A Grossmont College chemistry professor suggests one of his students may have made scientific history with an “amazingly simple experiment.”
According to San Diego Jewish World, 22-year-old Jeremy D. Nemetz discovered that the higher the gravity, the slower chemicals react with one another.
“I am still not believing [the experiment] had not yet been done, but I have found no evidence it has,” the professor, John Oakes, was quoted as saying. “He ran a chemical reaction on the desk top at a given temperature, and then ran the same chemical reaction in a centrifuge at the same temperature, so that the reaction was run at a higher effective ‘gravity.’”
Nemetz found that the reaction reliably slowed as the centripetal acceleration increased, and “the effect seemed to be linear with respect to the acceleration/gravity,” Oakes said.
A sophomore honors student who lives in Santee, Nemetz is hoping to transfer to UC San Diego.
On April 5, he was awarded two certificates by the Honors Transfer Council of California. One is the exemplary achievement award for excellence in the honors program; the other is the outstanding abstract award for having actually discovering something.
“My discovery is basically that when gravity (or similar force) is applied to an aqueous chemical reaction that its rate of reaction or the measurement of products formed over time is decreased,” Nemetz told San Diego Jewish World. “I believe that the increase of the potential energy of the molecules involved causes in response a decrease in the kinetic energy which results in less movement and less effective collisions of the molecules that result in a reaction.”
Nemetz says he hopes to publish his research, and see if anyone can confirm the results.
“Furthermore, I will be looking to devise equations using known constants that expand the rate equations and Bernoulli’s principle. If these are not divisible and even if they are, I’ll be looking to devising a more exact version of my experiment, such as combining a centrifuge and a spectrometer (spectrofuge) to get a better ratio of rate decrease versus gravity.”