Freezing Physics
- Pieterskerkplein
Freezing and freezing, ice-cold tricks by students.
Freezing Physics is a show created by the Rino Foundation for secondary school students that focuses on various experiments with liquid nitrogen.
With the show, they hope to arouse an admiration for the natural sciences in the pupils. In addition, with the experiments they also want to create an intuition for science and the scientific method in pupils. The show is impressive and also interesting for the pupil who does not yet understand everything, because the tests are very spectacular.
The Rino Foundation has consciously chosen to have all shows performed by mainly science students. This is because students are close to the pupils, as they themselves have only recently been in school. In addition, these are all people who have recently decided to study natural sciences themselves. This means that they are still very enthusiastic about their new field of study. The show is a good opportunity for the students to convey this enthusiasm to the students. This also gives the students the opportunity to break the stereotype of the 'crazy professor'.
The show
- -196°C
During the show, several tests are done with liquid nitrogen, but what not everyone knows is that liquid nitrogen is ridiculously cold! No less than 196 degrees below zero! Yet it is relatively safe to work with. How it works exactly will be explained to you.
- Extreme volume change
The extremely low temperature is not the only interesting thing about liquid nitrogen. When it evaporates, it expands 750 times. A balloon also shrinks to a small pancake when you cool it down. This makes transporting liquid nitrogen rather difficult, but it does make for some spectacular tests!
- Gases in the air
Of course there are more interesting gases in the air besides nitrogen. This is proven by two very spectacular experiments.
- Magnetism and superconductivity
Electricity and magnetism are probably the most feared subjects of every high school student, but the students are not afraid of them. With a simple test, the students show that electricity and magnetism are related. Then, a similar test is carried out with a superconductor in which the resistance is 0. This has surprising consequences!
- Material properties in extreme cold
At the end of a show about liquid nitrogen with difficult physics, there is of course nothing more fun than doing random things in the nitrogen. But as a physicist, you cannot just do anything. You have to observe what happens.
- Ice-cold surprise
After such a long physics show, there is nothing nicer than an ice-cold treat prepared with liquid nitrogen.
More information on the website of the Rino Foundation (in Dutch).