Fun with science this lunchtime. My wife had heated up the last bit of as cherry crumble in a pyrex dish. We'd eaten the rest of the dessert over the course of the last couple of days so most of the dish was empty. I removed the hot dish from the oven, dished out the crumble and then moved the dish over to the sink to soak. There was quite a lot of burnt on bits of crumble and fruit on the glass and I wasn't looking forward to cleaning it. But luckily I wasn't going to have to. I put the dish down on the washing up bowl, turned the hot tap (though the first blast of water would have been cold) and the dish rather spectacularly exploded into thousands of tiny shards of glass. I was a bit surprised, initially by the home made explosion I had just created, but also by the fact that a Pyrex dish could do this as I thought they were meant to be able to stand extremes of temperature. I guess the largely empty dish had become even hotter than usual though and this was a step too far. I am sure I've done this before without these devastating consequences. Fortunately the explosion was contained in the sink and I was not hit by flying glass, but unfortunately the sink and washing up bowl were full of tiny shards of glass, some of them going down the plughole.
I was slightly relieved that I no longer had to wash up that really dirty dish, but the relief was only short lived as I now had the worse task of cleaning up the glass, which was not going to be easy and might be dangerous. There were fragments so tiny that they were more or less invisible and other bigger bits that reminded me of the home made toffee we used to make on bonfire night. You'd make a big slab and then smash it and get these brittle shards of delicious toffee - the glass had taken on a similar consistency. I didn't try to eat any of the glass, even though I wondered if it might taste as good as the toffee it resembled.
Perhaps this was entirely my fault and I should have know this would happen, even though it's never happened before. Perhaps Al Qaeda has come up with a new plot to replace hardy oven proof dishes with non-oven proof ones in the hope that they can take out more of us this way than with all those complicated shoe and pant bombs. It's amazing to think that just by mixing glass with water and hot with cold you can create something as devastating and surprising as this. That's why science is cool. As long as you're not the one who has to clean out the sink and buy a new dish.
This week's Metro column can be read
here.
