starfire09

The reaction you see is Aluminum metal in the wire reacting with the NaCl salt in the water: Al + 3NaCl ---> Al(Cl)3 + 3Na The strange thing you saw was the production of Aluminum Chloride.

Hey! I've been lurking around these boards for a long time, just reading stuff, but haven't posted anything since I know so little compared to all of you guys @_@. So for my first post, I thought I'd ask a question that had been bugging me for a while. So one of my high school friends is in an AP Physics class, and he was describing to me a lecture that his teacher gave about how no two solid objects can actually come in contact with each other because of the atomic particles' repulsion. Now, I'm a chemistry guy, so I can kind of appreciate what he was talking about, but am unsure to the forces involved. First of all, is it true what he said, that no two objects can touch one another? And if it is, what causes this? Is it that once the distance gets so small, the intermolecular forces are so intense that they repel extremely "hard?" If that's the case, what is our perception of "touch?" Say I touch my finger to my face, is it the strong forces between positive nucleus to positive nucleus that makes me "feel" my cheek flexing in? Then what happens when somebody is, say, shot with a gun? Does the bullet just repel the electrons in somebody's chest so fast that it causes tearing, thus a hole? Ugh, all these questions I have makes me so glad that I chose to pursue chemistry as a major instead of theoretical physics. (-.-')