Bubbles and insights

Because the kindergarteners had heard the word 'cell' for the first time last week (around the yeast-peroxide demonstration), I brought in more yeast along with a compound microscope so everybody could really see the single cells of the yeast organism. Everybody enjoyed seeing the little guys floating around at 400x magnification.

One voice piped up from the back,

"There must be hundreds of them!"

A simple comment, but beautiful for its depth of insight. He realized that the several dozen cells piped onto the TV screen via digicam represented one pencil-point-sized view on a much bigger slide, and the slide was made from one half-drop of solution taken from a beaker with a whole 250ml. Hundreds – probably millions of cells were in that beaker.

He realized that, not only were we looking at things on a scale of teeniness that was outside everything his senses had shown him so far, but also that the teeniness would require numbers that he didn't otherwise need in daily reality. You might pick a dozen flowers, or see a hundred pigeons, or pass a thousand cars on a long day's drive, but those cozy familiar numbers, the ones whose magnitude we easily intuit, just don't do the job when it comes to a question about the yeast beaker.

In SilverSurfers I pulled one of those "I have never tried this before and maybe it will work" stunts, and got lucky. Again I put the yeast cells under the compound microscope; then I added a half drop of peroxide over at the edge of the cover slip, just to see if maybe we could see the cell's-eye view of last week's fizzy demo.

Here is the video. It speaks for itself.