DIY Crystal Growth Videos

Here’s a very good example that shows the process of producing single crystals and polycrystalline aggregates of copper sulphate. They are so good looking that they can serve as decorative pieces in your living room! [Check out the creator’s channel for more such videos.]

The next one is a time lapse video of growing crystals (of a variety of materials; this genre of videos are their own art form!

What is hidden in these short videos is the tremendous amount of patience and diligence required to get high quality results. In the first video, for example, you see instructions about filtering the solution every day, and keeping the beaker undisturbed, and waiting for 2 weeks or more.

Surface Tension

What a brilliant video! In just 30 minutes, Prof. Lloyd Trefethen (Wikipedia) of Tufts University manages to cover a huge variety of phenomena that arise due to surface tension: capillary rise, nucleation, Rayleigh instability, effects due to a chemical, temperature and charge gradients) using excellent demonstrations (some of which are in slo-mo). Explaining and presenting an analysis of these phenomena / effects in an undergrad curriculum could take 5 hours or more!

Of particular interest to materials is the section (at ~4 minutes) in which Prof. Trefethen derives the Young-Laplace equation (in less than 30 seconds!), and another (at ~2 minutes) in which he demonstrates the symmetry that arises when three bubbles meet at a point such that two bubble walls form 120^o; immediately after this demo comes another showing that 4-bubble meetings are unstable in 2D.