By Wendy Barnaby

Dr Graeme Jones had his young audience literally dancing in their seats at his lecture on Wednesday. In an extravaganza which had everyone sniffing scents and waving light sticks, he explored the chemistry of Saturday nights.

Dr Graeme Jones had his young audience literally dancing in their seats at his lecture on Wednesday. In an extravaganza which had everyone sniffing scents and waving light sticks, he explored the chemistry of Saturday nights.

Jones, of the University of Keele, was delivering his BA Lord Kelvin Award lecture. It turns out that Lord ("call me Kev") Kelvin’s laws of thermodynamics are a great help to aspiring revellers: his second law, for example, tells them that they’ll never be able to devote all their energy to the partying, as they’re sure to lose some – possibly in the form of heat. Not that this should stop them letting their hair down. In step-by-step working, Jones calculated how many molecules one strand of hair would grow by, in one second. The answer – greeted with a dramatic burst of the Allelulia Chorus – was 120 billion. Which would be, Jones guessed, enough peanuts to fill the Albert Hall.

What our party-goers hope to do is to meet someone else and get together. Once Jones had explained – with reference to the energies involved - that this would be a knackering process, he asked what a suitable catalyst would be to help things along. After a universal shout of "alcohol!", he corrected his audience by pointing out that alcohol would be consumed in the process. Catalysts are not. He preferred music, and we had another blast.

Alcohol has its place in Saturday nights, however, and Jones entertained all with his analysis of alcopops. As well as water and alcohol, gas chromatography mass spectrometry shows they’re made of caffeine, sucrose, molecules which taste like raspberry, vanilla and preservatives.

They also contain the same blue colourant as Morning Fresh washing-up liquid and Persil.

The art of being seen at the rave was revealed to depend on fluorescence, and as the lights went down everyone waved fluorescent sticks to get in the mood. Pheromones – molecules of scent which attract one sex to the other – help too; and the audience got to smell some, with uncertain results. Many noses crinkled. Jones dispelled any assumptions that we might be a special species by revealing that pigs react to the same pheromones – androstenol and androstenone – that humans do.

Chemistry, said Jones, is definitely the science of love: how many people say, when they get together, "The physics are right?" To prove it, he played more blasts of music by Billie Piper ("chemistry is something deep inside"), S Club 7 ("it’s in the make-up of the DNA") and Baby Boy ("the chemistry felt so real and so true"). He then subjected molecules to infrared spectroscopy, making them vibrate, and everyone danced to Good Vibrations, trying to make their arms and bodies match the vibrations of the molecular structures.

There was no doubt about the crowd’s enthusiasm. "It was really, really funny," laughed one teenaged girl, "and you learned things as well." One boy probably spoke for many: "I liked the way he used science to relate to something we know about. School chemistry is pretty boring – but this was really interesting," he said.