This is out of the archives, more than 10 years ago, but even so... Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride | Science | AAAS
A. G. Streng was a chemist at Temple University in 1960s. Apparently OSHA hadn't been invented yet, because he did some stuff. Derek Lowe is a chemist who had some things to say about Streng's work.
If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.
The article includes other gems, like...
Even Streng had to give up on some of the planned experiments, though (bonus dormitat Strengus?). Sulfur compounds defeated him, because the thermodynamics were just too titanic. Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four molecules of FOOF to give sulfur hexafluoride, 2 molecules of HF and four oxygens. . .and 433 kcal, which is the kind of every-man-for-himself exotherm that you want to avoid at all cost. The sulfur chemistry of FOOF remains unexplored, so if you feel like whipping up a batch of Satan's kimchi, go right ahead.
Hat tip for this bit of insanity goes to Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony and Daily News Stuff 27 July 2023: Worse Is Better Edition
Derek Lowe is a research chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry and not a solid-state physicist, but he's good at sniffing out suspect research papers and doesn't smell anything obviously rotten here.
Also his series of posts on Things I Won't Work With contains a number of timeless classics.
Two of my personal favorite TIWWW quotes:
ReplyDeleteOne from "Can't Stop the Nitro Groups" (https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/can-t-stop-nitro-groups):
'Her chemistry is often partnered with people who have an abiding interest in explosions; the group is well-known on the short list of those that try to see just how much craziness you can pack into a single molecule's structure before it flings itself apart out of sheer joie de vivre.
No, that's a perfectly accurate statement of their research program: this new paper's introduction includes the phrase "In our continuing efforts to introduce as many nitro groups associated with a tetrazole ring as possible. . ." and to most organic chemists that's roughly equivalent to saying something like "In our continuing efforts to spray as much graffiti on the snouts of salt-water crocodiles as possible. . ." '
Another from "Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane" (https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane):
"What makes it unusual is not that it blows up - go find me a small hexa-N-nitro compound that doesn't - but that it doesn't actually blow up immediately, early, and often. No, making things that go off when someone down the hall curses at the coffee machine, that's no problem. Making something like this that can actually be handled and stored is a real accomplishment."