Brady has started a new video channel, about words.
One of the words is vodka,
and he's challenged me to say something chemical about vodka.
It's really too easy, but I'll do it all the same.
The first thing, which...
some of you may have seen on our other videos,
is that Mendeleev, father of the periodic table,
worked out the method of measuring
the standard concentration of alcohol in vodka,
at about 40%.
So you can buy vodka with Mendeleev's name on it,
and the periodic table.
And... I keep this bottle in my office,
to drink when something sad happens.
A friend dies, or... a grant is not funded.
Here's a picture of Mendeleev on my tie.
In some parts of Russia, he is more famous for vodka
than he was for the periodic table.
A few years ago, I found this bottle of vodka in France.
It has "Poliakov", which is my surname,
so I was quite excited.
But... it's spelled with a V, rather than a double-F,
the way I spell it, because...
over the years, the way that people translate
the Russian alphabet into English letters has changed.
But it's the same name.
Don't know if it's as good as the Mendeleev one.
But the real scientific reason that I can talk about vodka
is with this bottle, Stolichnaya.
It means "capital vodka", which you can see is empty.
And the reason it's empty is because
the vodka in this bottle was used by one of my students,
Sasha Novitskiy, in an experiment.
We had invented a new way of measuring the phase behavior,
that is, to find when you heat up
a liquid, when it goes into a gas.
And we measured- invented a way for measuring
the phase behavior of mixtures of alcohol and water.
And when we were preparing the paper to publish,
Sasha said it'd be really nice to try a mixture of...
a real mixture of alcohol and water, vodka.
So... we did the experiment, and it worked,
and here you can see the scientific paper,
and here is the phase diagram of Stolichnaya vodka,
as a function of temperature and pressure.
It worked really quite well, except...
we forgot that vodka also contains a small amount of sugar.
And at the high temperature, the sugar turned to caramel,
and by the end of the experiment,
the whole apparatus was blocked.
I should just say that vodka's played quite a, um...
role in my life.
One of the first poems that I ever learnt in Russian
was about vodka.
It went, "Chizhik-Pyzhik, gde ty byl?
"Na Fontanke vodku pil!
"Vypil ryumku, vypil dve-
"Zashumelo v golove."
"Little sparrow, little sparrow, where have you been?
"I've been on the Fontanke," a river in Saint Petersburg,
"and I was drinking vodka.
"I drank one little glass, then another,
"And now a noise has started in my head."
And if you want to find out more about vodka,
or samovar, or lots of other words,
go and see Brady's website.
It's quite fun. I've learnt quite a lot already.
And I'm sure you will, too.
[Brady] Is it better than Periodic Table of Videos?
Well, that, I would not want to be judgmental about my colleagues.