Remember the "Sol-Gel Song" by Liz Lax ’05?
It’s become an international hit, at least in the community of scientists and engineers who devote themselves to the ultra-light materials known for their insulating properties.
It was performed by officers of the International Sol-Gel Society at their 14th conference last week in Montpellier, France, according to Mary Carroll of Chemistry and director of undergraduate research. Carroll attended the conference with Ann Anderson of Mechanical Engineering, and the two are co-directors of the College’s Aerogel Lab.
Carroll and Anderson presented four papers at the conference, with several current and former students as co-authors.
Lax, a first-year medical student at St. George’s University in Grenada, composed the piece in the summer of 2003 as a way to “pass the time in lab. “She performed it at the Steinmetz Symposium the following spring, and posted the performance on the Web. It was there that officers of ISGS found the song and the lyrics. (What they performed was a mix of Lax’s song and Queens “We Are the Champions” — substituting “sol gels” for “champions.”)
“During the conference banquet, Dr. Christophe Barbe, one of the officers of the International (ISGS, http://www.isgs.org/ ), called the rest of the ISGS officers to the microphone and announced that Liz Lax from Union College in New York had written a song about sol gels and that they were going to sing it,” Carroll said.
“As you can imagine, we were delighted.
"Afterwards, Ann and I … let them know that Liz had been a research student in our lab,” Carroll said. “They hadn’t made the connection, which is probably a good thing, since they might have asked us to sing it!”
Some of the lyrics are:
"Here in the bat cave, we play around with chemicals
Give me TMOS, methanol and ammonium hydroxide
Stir for ten minutes, don't forget the water
We're making sol-gels."
The song can be heard at http://scoter3.union.edu/~andersoa/AerogelWeb/.