The first day of October was marked with the start of weekly meetings between schoolchildren from the Voronezh region and the academic staff of the Faculties of Chemistry, Physics, Biomedical Sciences, and Pharmaceutics of Voronezh State University. The sessions are held as a part of the “Saturday University” project.
The first lecture was given by Professor Alexander Zavrazhnov (DSc in Chemistry) from the Department of General and Inorganic Chemistry. It was dedicated to such concepts as “allotropy”, “polymorphism”, and “isomerism”. The professor told the audience about the latest achievements in chemistry that considerably expanded the number of allotropic forms of oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and phosphorus. He also explained why “allotropy” and “polymorphism” should be viewed as separate concepts and proved it by demonstrating different phases of carbon.
He also demonstrated experiments by which red phosphorus turns white and which show some reactions of solid white phosphorus and solutions. Moreover, the schoolchildren could learn how to get ozone as a result of chemical reaction and allotropic transformations in overheated sulphur vapour under temperature variations.
