Question: What is the craziest experiment you have done in your life ?

Sarah Bardsley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

I think I have already answered this but here’s my answer again….

Whilst diving with a group of people (plus circling sharks) in Australia we investigated the effects of something called nitrogen narcosis on our bodies.

When you dive to a certain depth (30 metres or deeper) you breath gases under a higher pressure. This causes a build up of nitrogen levels in your blood which can lead to a feeling of happiness or drunkenness.

Our dive instructor had us all kneeling in a circle in the bottom of the sea floor. He used a special board to write all our names down and assigned a place name to each. Our task was to take this board, find our names on it and our particular place name and write that place name backwards. A very simple task on land and feeling normal but if experiencing nitrogen narcosis it could be a bit tricky.

I got ‘liverpool’ and whilst I was able to write this backwards it did take me a while to figure out. One girl was away with the fairies. She wrote everybody’s name and place name backwards! She also spent most of her time dancing and twirling her arms around like a loon!

While this isn’t exactly a scientific experiment in the strictest sense – of writing a hypothesis, designing the experiment, getting results, making conclusions and writing it up – it does show you that science exists all around us and you can explore in not in the confines of a lab!