The Prof watches Breaking Bad (at last)

and of course hf appears in the TV show Breaking Bad, which I'm happy to say I've never seen. Why are you happy to say it's really good? Well, maybe one day I can see it when I'm older for a long time. Have people ever wanted to hear what you think about Breaking Bad before watching this episode? What did you know about Breaking Bad and what did you expect? Well, I knew it was about a chemistry teacher and I knew he was making some kind of drug, but I didn't know which one and I didn't really know much else about it, except that I think I had heard that there were a lot of episodes and that at some point the Hydrogen fluoride played a role, but that was it, why?

There was a show about chemistry that didn't appeal to you until now well, I don't really watch much TV, I mean, I watch a lot, I will until the pandemic. I went to the movies pretty regularly and obviously Breaking Bad isn't in the movies, I guess not. On terrestrial television we don't have streaming services on our TV, so I never watched and I'm a chemistry

prof

essor, when you make people like you know, is it a common joke that you have to put up with the cliche oh? Do you know how to make drugs and things like that?

No, I mean, I'm not sure anyone has ever asked me. Well, I mean, you've asked me, but I don't remember anyone else asking me. I've never asked you to make drugs, no, no, but I mean, you just asked me the question, but no, I have no idea, I don't remember anyone asking me that, so

prof

essor, so far I've only convinced you for you to look at. The first episode, pilot, and pilot all begin with this iconic shot of a pair of pants floating in the air, and I get the impression that it's one of the shots that impressed you the most.

Yeah, I really liked it and I started wondering if you could. flying pants like a pair or like a kite, but I was a little disappointed because since you later see where the pants came from, I think it's physically impossible for them to have been run over by the van the teacher was driving, but um, the floaties. the pants were really good, they look a bit like a pair of pants you would wear no, no, I don't think so, no, possibly, but I'm not very picky about clothes, these are my good clothes, you can't come home smelling Like a meth lab, after the intro sequence we get the title screen of the show, which involves Breaking Bad being written with bromine and barium and the periodic table and all that kind of chemical formula, I thought that would really get you excited, yeah , I thought it was pretty clever, I thought it was a little more subtle than these things where they are drawn as symbols of elements with the atomic weight and so on as well and I quite liked that and I started thinking about how you could write my name with argon in Martin and I couldn't decide if polonium or lithium would look better in polyurethane.

At the beginning of the episode we see Walter, the star of the show, in a chemistry setting as a teacher with his students, because I don't know, you know, five minutes or so trying to conduct a chemistry class, that's all there is to it. life, right, it's just the constant, it's the cycle, it's the solution, the lesson was pretty 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 green color, I think it's probably copper and barium, which might have been strontium, but the strontium might have been a little exotic for the show's props department.

There were other things that were quite strange, particularly in the In my opinion, Walter was quite safety conscious and then not wearing safety glasses. He was also quite interested in me asking what chemistry was. Yeah, I'm not sure anyone has ever asked me that my son when he was in high school was asked what. It's in organic chemistry and he said in a fairly loud whisper to his friends that's what my dad does. Chemistry is the study of matter but I prefer to see it as the study of change. Walters responded that it was the study of change.

It would have been better. I would have mixed it with the other definition that it was study of matter and if I had said it was the way matter changes, I think it could have been pretty good. I was also not entirely convinced that he lit a Bunsen burner and said that. Those were electrons lighting the burner, but overall I thought the class's reaction was a little disappointing so he was pretty exciting, chemistry teacher. I think chemistry as a study of change was a very good answer. I mean, obviously, it also foreshadows what's going to happen.

It happens on this TV show, but I thought it was a pretty poetic response. There was one thing that caught my attention about him is that he looks a lot like a well-known British scientist, Robert Winston, who is a pretty famous popularizer of science or used to be. I know I know very few chemists who have mustaches. In fact, later or shortly after that scene, you see that he has a second job at the car wash. I don't know how to describe it as a manual car wash and that highlights a pretty important point. I think chemistry or science teachers often don't have the social status that they really should have because it's such an important job.

I'm not sure that's the point they were trying to get across in this particular movie, but I think it's a very important thing to see. I think what they mean is that chemistry teachers don't make a lot of money, which is the only reason it fails. Yeah, I mean, that could be true, but I don't. I have no idea what chemistry teachers are naturally like, so we also see a scene shortly after when he's ransacking the school lab and taking all sorts of things off the shelves. I thought you must have taken a dim view of that.

They are two pretty good shoes. I was surprised by his dishonesty. Well, that was part of the story, wasn't it? But what surprised me a little more was the size of the jars they had in the school store, particularly the. Um, they were all on a much larger scale than I would have expected in the school chemistry lab shortly after the robbery, we see him talking to Jesse about, you know, preparing to make the meth and he berates him for cooking with a flask. volumetric. instead of a kitchen flask and, as I thought, you would like a little teaching on how to use the equipment.

No, this is a volumetric flask you wouldn't cook in one of these, uh, yeah. No, no, no, yeah, I guess I mean that was quite nice and although I have to say that early in my career when I didn't know things that well, I tried cooking in a volumetric flask, but I think both. There's something that I felt didn't ring very true with his first meeting with Jesse when Jesse escapes a police raid. Jesse has already left school and Walter admits it honestly, I never expected you to be much, but meth I didn't. Imagine that and certainly as a university professor I rarely recognize students when they return because they have changed, they have grown, so I wasn't sure that Walter would have immediately recognized his student, on the other hand it is clear that although Jesse was a bad student and Walter still managed to teach him something: the 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. Didn't you learn anything from my chemistry class? No, you failed me. this interaction between them where they're talking about cooking, making meth and jesse says it's an art, cooking is art. I saw your ridiculous setup. You and I won't 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 peas my signature is gone walter has none of that says this is not art this is just pure and simple chemistry where would you go down to?

Is there art in chemistry? I think there is an art to doing preparative chemistry. Well I've never been a very good preparative chemist and that's why in the later stages of my career I've built machines to make chemicals because I'm not very good at manipulating them so I think there's a lot of art and in particular chemicals Organics believe that what they do is an art as well as a science. A real theme running through this scene too is like, even though he was doing something bad, Walter was taking a real pride in chemistry, right? He says we are going to produce things that are pure and stable.

There is a real chemist's pride in him despite what he is doing. Yeah, a lot, so you mentioned cooking the drugs and me there. was that jessica calls herself captain cook, which for you as an australian and for me would have raised the idea of ​​captain cook the explorer, which maybe wouldn't have resonated as much with the american audience and also i remember that captain cook was murdered, so I wonder if this is something that will happen in a later episode. Oh, look, you're already thinking I like it. We also see Walter talking to Jesse about wanting to implement a security station like an eyewash station and he is very security conscious.

I know you used to be the health and safety officer for your chemistry department. We were glowing with pride at that moment. Yes, I was very happy with that, although as I pointed out, Walter was not wearing safety glasses when he demonstrated to his students and the students. Those sitting not far from the bench weren't wearing safety glasses either, although I was a little surprised by the safety gear Walter wore when he started making meth, where he was wearing a leather apron and boxers and nothing else. I would have thought he would have been wearing a lab coat, although from a drama point of view he wouldn't look so good wearing a lab coat once when he was working in a lab at my previous university, where it was very hot. 37 degrees Celsius almost body heat.

He was wearing a lab coat but I was stripped to the waist, so he was just wearing pants and a lab coat because it was so hot, but he was still wearing a lab coat. You've never done chemistry in just your underwear no, at this point we have this montage when he makes the crystal meth, you know it's a pretty stylistic and quick edit and stuff like that, but we see a lot of equipment and powders and stuff being poured and it's our first real guy. Well, I thought it was quite nice as a setup. It didn't make any chemical sense.

First of all, I have to say that I had to look up what meth was. because I didn't know its formula but I don't understand why they were using red phosphorus and what also seemed like it could be cobalt chloride or cobalt sulfate. The other thing is that I was quite surprised by the volume of fumes that were coming out of the upper part of the house. rolling machine they were using as a lab, so I'm not sure what was coming out, but I guess I'm a little less worried about the slight inaccuracies of the chemistry than the impression of actually doing it. and of course he uses chemistry to get out of trouble with the bad guys in this scene where he throws some red phosphorus and there's an explosion and then there are fumes that overwhelm the bad guys, it gives you an idea of ​​what's going on there.

Is that plausible? No, I don't think so, they said they were producing phosphine ph3 as ammonia, which is nh3, which burns quite easily and if they had flames it would have burned the phosphine and I suspect I haven't calculated that. If you look at the volume of the interior of the RV and the volume of gas it could have produced, it wouldn't have been enough to produce well, the reaction it had probably wouldn't have produced the gas in the first place, but ignoring that. I don't know if it would have produced enough gas to produce the toxic effect they said it formed and the other thing is that I'm not absolutely sure the reaction would have happened fast enough for the bad guys to not shoot it anyway.

In the end they use gas masks when this gas is removed and I have very rarely seen laboratories with gas masks. They occasionally have breathing apparatus in case something goes wrong, but I don't know if they would have had gas masks that were good enough. I know, but again I think you have to allow yourself a little dramatic license. There will be a few things you'll learn about me in the next few days so you've finally seen an episode of Breaking Bad after all of this. years, I can't tell you how many viewers have asked you what you think of Breaking Bad.

Now you've seen an episode. What did you think of it as an overall thing, not just the chemistry but just a part of the storytelling? So my overall verdict is that it's pretty good, let me explain that to American viewers. Pretty good in English means not bad, it doesn't mean it's outstanding, but I think I was really glad I saw it because I guess I was kind of curious. it was about not so much curiosity, you've waited so long, yeah, well, I mean, sometimes you have to hold back, I think it's positive that it brought chemistry to a wider audience, I think well, I don't know how the rest As the story unfolds, there are things that caught my attention, like guns everywhere that are clearly much more common in the US than in the UK.

I'm not sure I know anyone who has driven one.gun and it's been a long time since I did that. I've handled firearms, but I think overall it was pretty fun. Would you like to see more? How many episodes are there? There are quite a few, I think. I think. What a good idea it might be to focus a little more on the chemistry now, maybe some of the viewers would like to suggest scenes and sections or episodes or parts of the series that they would especially like you to watch and I could put together a small collection for you and we could deal with that instead of the whole series, I think that's a great idea, I guess I'm always interested in how chemistry is portrayed in movies, plays and such, my brother wrote.

My brother is a playwright in case you don't know he writes plays and films and is a film director, he wrote a play for the national theater about chemistry and I had to provide the dialogue about chemistry for that play and on opening night. at the national theater 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 very funny that people said that in the middle of the 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 in school when people are bored It's very positive.

I have to say enough about the scene where they were making meth the first time they got some huge crystals that look really Well, this is glass quality. You have crystals here that are two inches and three inches long, but that's pretty unrealistic because if you want to get big crystals you have to grow them very slowly. I don't think they were there during the days they were doing. chemistry or at least in history, so that was a little unrealistic but, on the other hand, having the idea that the chemistry teacher could make much better compounds than his student was probably quite realistic.

The other point that I did notice is that one of the bad guys was smoking in the laboratory, put out the cigarette please and Walter stops him because it is dangerous with organic solvents and a lit cigarette and this reminded me of a friend of mine who was a security officer at a tobacco company in the tobacco company's laboratories. and he banned smoking and they took him in front of the directors who said what would this look like for our company if we banned smoking in our labs and he said well what will the company look like if someone smokes and explodes? the entire laboratory, so he was allowed to ban it.

There is also a story about a chemist when I was a student and it was said that one of the professors who taught laboratory classes was smoking and put a little ash in the solution that one of my classmates was trying to obtain crystals and the small ash particles acted as a nucleus to make the crystals start to grow, so this non-crystallizing solution suddenly crystallized beautifully when the cigarette ash fell, it wouldn't for a moment. I recommend that any of you try smoking in the lab or anywhere else or anywhere else. Yes, most chemists are fascinated by what they have always been told: hydrofluoric acid eats human flesh.