I'm not going lie, I might be a little of a pyromaniac. But then again, lots of guys are happy to watch things go BOOM with lots of light and flame. During my senior year of high school, I collected used Christmas trees and waited until they were all dried up. When they were dry and ready, I would invite people over for a bonfire and we'd watch one or two go up in flames- which would sometimes reach ~20 feet in the air. (Just to make it clear, we didn't ONLY burn trees. We did all the normal stuff people do at bonfires too, like roast marshmallows and generally just hang out.) Don't worry either, I was reasonably safe about it. Only once did I burn myself, and it was only about an inch off my hair which was fairly long at the time… and I'll leave it at that.
You may be wondering why and how this pertains to Caltech. In one sense it really doesn't since I don't think we burn Christmas trees here... and in the other sense we built Roman candles in my Chemistry lab. Although some of you may have built your own flame-spouting test tubes in high-school, I had never done anything similar, so it was pretty cool for me to do so this time. Below is a video clip of my section's Roman Candles. I don't actually know which one is mine unfortunately, but the video after that is of the TA's Roman Candle. I think we measured the temperature inside the TA's metal tube with a laser mechanism and it was above 800 degrees Celsius. The iron or whatever the tube was made of looked ready to just melt away.
(Sorry about the video quality, it was pretty dark and I had to use my iPhone.)
For the first one, if you want to skip the intro, just go to 1:20 and watch from there.
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