Mercury Vortex

Transcript

okay hello this is Dr James and I'm always doing some interesting science experiments and sometimes I find some unexpected things and today I'm going to talk about Mercury Vortex so I was um doing some other experiments related with Mercury and doing electrolysis in salt water some kind of special salt water which I've done another experiment with but anyway the Mercury you know when I just put the electrodes in the water without the mercury in it I don't see this effect I believe maybe the Mercury starts spinning very rapidly because the water starts rotating but only when the electrodes are in the Mercury the electrodes are not in the Mercury it doesn't happen it's very strange in fact let's take a look at this I can't explain it here's an interesting phenomenon I have um mercury in the bottom and I added some of my fish poo to it and some water it seems like the water so this is the negative side over here and I'm sorry this is the positive side and this is the negative side here and when I have the electrode and the Mercury it causes this thing to spin around really quickly stir everything up very strange okay that thing is just oscillating and going crazy let's go Vortex or something anyway very cool foreign effect I've been doing electrolysis on this Mercury and if you watch this a little bit of the Mercury will break away from the main glob so the the Mercury I'm putting it in the negative electrode I have a positive electrode at the other end because the negative electrode will attract the positive ions and it will basically reduce the Mercury if I put the Mercury at the other end it would kind of destroy it it like oxidize it or something but I'm trying to you know purify the Mercury and this is one way they do it for uh gold processing they'll when you do that it puts if you have salt in there it will if it's like for instance sodium chloride it will put pure sodium in amalgam with the Mercury and then makes it more effective at picking up gold for instance but um this is really strange effect part of the Mercury uh when I do electrolysis on it and as I said the positive electrode is at the other end and the negative electrode is in the Mercury and uh part of the Mercury breaks off like it's charged and flies up toward the positive electrode very strange very unusual effect let's take a look okay here's some more strange behavior of this thing the ball Murphy ball shoots up every so often shoots from the positive or negative electrode on the left toward the positive electrode on the right see the ball just shoots up through the water and then rolls back down percolates very bizarre thank you seems like it creates some kind of Vortex and then it shoots the Mercury up toward the other electrode very strange thank you anyway I don't have a complete explanation for that I'm thinking maybe um you know Mercury is a liquid metal and it conducts electricity and there's salt water around it maybe it's some kind of instability due to the different densities of the materials conducting electricity I don't know maybe a magnetohydro hydronomic effect or something uh or maybe something bizarre who knows anyway I just thought I'd share that with you this is uh Dr James and thanks for watching