Chemist Breaks Down 22 Chemistry Scenes From Movies & TV | WIRED

[Music] i'm dr kate bieberdorf but you may know me as kate the chemist kate is a scientist author and science entertainer today i'm going to break down clips from movies and tv about chemistry so let's experiment dissolving a body breaking bad it's possible that hf could dissolve a body but i would not pick that one because hf is a weak acid and so that means that it doesn't fully dissociate into the hydronium ion and that's the active species that's actually going to start eating away at the tissue so if it was me to dissolve a body even though i shouldn't be saying this i would probably go with something closer to aquaria which is like a royal acid that last scene makes me cringe he's standing next to a huge container of hf so hydrofluoric acid that is being suspended in the air and he doesn't have any safety equipment on his face so like that thing could break and splash in his face and just he'd be done so no thank you when you add acid to something it is going to start to react immediately we have a saying in lab that you add acid to water do what you ought to because if you add it in the opposite direction it starts to rip things apart in a really treacherous way so we usually would take a body help me out professor no we wouldn't we would usually take a substance and then add acid to it we're ready to go to work sniffing chemicals it's always sunny in philadelphia i'm stuck to your glue what about gasoline pour a little bit of gasoline on there dissolve some of the glue in theory in theory maybe gasoline could actually dissolve glue that's basic chemistry they have similar properties and so it's possible that you could actually use this non-polar substance gasoline to dissolve something that's also relatively nonpolar which is glue so in theory maybe but there are so many things that would be better to use and gasoline would be like the bottom of my list are you sure it's gasoline though i should just try it again jesus please don't huff gasoline at home it's not a good high though honestly because the gas can get into your brain it's one of those things that's very dense like the molecule is very dense it also could fill up your lungs and then you can asphyxiate chemical brownies rick and morty okay if we add a little more titanium nitrate and just a tad of chloride tartrate ovenless brownies not even close on this one titanium nitrate is a colorless solid and chlorified tartrate i think you said glorified tartrate i am not familiar with that molecule i'm pretty sure that does not exist but let's just give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were using tartrate which is essentially the salt of cream of tartar or tartric acid yeah it's gotta be that way so we do eat cream of tartar that's used in a lot of baking recipes so that piece we could actually eat but if you took titanium nitrate and mixed it with cream of tartar you are definitely not making brownies it's incredible what a gifted mind can accomplish sticky substances spiderman homecoming but trust me there's nothing boring my big issue is on the right side the left part that ring i'm okay with that that's okay but it's when we get to the right side of it and you see just like a line attached to it this rogue carbon and then you have another one attached to a carbon and another it's just garbage so like that is just a disaster of a drawing it's something i would expect from a high school student and it's not good this would not make a sticky substance at all it would make a clear colorless solution that kind of looks like salt water in this experiment we are going to make nylon which is what i would make if i was spiderman so i have four different things in front of me to start with i have a crystallization dish and so this is a really round glass dish that is appropriate to make nylon in i also have a spatula and that's just going to be to actually pull my nylon out so i'm going to start off by pouring this liquid just to have a little bit at the bottom so i just want to cover my crystallization dish completely then i'm going to take my other reagent my chloride and i'm going to add that and right away we can already see the nylon forming it's happening it's absolutely working oh my god i'm so excited and i've made nylon look at this and it just doesn't stop it just keeps going and i can keep pulling it in here and i've made this like awesome polymer look at this see this is what spiderman should have done like this is exactly what it looks like oh my god it's just nonstop fictional elements vibranium black panther a meteorite made of vibranium the strongest substance in the universe struck the continent of africa the theory here is actually quite spot-on i mean that's how elements are brought to earth there are explosions that happen in space maybe it's with a meteorite maybe it's a supernova who knows what it is but eventually these pieces these elements actually just like fling themselves onto earth it's not just the metal they sew it into their clothes it powers their city their tank unfortunately there is no atom or no element on the periodic table right now that resembles vibranium in any way whatsoever what are you talking about cooking meth breaking bad [Music] in terms of safety i'm pretty good with this they have the gas mask on then they have a piece over that that protects their face so that's going to protect their eyes and nose as well and they also are completely covered in some kind of hazmat suit i really like how they have their gloves all the way up but then over the suit so in theory nothing's going to be dropping down into them a lot of the equipment and the processes used here are very standard so any standard chemistry lab any industry place any pharmaceutical place those are probably going to have all that equipment all that safety equipment and in theory you could potentially make meth there with that glassware and with the gas mask that you would need [Music] that's a very common method we use stills in our lab when i was in graduate school to purify our solvents it's a really old-school way of doing it [Music] 2.35 pounds to make something that's like two or three pounds is a lot of material and you would need to put a lot of reagents into that is it possible absolutely for their setup gasoline fight zoolander [Music] i would not douse myself with gasoline that's typically frowned upon it would smell terrible but you're also extremely flammable it's just not a good idea i do not believe that small the flame would be able to have that big of an explosion i don't think the spark from the lighter would ignite it the actual flame from the lighter definitely could light octane vapors on fire or gasoline vapors on fire but it wouldn't have those big like explosion points of boom boom boom that we see in that clip cigar explosion national lampoon's christmas vacation sewer gas don't drop that even though the chemistry is not perfect here i do like it sewer gas typically contains a mixture of hydrogen sulfide some ammonia some carbon dioxide maybe maybe some methane the hydrogen sulfide is really what i'd be worried about there that is toxic and it is extraordinarily flammable yeah and thanks for telling us and anytime you have gases that are trapped in like an area that's when you can essentially make a bomb and so if it's trapped in a small pipe or a small area it's gonna explode it's gonna push out so you definitely will see an explosion but not nearly like that cigarette explosion con air nara this is a big myth cigarettes rarely cause an explosion like this you would need that cigarette to land perfectly like have that light that actual fire directly connect with any of that liquid that's flammable but unless it lands perfectly like this is just not gonna happen looks like you missed your connection chloroform community excuse me who are you guys this is not your office so when you take chloroform and you put it on a rag and you try to smother someone it actually takes quite a long time i've never done it personally but from what i've read it sounds like it takes about five minutes so you don't just immediately pass out what's happening oh we all got chloroformed with a small amount of it you essentially get that euphoric feeling that temporary euphoric feeling like you do with any other drug or alcohol but then you pass out like with alcohol would you stop testing for purity blow what i'm doing here is measuring the purity pure coke uh it melts away at about a 185 190 degrees so by definition when we use the word pure in the chemistry world that means we have a hundred percent of just those molecules so pure cocaine would be a vial of pure cocaine there's no meth in there there's no corn starch in there it is just cocaine 187 where did you get this stuff so he's using a very interesting version of a melting point apparatus we use this a lot anytime you're actually trying to characterize a molecule so the first time a molecule is made and you're trying to publish that you want to know the melting point and so this is a really easy way for you to quickly test your material and see if it's good chemical burn fight club this is a chemical i don't like it he's intentionally throwing sodium hydroxide which is lie a base a very strong base onto your hand you've heard more than you've ever been burned and you will have a squad the movie's wrong here because it doesn't burn like that that's not really what a chemical burn with a base feels like that's more what it would feel like with an acid when you put a base on your hand like that your hand actually feels really slippery because it sucks the fats out i know it's gross of your hand but it sucks the fats out of your hand and you start to feel like really slippery and you're kind of making soap like literally on your hand this is the best soup creating foam big bang theory we're going to combine these chemicals with ordinary dish soap creating a little exothermic release of oxygen this science is good yeah i'm all about this one for elephant's toothpaste which is the reaction he's making what you do is you take concentrated hydrogen peroxide so that's why he's wearing gloves usually about 35 hydrogen peroxide you add it to a mixture of dish soap so some really bubbly dish soap and i usually add food coloring to make it colorful and then you add your catalyst your potassium iodide and that's what decomposes hydrogen peroxide to release oxygen gas so yeah sheldon was right sheldon you remind me of a young lex luthor he uses the phrase exothermic release of oxygen exothermic release of oxygen that means you're releasing oxygen and also releasing heat energy so you probably can see at the very top or right on the outside of the reaction you can actually see those heat waves and it's just heat energy being pushed off as the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide occurs so let's do exactly what sheldon just did we're going to make elephant's toothpaste so in order to do this you need an erlenmeyer flask so something that's wide at the bottom and then narrow at the top you're also going to need hydrogen peroxide and you want concentrated hydrogen peroxide you'll also need some dish soap i highly recommend non-natural dish soap and then i have my potassium iodide which is a catalyst and that's going to actually activate this reaction let's get started so the first thing i'm going to do is add my hydrogen peroxide to my erlenmeyer flask so we'll just add this whole thing in here want a nice big reaction then what i'm going to do is add my dish soap in here and so the dish soap is actually going to trap the oxygen gas that's released once i add my catalyst got to give it a little swoosh then we're going to add our food coloring so this is the yellow you could add any color you want but i want it to match sheldon i'm going to give it a little shake to prep my catalyst this is the best part and then on the count of three i'm just gonna add this directly into my flask one two and three let's see what we get here this is amazing so you have hydrogen peroxide it decomposed it released oxygen gas which was trapped in the dish soap we also see liquid water is actually um condensing on the outside of the container and then hopefully you can see all of the steam these heat works because this is an exothermic release of oxygen gas just like sheldon said gene altering chemicals spiderman [Music] stay away from green gas you never want to breathe in green gas what i love about this is that he essentially is doing a really fun chemical reaction inside of his body so the first thing he does is he drinks something which is essentially a primer some kind of molecule that will react with the gas so he needs to have that in his body because we don't actually have that the green gas comes in and then like supposedly magically he has a chemical reaction between the two and it's just garbage i'm something of a scientist myself explaining a nuclear reactor chernobyl there are essentially two things that happen inside a nuclear reactor the reactivity which generates power either goes up or it goes down his explanation of a nuclear reactor is beautiful i love the way he describes it fuel increases reactivity control rods and water reduce it essentially what you do is you take a fuel source and you release energy from that source of fuel and then you funnel that energy through the power plant he does a great job of this because he really expresses how the nuclear fuel is dangerous but it can be kept under control if you have all the other parameters locked into place it is beautiful explaining a nuclear disaster chernobyl when the core is running at full power it burns the xenon away before it can cause a problem but chernobyl reactor 4 has been held at half power for 10 hours i love how he talks about xenon and how cute is he at how he says it zenon xenon's an inert gas and so it really limits reactivity it's not something that's very explosive it doesn't really want to react with things but at high enough temperatures we can burn it off and so when we have too much xenon present but it's not at high enough temperatures we essentially start poisoning the reactor at long last we have arrived 123.45 explosion what happened is they dunked these graphite rods directly into the water and it essentially had enough energy to boil the water up first of all so the water is going to go from the liquid state to the gas phase but it also had enough energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and when hydrogen is around oxygen with enough pressure and with enough energy it was so hot it immediately becomes combustible so we build up the pressure we set hydrogen on fire we blow the roof off and then that's gonna grab every single radioactive material in those nuclear rods and they're just gonna shoot them everywhere and it was a huge problem they believe the radiation was airborne for about nine days just terrifying safety first always chemistry equipment mr bean the whole bean don't do that i hate that he's not wearing goggles he's not wearing gloves he doesn't have a lab coat on he put two liquids to his face that he doesn't know what they are and then mix them together that's just like a big no this setup is a disaster it would never happen in real life what drives me the most crazy is that all the tubes are basically wired backwards you always shoot liquid cold liquid into the bottom pump up to the top and then you filter it out the top every single one in this clip is set up backwards until the water is flowing in the wrong direction liquid nitrogen terminator 2 judgment day hasta la vista baby it's possible that you could cover something in liquid nitrogen and then shoot it and have a an explosion like that it's possible is it going to happen exactly like that unlikely liquid nitrogen is one of my favorite things on planet earth so in the terminator 2 clip we saw that there was this liquidy thing that was frozen with liquid nitrogen and then it was shattered with a bullet and so we're going to try to replicate that so the first thing i'm gonna do is put my safety goggles on and then i'm going to put my cryogenic gloves on liquid nitrogen is cryogenic it's very very cold i've got hot dogs hot dogs are gonna kind of replicate what happens if like human flesh went in there now this is disgusting i'm just gonna put that out there i have to stick my hand in there and get it oh let me try to grab it it is like rock hard oh my gosh so that's like we're gonna pretend human flesh that we froze with liquid nitrogen one two three so let's use this experiment to conclude that if you dunked a human or a robot in liquid nitrogen and then tried to hit it with a bullet or a hammer you absolutely would be able to destroy the villain case closed ingesting toxic chemicals radium girls watch me don't do it this actually used to happen a hundred percent they would dip the paint brush in there and then put it into their mouth to get into this nice like pinpoint tip and then they would be able to very precisely paint these different dials on the top of clocks and essentially what they're doing is using a paint that contains radium to give that nice like glow-in-the-dark effect everyone put down your brushes radium is in the same group as calcium in the periodic table so it means it's in the same column radium actually is going to get into these little gaps where calcium usually sits in your jaw and so it kind of sinks into these holes and then it starts just like pulsing out radiation so right away when you're licking the paint it's just going to taste bad but you're not going to notice the fact that you're absolutely killing yourself while doing this but like a year or two later when you've had enough radium deposit in these bones then it starts shooting out these alpha beta and gamma rays and that is what's actually causing cancer and the dentists were the first people to figure it out because they were seeing all these girls come in with these huge issues in their jaw and the only thing they had in common is that they all worked at the same spot invisible inc national treasure [Music] there are two common ways of using lemon juice for secret messages one of them is if you have baking soda and you kind of paint the baking soda onto your surface your canvas whatever and then you can actually use lemon juice and kind of coat it over there and then it will bubble and kind of elevate the secret message will the second way would be to actually use lemon juice to write the message to actually code the message and then you can expose it to heat and the message will appear but neither of those things happened here so this is pretty much just bad science sorry toxic chemicals casino royale a hundred percent you could poison someone this way sodium cyanide is very very water soluble so it looks like they dissolved the salt in water and then dumped it into the martini glass so depending on how much cyanide was there you absolutely could kill the person if there's enough yeah this would work it's very possible that he would start feeling nauseous getting dizzy the sweating the really quick and so all three of those factors together would probably clue someone like james bond into knowing that he's been poisoned there is one antidote that we know of and it works extraordinarily well so the first thing you need to do is you need to inhale an enamel nitrate that's followed by an iv that's filled of sodium nitrate which is then followed by a second iv that has sodium thiosulfate that last hand nearly killed me handling dangerous chemicals the rock really elegant string of pearls configuration the vx nerve agent is absolutely real it is a neurotoxin which means it goes into your body and affects either your central or peripheral nervous system you know how this works this one specifically makes it so that your muscles can't relax so your muscles can still contract like your heart can still beat but then it can't relax oh my god the only reason you would use vx nerve gas is to hurt somebody or kill someone there's no functional or practical reason to use it to injure the small of your back as the poison seizes your nervous system do not move that one of the biggest thing that drives me nuts about this is that we're seeing the vx in the gas phase and it only exists in the gas phase at really really high temperatures and so these little green bubbles or those little balls are filled with green gas which must be at high temps yet somehow they're like just carrying it around without being around something like none of the science really matches for that so it should really be in the liquid phase right now which is an amber color all right just back away making water the martian i have hundreds of liters of unused hydrazine at the ndv if i run the hydrazine over an iridium catalyst it'll separate into n2 and h2 well he's starting off with hydrazine so n2h4 and so that's something that's used as essentially rocket fuel and so he has a lot of that leftover and what he's going to do is then take an iridium catalyst which again found on his equipment combine the two and that breaks apart the hydrazine into nitrogen and hydrogen it also makes ammonia which he didn't mention but i understand why he left that part off so this chemistry is really clean here hydrazine is extremely flammable it would be able to propel a rocket through space which is extremely important but in the context of this movie there's a big piece that we've overlooked because i'm stupid it's very very toxic and so if he's using hydrazine at all he needs to be in some kind of hazmat suit his space suit at the very least so yeah i blew myself up i do not think he would have survived that explosion not at all he would have had at least second-degree burns but more likely third-degree burns and those are painful let's not talk about that ever again conclusion so overall movies typically portray chemistry in a explosive light you see over and over again that a small spark causes a huge explosion or a little huff of a molecule all of a sudden makes you pass out and die what i love about that though is that people love including chemistry in their movies and in their tv shows and so i will always be happy about that

Channel: WIRED

Views: 2,679,951

Keywords: arts & entertainment, breaking bad chemistry, chemist breaks down, chemistry, chemistry experiments, chemistry explained, chemistry teacher, chemistry wired, kate chemistry, kate the chemist, ott technique critique, rick and morty chemistry, spider man web fluid, spiderman web fluid, spiderman web fluid formula, walter white, walter white cook, wired, wired chemistry, wired technique critique chemistry

Id: asAd-E5_HPo

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/activelypooping]

Sure, and you're going to tell me that a car flying off a cliff doesn't spontaneously explode. Think of all that kinetic energy from gravity!