Accidents and Regrets (and chocolate biscuits)

okay I think I am looking at the camera it has a little light on it so I can just watch that light most of you around the world I'm in isolation here in my study in Nottingham before I went into isolation Brady and I recorded some questions and answers and this little video is the last part of the recording we made but we've now set things up in my study so we can record new videos and they're all going to be coming up quite soon but for now let's watch the last of the questions and answers that we recorded before all of this started [Music] what is the stupidest thing you did in chemistry in your life I think the stupidest thing I did was when I was a schoolboy and I tried to distill formic acid out of oven cleaner in my parents basement I didn't look up the boiling point of formic acid but it's only 1 point something degrees above the boiling point of water so separating them by distillation is pretty difficult but more stupidly I did not put in any boiling beads into the oven cleaner so I heated it up on an oil bath in my parents basement and then suddenly I saw the temperature got very high to something like a hundred and fifty degrees without it boiling and I dropped in some beads and push it all vaporized and clouds of acid vapor filled the basement and we all had to retreat did you get in trouble I don't think my parents noticed have you seen Breaking Bad yet no I occasionally get asked about it but I don't subscribe to any sort of streaming service playing biscuits or choc quit chip I don't eat biscuits all that much and but I suppose I prefer chocolate chip to plain biscuits if I have to what is the worst injury you have ever sustained in the pursuit of chemistry touchwood I have never injured myself seriously though when I was a schoolboy we didn't wear gloves when we did chemistry and so my fingers were permanently stained yellow from nitric acid and which makes your skin yellow and it eventually peels off and also when I was learning to glass blow I wasn't very successful because even then my hands shook rather I burnt myself several times I can remember traveling on the London Underground the Underground trains and putting my burnt finger against cold metal to try and make its hurtless as I was going home from school what experiment do you wish all high school students would be required to perform I've never thought about that I think the answer is it doesn't really matter which experiments they perform but it's good if they perform lots of experiments some students are rather frightened when they get to the lamp and so the more experiments you can do the more confidence you will get I think the really important thing to say is that modern society relies on the use of chemicals and if we don't train young people to use chemicals safely then when they are my age there will be nobody in the world who can handle chemicals and the whole thing will collapse so it's really important that people respect chemicals because they're often dangerous but at the same time have the confidence to handle them safely are there any games you enjoy playing I used to play a little Hennis but I wasn't very good when I was a child they used to play mahjong and I have a notice here in my office saying don't play mahjong with strangers you're sure to be cheated I play some games with my grandchildren but they like to change the rules so they win do you play chess I was very bad at chess my fault that was very good I still have a chess set that he had as a child in Russia but it is missing one white bishop because he was playing it in the outside latrine and the white bishop fell down into the cess pit below he was playing chess in a toilet well working out chess problems okay have you ever played a video game or a computer game I haven't played any video games my children used to in the early days so called BBC computer and I did help devise some computer games for chemists for high school children and we Brady's help and our colleagues in computer file we've actually got these on the internet so you can play them to yourself if you'd like to how popular were you in your school days I think probably not very popular and my brother who's younger than me went the same school as me after I'd left and his friends said they were frightened of me I have no idea because you're a chemist what's your favorite color I don't know probably green after all I am a green chemist and what's your favorite number I don't know but most people say 7 as far as I remember but I suppose at the moment it's probably a hundred and fifty because it's a hundred and fifty years of the periodic table one that's 151 and 150 years of supercritical fluids which was my big area of research do you have any regrets everyone has regrets except Edith Piaf who if you remember had the song which overlooked the little gal I didn't regret anything but on the other hand sometimes things that when regrets may be better that they didn't happen because the consequences of them might not have been as good as one dimensions but I think I'm very pleased about many things particularly meeting Brady of course did you ever meet Albert Einstein or Nikola Tesla the answer's no and I think Einstein died when I was quite small I think he died in 55 when I would have been sufficiently young I wouldn't even know who he was have you ever been starstruck I'm not sure I'm be quite often when you meet somebody who is special for one reason or another it's quite difficult to say think what you would say to them I'm sometimes wondered what would I say if I met Mendeleev who I think was actually quite an eccentric and antisocial person I think as you get older you tend to get less starstruck and I'm quite embarrassed when people get starstruck meeting me how can they be starstruck about somebody is ordinary as me who's the most famous person you've met depends how you define Fame most recently I suppose the president of China Xi Jingping who may shook hands with but we appeared to have no language in common and I've met lots of Nobel Prize winners and sometimes they're really quite conceited but very often they're delightfully modest and it's quite a privilege to talk to them have you met the Queen met the Queen and Prince Charles who asked me how green chemistry was going you can see him on one of our videos have you ever worked with flora and communic acid the short answer is no in fact I've never worked with fluorine I did once work in somebody's lab where they had an argon fluoride laser contained argon and fluorine inside and it developed leak and some of the fluorine came out in the cooling water into the lab in the form of HF hydrogen fluoride and the smell was dreadful do you know any periodic jokes no not apart from cliched ones when of my colleagues like saying he has no chemical jokes they all are gone but I don't really like such nonsense do you collect anything like stamps or rocks I sometimes pick up nice stones on the beach or lying around and I often give them to children who I know several children who like collecting stones and I collect books you take lots of photos of flowers don't you yes my wife is very interested in flowers so I take pictures for her and I suppose in the last few years when they've gone iPhone and I like taking pictures of all sorts of strange things but what's the last thing you took a picture of the last thing I took picture of is last thing I photographed was this which is a cell for liquid xenon haven't used it for probably 30 years and it's also if you were interested in such things it's got these red windows which are made from a material called K rs5 which is a mixture of thallium iodide and bromide so it's quite dangerous to touch the windows thallium is highly poisonous but I took a [ __ ] of this because I'm giving a lecture in 10 days time and I needed a fighter of this what do you think will be the next big breakthrough in chemistry that will change how we live our daily lives I think the biggest change probably is greatly improved battery life at the moment the batteries that we have are good but they don't hold nearly enough charge many people can't get through the day without their smartphone running down and the really important thing is that if you could make batteries hold perhaps twice or three times the charge per unit weight of what is possible today then you could start making electric aircraft at least for short-range flights the electric cars would become much more viable than they are now you may have heard the UK has declared a few days ago that no cars are going to be sold with petrol or diesel or hybrid engines in 2035 which is only 15 years from now and my car is more than ten years old now so we've really got to make major developments in battery technology how often do experiments work versus not work we used to have a sign on our lab door which was a quotation from the Nobel Prize winner Fred Sanger Fred Sanger is the only person who's ever won two Nobel prizes in chemistry there's some people that have won two Nobel prizes but in different subjects and the quotation which used to be glued to our lab door said most experiments don't work in fact if every experiment you do does work perhaps it means you're not trying things that are adventurous enough but what's really important about experiments you shouldn't just do them to see what happens but you should have some sort of hypo this or idea of what's going to happen and then that may not happen but it enables you to change your theory is salt dissolving in water a chemical reaction or a physical reaction it's a physical process because if you evaporate the water you can get the salt back on the other hand if you drop a piece of sodium into water you get a chemical reaction and you get a solution of sodium hydroxide and when you evaporate it you'll get a white solid rather than the metal and you have to work quite hard to get the sodium back from it how does the professor view the increasingly close relationship between science and business well of course it depends what the relationship is there has always been a strong interaction between chemistry and industry and most of the chemists that we educate go into industry in some form or another industry the chemistry using industry are our biggest customers for our product chemistry graduates but I think that particularly now when society is faced with so many problems in terms of sustainability of chemistry supplying the chemical needs of future generations it's really important for chemists to work with industry to make sure that we can continue supplying the chemicals that people need and I have had in my career some really very good collaborations with industry and those collaborations are continuing and I really enjoy working with industry but professor can sort of chasing the mighty dollar impede blue sky research those sort of crazy ideas that aren't necessarily financially viable but could open whole new avenues you don't have to do all your research with industry blue skies research in general can be quite sometimes be quite inexpensive so even if you have an industrially sponsored project you can still try extra ideas and so on and I have had several really good ideas that have been inspired by spin-offs from what I've done from industry do you prefer coffee or tea tea green tea I don't like black tea very much and I used to be really addicted to coffee and then I went to China in 1998 when there was almost no coffee there and you had to drink green tea and after a week I came back addicted why do you prefer green tea green tea is really good because you can put the leaves in your cup and then you can add hot water to it all day the same ways the same leaves and it's still viable and if I drank as much coffee as I drink green tea I would be shaking ten times more I really enjoy answering your questions so keep sending them but for the moment we're recording new footage and you'll be seeing those videos soon so keep watching at different speeds and from different angles Professor Sir Martin Polyakov for services to the chemical sciences [Music]

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 209,541

Rating: 4.975307 out of 5

Keywords: periodic, videos, chemistry

Id: ZsLcOMfOzNY

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/juniegrrl]

The little set-up chat with the Professor figuring out where to look is the same thing I have to tell myself with every video meeting.

I love the professor's study. I collect books as well, though I assume his study has a more scholarly bent than my library does.

[u/Iron_Bawls]

I need a Neil video. I'm very curious about what the legendary man of many resources/abilities has been doing.