Iodine Clock Reaction Timed to Tchaikovsky’s Russian Dance from The Nutcracker

The classic chemistry demonstration, the Iodine Clock Reaction, is traditionally set to the William Tell Overture. By deriving the equation governing the time change for any volume of stock solutions, the Iodine Clock Reaction can be set to any piece of music. Here, we set it to The Russian Dance (Trepak) from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. Students provided written permission to be filmed, and to allow the video to be shared publicly.