also collectively done on a large scale when alchemy was first being practiced for the same reasons as distilling. Scientists wanted to understand compounds and chemicals as much as possible, which meant seeing how it interacts in different reactions.

Alchemy Shop Set up

After this set up, the exhibit opened up into multiple pods that each touched on a different branch of chemistry. What I really enjoyed was that there was an in depth explanation that broke the complex concepts down into palatable tidbits that children, adults, and sciencey people could all understand. What I loved even more were the molecule diagrams they had practically everywhere. Since taking organic chemistry I’ve come to appreciate how these molecules look and what the different colors mean, so it was really cool to me that I could understand what was going on.

Molecular structure of Retinol

Lastly, my favorite part of this exhibit was the section that had analytical instrumentation in it. Once again, this section did a great job at explaining what these complex instruments do while also keeping it simple enough for anyone to understand. What made it my favorite part was the explanations of what these instruments are used for, as they directly correlated to the experiments I had just done in my Instrumental Analysis class in the spring. We detected the amount of lead and other trace metals in drinking water using AAS (atomic absorption spectroscopy), and the last experiment we performed was on an FTIR (Fourier-transformer infrared spectroscopy). I also worked with GC-MS (gas chromatograph mass spectroscopy) instrumentation during my 2 year long undergraduate research project with Dr. Cornett in the chemistry department. We have an older Agilent GC-MS, but it was cool to see that the one they had in the display was also made by Agilent technologies. Overall, I loved getting to spend time in my element (hehehe get it? Cause, chemistry) and getting to see how chemistry developed in Germany.

GC-MS

FTIR

FAAS

-Grace Semaan