I've been involved with lots of outreach projects; last week it was Year 12 Experience Days. I haven't heard of them before... so of course I got involved. The principle (in chemistry, anyway) was to put 20 year 12 students in a lab and blow things up. Not the students.

It was an experience for me too, for whilst all I had to do was help with some ratio calculations and chat to keen students about degree options, there were a few bangs. And whooshes. There were also a few explosions of water from very high pressure taps (we had warned them about the taps, but they hadn't quite realised the extent of the danger), but it was the hydrogen bombs which took centre stage ...they, after all, were deliberate.

The Experience was actually a fairly innovative lab designed to teach the value of precision and accuracy in order to get exciting results like very loud bangs and fireworks. This was coupled with a fairly appalling out of date handout, which every single student abandoned in the laboratory.

They started off by choosing a hydrogen:air ratio and measuring out a test tube to be filled with that amount of hydrogen, then they stood in a line lowest:highest hydrogen loading whilst we went past lighting the tubes to give that distinctive squeaky pop. As the hydrogen content increased, the squeaks got quieter, and we explained how the extra fuel couldn't burn without the right amount of oxygen.

After that we got bigger (plastic) bottles and did hydrogen:oxygen ratios; we cleared a long line in the laboratory, mounted them on a crate and set light to the rockets, which projected themselves across the room. We had to wear ear plugs (I always wonder if they're luminous yellow to make them easier to find if they get lost in your ear). The rocket which went the furthest was the only one that had been named.

And after that, we got an even bigger bottle of methanol and oxygen fuel, called a Whoosh Bottle. This experiment is best done in a darkened room. One (slightly nervous) volunteer lit the fuel and we were treated to an array of blue flames which rose up and hit the ceiling with that characteristic whoosh.

It's nice to know that fuel cells are on the A level syllabus, but I doubt they do this one in schools.

The first flames of my passion for chemistry were ignited in year 10 when I had a very good chemistry teacher. My best friend and I would work together to get finished as quickly as possible and then follow her round the classroom pestering for more work. ...Yes, we were actually that geeky.

I immediately decided that I wanted to do chemistry or something chemistry related at university ...so much for my family who assumed I would do English. It's not that English isn't fun, or you can't get jobs with an English degree, but chemistry not only explains the hows and the whys, but it does it with bangs, flames and vibrant colours and odours.

The particular chemistry teacher I mention was especially good at demonstrating the ease with which practicals that seem to start off well can quickly go up in flames. There were a few incidents.

One I remember was the electrolysis of brine, which she happily told us how to set up, then left us to it. Ten minutes later I asked her how long we should run it, as I was starting to feel dizzy from all the chlorine...

Her lackadaisical approach only made us all the more keen to experiment: I remember one incident when she urged us to cautiously add just a touch of iodine to a solution, just the tip of a spatula. Naturally, one of the boys on the bench next to me had to see what would happen if he threw a whole load in - BANG, and iodine on the ceiling. Which actually remained there the whole time I was at school.

One of the highlights had to be "Mr B's Biology Books". This was a demonstration she ran, and I can't actually remember what it was now, although I suspect it involved ethanol. A dangerous demonstration, she set up the plastic shield between her and us at the front of her desk, while she heated a reflux condenser set up with rubber tubes to feed the water in. Quickly, she realised that the screen base was too high and we couldn't see anything. Scouting around, she spied a pile of A level biology text books, which she nicked to pile up her apparatus on before continuing heating.

The inevitable happened: the rubber tubing caught fire, the rubber tubing lit the biology books. We were all very appreciative and unhelpful in the face of disaster.

She extinguished the fire, leaving the biology books scorched and hiding them on the shelf whilst begging us not to tell Mr B. Of course, he was immediately notified.

Laughing as other people go head over heels has always been popular: just look at slapstick. This is why You've Been Framed was so popular. We might not like to admit it, but we laugh.

Laughter theory suggests that what we laugh at is incongruity within a play frame, i.e. non-serious loss of grace and dignity - a caper.

The one person who doesn't find it funny is the person being laughed at. But this could have dangerous implications for them - philosopher Henri Bergson argues that we laugh at mistakes to maintain the rules of society and put a halt to any outrageous behaviour. And it does work: the mocked becomes embarrassed and endeavours not to repeat the mistake. But it's not just laughter which stigmatises mistakes: it's common throughout our society. On his TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson argues that schools are killing creativity by "running education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make". And this is fundamentally silly, since we're educating our children for a future we cannot imagine. Robinson argues that "creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status".

Whilst I do intend to prepare for motherhood by investing in 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), I'm somewhat confused as to how one would fit "creativity" onto the syllabus. Maybe we would have academic chemistry lessons, followed by creative chemistry lessons, where dangerous chemicals are presented to the children and they are asked to design an experiment, write a risk assessment, then try it.

Like Neville's exploding cauldron scene in Harry Potter.

Personally, I think it's the school's job to encourage creative, not teach it. Then again, Robinson also thinks that schools are training everyone to be academics. And this really doesn't add up. Research is creative. Chemistry especially is a creative subject. And when you're doing research, you're wrong pretty much all the time. Things go bang. Reactions don't work. Expensive beam time is wasted.

The OED says of research: the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions

Or, better, Einstein: "If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

It's not just that these are pleasant excuses for further lack of productivity, it's that creativity and making mistakes are absolutely crucial. As a climber I am using to falling. We fall on purpose. We fall to make sure we can take falls, to make sure we can catch them. If you never fall, you never push yourself to your limits and you can't improve. Falling is normal.

Chemistry is exactly the same. If you want something original, you want to understand things, you have to go beyond what you know will work. If education trains you out of creativity, academia recalls it just as you're getting rusty. And maybe if we'd had a creative education we would make fewer cracks and bangs during doctoral programmes as we had made our mistakes early in life.

But that'd be no fun, would it?

I believe in starting with a bang. Something I apparently managed pretty effectively during my 4th year research project when I accidentally built a bomb.

I know, I know... How can you accidentally build a bomb, right?

Well, that kind of things just happens sometimes. How else do you suppose such things were discovered, if not through someone playing about irresponsibly? Theory? Don't be silly.

It wasn't the first accident in that lab either: the year before, they had managed to burn down an entire furnace room when a hoover that had spent the day sucking lots of oxide particles decided to explode in the middle of the night. The fire doors did their bit: the smoke detectors didn't, and there was a lot of equipment lost and a ban put on using vacuum cleaners in the chemistry department.

So I was in safe hands, although whilst the hoover culprit remained a mystery, this one was entirely my doing.

I had been making things cold, and this involved a propanol slurry, which was kept below freezing with the aid of lots of dry ice. The system was that I would use the old, contaminated propanol kept in a large solvent bottle, one of those dark glass things about as big as a torso and pour it back in there when the dry ice had all evaporated into carbon dioxide so it could be used again for the same purpose.

And here's where I have to make a confession: I'm a very impatient person. It certainly looked like all the carbon dioxide had bubbled away, and I wanted to leave the lab nice and clean for everyone. So, happily, I shoved the slurry back in the bottle and... yes... put on the lid.

A few hours later, the one remaining student in the laboratory was somewhat shocked by an incredibly loud bang, which turned out to be my carbon dioxide bomb going off as the pressure inside the bottle became too much.

We had to get a new solvent bottle and stock of shabby propanol after that, and I spent a good long time sweeping up pieces of broken glass. Seriously, it got everywhere. I was climbing under desks and glove boxes, scraping it out of corners with my (marigold protected) fingertips. It's a good job nobody got hurt (broken glass is not the best thing to project across a room), although the bottle being under a desk meant most of the spread was at floor level.

But you learn lessons from your mistakes and I didn't do that again. Even for giggles.