The Prof watches Breaking Bad (at last)

and of course hf features in the tv show breaking bad which i'm glad to say i've never seen why are you glad to say that it's really good well perhaps perhaps one day i might watch it when i'm old [Music] for a long time people have wanted to hear what you think of breaking bad before you watch this episode what did you know about breaking bad and what were you expecting well i knew it was about a chemistry teacher and i knew that he was making some sort of drug but i didn't know which one and i really didn't know much more about that except that i think i'd heard that there were a lot of episodes and that at some stage hf hydrogen fluoride played a part but that was about it why had a show about chemistry not attracted you until now well i don't actually watch much tv i mean i watch quite a i will until the pandemic i went to the cinema quite regularly and obviously breaking bad is not in the cinema i suppose it was not on terrestrial television we don't have streaming services on our tv so i just never watched and professor as a chemist when you make people like you know out and about is it a common joke for you to have to put up with the cliche of oh do you know how to make drugs and things like that no i mean it's i'm not sure anybody's ever asked me well i mean you you have you have asked me but i'm i can't remember anybody else ever asking me i've never asked you to make drugs no no no but i mean you've just asked me the question but no i i've no idea i can't remember anybody asking me that so professor so far i've only convinced you to watch the first episode the pilot and the pilot starts with this iconic shot of a pair of trousers floating through the air and i get the impression that's one of the shots that made the biggest impression on you yeah i really liked it i i started wondering whether you could fly trousers as a pair of as a kite but i was slightly disappointed because given that later on you see where the trousers came from i think it's physically impossible that they could have been run over by the van that the teacher was driving but um the floating trousers was really good they look a bit like a pair of trousers you'd wear no no i don't think so no well possibly but i'm not very very fussy about clothes these are my good clothes you can't go home smelling like a meth lab after the introductory sequence we have like the title screen for the show which involves breaking bad being written with bromine and barium and the periodic table and all these sort of uh chemistry formula i thought that would really excite you yeah i thought that was quite clever i thought it was a bit more subtle than these things where they're drawn like element symbols with the atomic weight and so on in as well and i quite like that and i started thinking how my name could be spelled with argon in the martin and i couldn't decide whether polonium or lithium would look better in polyurethane early in the episode we see walter the star of the show in a chemistry setting as a teacher with his students for i don't know you know five minutes or so trying to conduct a chemistry class well that's that's all of life right it's just it's the constant it's the cycle it's solution the lesson was quite good there were one or two things one thing i really liked was his flame tests which i thought were really good where he sprayed something that gave a red and a green color i think it's probably copper and barium that could have been strontium but strontium might have been a bit exotic for the props department of the show there were other things that were quite strange particularly in the view of him walter being rather safety conscious later on that he was not wearing safety glasses i also was quite interested in him asking what chemistry was yes i'm not sure anybody's been asked me that my son when he was at high school was asked what is in organic chemistry and he said in a rather loud whisper to his friends it's what my dad does chemistry is the study of matter but i prefer to see it as the study of change walters answered that it was the study of change would have been better if he'd mixed it up with the other definition which was study of matter and if you said it was the way that matter changes i think that might have been quite good i was also not totally convinced by him lighting a bunsen burner and saying that that was electrons lighting the burner but overall i thought the reaction of the class was a bit disappointing from what was quite uh exciting chemistry teacher i think chemistry being the study of change was a really nice answer i mean it obviously it also foreshadows what's going to happen in this television show but um but i thought it's a quite quite a poetic answer there was one thing that struck me about him is that he looks quite like a well-known british scientist robert winston who's quite a famous popularizer of science or used to be i know very few chemists that have mustaches actually later on or quite shortly after that scene you see that he's got a second job in the car wash um i don't know how you describe it a manual car wash and that underlines quite an important point i think that chemistry teachers or science teachers often don't have the social status that they really ought to have because it's such an important job i'm not sure that that's the point that they were trying to make in this particular film but i think it's quite an important thing to see i think the point they're trying to make is that chemistry teachers don't earn a lot of money which is the whole reason that he breaks bad yeah i mean that might be true but um i don't i've no idea what chemistry teachers are naturally so we also see a scene shortly after when he when he's looting the school lab and he's taking all sorts of things from the uh from the shelves i thought you must have frowned upon that you're a bit of a goody two shoes was i shocked by his dishonesty um well that was part of the story wasn't it but the what surprised me a bit more was the size of flasks that they had in the um school store particularly the um they they all were on a much larger scale than i would have expected in the school chemistry lab shortly after the theft we see him talking with jesse about uh you know preparing to make the crystal meth and he admonishes him for cooking with a volumetric flask rather than a cooking flask and like i thought you'd like that getting a little bit of a little bit of teaching in there about how to use the equipment no this is a volumetric flask you wouldn't cook in one of these uh yeah i do uh no you don't yes i think i mean that that was quite nice and um though i must say earlier in my career when i didn't know things so well i tried to cook in a volumetric flask but i think that the two th there's something that i felt didn't ring very true with his first meeting with jesse when jesse escapes from a police raid jesse has already left the school and walter recognizes him honestly i never expected you to amount to much but methamphetamine i didn't picture that and certainly as a university teacher i rarely recognize students when they come back because they've changed they've grown up so i wasn't sure that walter would have immediately recognized his student on the other hand it's clear that he although jesse was a bad student that walter still managed to teach him something volumetric flask is for general mixing and titration you wouldn't apply heat to a volumetric flask that's what a boiling flask is for did you learn nothing from my chemistry class no you flunked me there's this interaction between them where um they're talking about the the cooking the preparation of crystal meth and jesse says it's an art cooking is art i saw your setup ridiculous you and i will not make garbage we will produce a chemically pure and stable product that performs as advertised no adulterants no baby formula no chili powder oh no chili peas my signature not anymore walter's not having any of that he says this is not art this is just pure and simple chemistry where would you come down on is there art to chemistry well i think there is art in doing preparative chemistry well i've never been a very good preparative chemist and that's why late in the later stages of my career i have built machines to make chemicals because i'm not very good at manipulating them so i think there is quite a lot of art and particularly organic chemists very much believe that what they do is an art as well as being a science a real theme that runs through this scene as well is like even though he's doing something bad walter is taking a real pride in the chemistry isn't he he says we're going to produce things that are pure and stable there's a real kind of chemist's pride in him despite what he's doing yeah very much so um you mentioned cooking the um drugs and i there was that jessica calls himself captain cook which for you as an australian and for me would have raised the idea of captain cook the explorer which perhaps won't have resonated so much with the american audience and also i remember that captain cook was murdered so i wonder whether this is something that is going to happen in a later episode oh look you're already thinking i like it also we see walter talking to jesse about wanting to put safety like an eyewash station in place and he's very sort of safety conscious i know you used to be the health and safety officer for your chemistry department we were you glowing with pride at that point yeah i was very pleased with that though as i pointed out walter wasn't wearing safety glasses when demonstrating to his students and the students sitting not far from the bench weren't wearing safety glasses either though i was a bit surprised by the safety equipment that walter used when he was started making his um crystal meth where he was wearing a leather apron and his underpants and nothing else and i would have thought he would have been wearing um a lab coat though from the point of view of the drama it would not look have looked quite as good wearing a lab coat once when i was working in a lab in my previous university which was very hot 37 degrees centigrade nearly body heat i wore a lab coat but stripped to the waist so i was just i was um just wearing trousers and a lab coat because it was so hot but i still wore a lab coat you've never done chemistry in just your underwear no that at this point we have this montage when he when he makes the crystal meth you know it's quite stylistic and fast editing and things like that but we do see lots of equipment and powders and things being poured and it's our first real kind of look at lots and lots of chemistry happening what did you think of that bit well i thought it was quite nice as a montage it didn't make any chemical sense at all first of all i should say i had to look up what methaphetamine was because i didn't know its formula but i don't see why they were using red phosphorus and also what looked as if it might have been cobalt chloride or cobalt sulfate the other thing is i was quite surprised by the volume of fumes that were coming out of the top of the motorhome that they were using as the lab so i'm not sure what it was that was coming out but i suppose i'm slightly less worried about slight inaccuracies of the chemistry than the impression of actually doing it and of course he uses chemistry to get out of the pickle with the bad guys in in this scene where he he throws down some red phosphorus and there's an explosion and then there are fumes that overwhelm the bad guys give you any idea what's going on there is that plausible no i don't think it is they said they were making phosphine ph3 like ammonia which is nh3 which burns quite easily and if they'd had flames it would have burnt the phosphine and i suspect and i haven't calculated this if you looked at the volume of the inside of the motorhome and the volume of gas that he might have produced there wouldn't have been enough to produce well first of all the reaction he had probably wouldn't have produced the gas but ignoring that i don't know that it would have produced enough gas to produce the toxic effect that they said was formed and the other thing is i'm not absolutely certain that the reaction would have happened fast enough for the bad guys not to shoot him anyway they wear gas masks at the end when this gas has been removed and i very rarely have ever seen labs with gas masks occasionally you have breathing apparatus in case something goes wrong but whether they would have had gas masks that were good enough i don't know but again i think you have to allow a little bit of dramatic license there are going to be some things things that you'll come to learn about me in the next few days so you finally have watched an episode of breaking bad after all these years i cannot tell you how many viewers have asked to know what you think of breaking bad you've now seen one episode what did you think of it just as an overall thing not just the chemistry but just as a you know a piece of storytelling so my overall verdict is that it's quite good let me just explain for american viewers quite good in english means not bad doesn't mean it's outstanding [Music] but i think i mean i was quite pleased to have seen it because i suppose i had some curiosity what it was about not that much curiosity you've waited this long yeah well i mean sometimes one has to restrain oneself i think i mean it is positive that it's brought chemistry to a wider audience i think well i don't know how the rest of the story is going to develop there are things which struck me like the guns that everywhere which are clearly much more common in america than in the uk i'm not sure that i know anybody who's ever handled a pistol and it's a long time since i've handled any firearms but i think overall it was quite fun are you inclined to watch any more um how many episodes are there there's quite a few i think i think what a good idea might be just to zero in a bit more on the chemistry now perhaps some of the viewers would like to suggest scenes and sections or episodes or parts of the series they would particularly like you to watch and i might be able to put together a bit of a collection for you and we could just deal with those rather than the whole series i think that's a great idea um i think i mean i'm always interested how chemistry is um portrayed in films plays and so on my brother wrote my brother is a playwright in case you don't know if he writes plays and films and he's a film director he wrote a play for the national theatre about chemistry and i had to provide the dialogue about chemistry for that play and on the opening night in the national theatre in london when one of the actors said hexafluoroisopropanol i was the only person in the audience who laughed why is that funny well i thought it sounded really funny people saying that in the middle of national theater but on the other hand i think that anything that brings chemistry to the public in a way that is not about learning at school when people are bored is very positive i should say enough about the scene where they were making the crystal meth the first time they got some enormous crystals which look really nice this is glass grade you got crystals in here two inches three inches long but that is rather unrealistic because if you want to get big crystals you have to grow them very slowly i don't think that they were there for days when they were doing the chemistry or at least in the story so that was a bit unrealistic but on the other hand to get the idea that the chemistry teacher could make much better compounds than his pupil was probably pretty realistic the other point which i did notice is that one of the bad guys was smoking in the lab put the cigarette out please and walter stops him because it's dangerous with organic solvents and a lighted cigarette and this reminded me of a friend of mine who was safety officer for a tobacco company the labs of the tobacco company and he banned smoking and he was brought in front of the directors who said how's this going to look for our company if we're banning smoking in our labs and he replied well how's it going to look for the company if somebody smokes and blows up the whole lab so he was allowed to ban it there is also a story of a chemist when i was an undergraduate one of the professors who was teaching lab classes was said to have been smoking and put a bit of the ash into the solution that one of my fellow students was trying to get crystals from and the tiny particles of ash acted as a nucleus to start the crystals growing and so this solution that wouldn't crystallize suddenly crystallized beautifully when the cigarette ash fell in i wouldn't for a moment recommend that any of you try smoking in the lab or anywhere else or anywhere else yes most chemists are fascinated by what they've always been told that hf hydrofluoric acid eats human flesh

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 849,723

Rating: 4.9382396 out of 5

Keywords: periodic, videos, chemistry

Id: 89PCYdMRtjQ

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AltheaToldMe1]

Thank you for this! Professor is adorable!

[u/GiddiOne]

This is excellent. Good interview man!

[u/piperazinecitrate]

I don't see why they were using red phosphorus.

HI/P reaction to reduce the hydroxy group on the first carbon of ephedrine.