Making Transparent Metal? Invisible Sodium chemical experiment!

Please note that this video was made solely for research and demonstration purposes! Do not attempt to repeat the experiments shown in this video!Hello everyone! Today I will show you a very unusual effect, that I observed in the reaction of sodium with water on the surface of wet napkins.As we already know from my previous videos, sodium is an active alkali metal. It is quite soft and vigorously reacts with water. If you just throw a piece of sodium in the water, usually it melts first, then lights up and then explodes. However, if you perform the reaction of sodium with water under different conditions, we can observe a very unusual effect. Take a cup of water and put a filter paper on it’s surface. Next, take a medium size piece of sodium, and put it on the wet surface of the filter.When sodium metal contacts with the wet filter surface, the reaction begins. As a result of the heat during the reaction, sodium eventually melts and then ignites. But after this an unusual effect takes place which I still cannot explain.Burning stops, and a droplet of sodium that was just black becomes red and then transparent. After that the droplet begins to float on the water surface and in the end it explodes. I did this experiment several times and every time the same result has been achieved. First, the droplet of sodium ignites. Then, the burning stops. And then, for reasons unknown to me, a droplet of unknown substance was formed which was floating on the surface of water. Whether, we are dealing with a transparent sodium, or any other substance was formed, such as sodium hydroxide, or a sodium hydroxide mixture with water in unknown proportions? Why the droplet becomes perfectly clear? Still I cannot find the answer to this question. If we assume that we are dealing with sodium hydroxide, then why this droplet doesn’t sink and instead floats on the surface of water? As the density of sodium hydroxide is 2 times greater than the density of water. Or can we assume that we are dealing with undiscovered properties of sodium metal, which is to acquire a transparent state under certain conditions? I began to study this question. I have started looking for scientific articles which mention the transparent state of sodium metal. Luckily I found something. However, in this article written by Russian and Japanese scientists, the transparent state of sodium was only described having a very high pressure, more than million atmospheres. With huge pressure sodium droplet becomes transparent. I wrote to the authors of this article about the effect that I was able to photograph. Authors answered that we could be dealing with a transparent sodium hydroxide. But the question remains, why did this drop float and didn’t not sink? Perhaps because of the temperature difference between the droplet and water, we have to be dealing with the Leidenfrost effect, which we can observe by pouring liquid nitrogen on hand. I even spoke to Professor Toomas Tamm at Tallinn University, who is working in inorganic chemistry field. He suggested that perhaps we are not dealing with a pure sodium metal or sodium hydroxide, instead maybe with some kind of phases that sodium hydroxide can form with water. Thus, due to the special optical properties of this drop, it becomes transparent. I also managed to shoot the behavior of sodium on the surface of wet filter. Thus, we can clearly observe spheroidal state which the burning sodium droplet acquires after becoming transparent. Nevertheless, I have not received a clear answer to this question, and the effect that I was able to observe. Perhaps you, the viewers of my channel, could help me find an explanation for this effect. Why the sodium droplet becomes transparent after burning? What happens in this reaction? Write in comments your assumptions, and maybe together we will be able to find an explanation to the effect that we were able to observe. For those of you who were not very interested to listen to a scientific chatter, I suggest you to take a look at the moments in which the reaction of sodium and water was going out of control. Happy viewing! And those of you who were interested in the scientific side of this video, I propose to discuss such an effect that we were able to observe in the comments. Thanks for watching! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thoisoi2 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Thoisoi?ty=h Music: http://audiomicro.com