Fabian GiesenFeb 4
You ever think about how wild it is that modern humans have existed for like 300k+ years, and for approximately all of that time precisely zero of them had any idea how chemistry actually worked, but meanwhile your body is made of literally trillions of cells that somehow understand and remember everything you eat, so they're able to translate a weird very specific micronutrient deficiency into a food craving without you consciously being any the wiser?
Show threadaeva
@rygorous i just remembered a little detail from high school chemistry where one of the first things they taught us was under no circumstances do you taste the chemistry, so that might have something to do with why it took so long for humans to figure out chemistry
Feb 6 at 10:41pmWeb
Show threadFabian GiesenFeb 6
@aeva My favorite tidbit is how everything we have ever learned about fluorine chemistry acts as a stark warning not to engage in fluorine chemistry, and yet somehow you can go on Wikipedia and read sentences such as "Los Alamos National Laboratory used [dioxygen difluoride] to synthesize plutonium hexafluoride at unprecedentedly low temperatures"
Show threadFabian GiesenFeb 6

@aeva It just raises SO MANY questions:

Why do you have dioxygen difluoride?
Who would ever willingly synthesize that?
Why are you checking out some of that plutonium?
Holy shit, you want to have FOOF and plutonium in the same room?
Who approved that?
Oh you want to use both in the same process?
WHY?
To make plutonium hexafluoride?!
WHYYYYY?

Show threadmymFeb 6
@aeva @rygorous surprisingly, it is to make things less explosive
Show threadFabian GiesenFeb 6
@mym @aeva yeah any wiki walk into that general area is just a non-stop horror show of "excuse me, you did WHAT?"
Show threadFabian GiesenFeb 6
@aeva [NB these are rhetorical questions. I know the answers. They're in the same Wikipedia articles I've been reading. But it still seems like the kind of chemistry you do if BASE jumping just doesn't do it for you anymore.]
Show threadaevaFeb 6
@rygorous i'm reminded that someone climbed Taipei 101 without any safety equipment recently
Show threadvfigFeb 6

@aeva @rygorous the pioneers of chemistry absolutely did taste the chemistry, and wrote down what it was like (and in some cases, what it was like as it killed them).

so yes, we dont need students tasting the chemistry anymore.

Show threadFabian GiesenFeb 6
@vfig @aeva in fact, one could argue that past experience of pioneers of chemistry tasting and smelling all the compounds is precisely why we now tell students to not do that anymore
Show threadaevaFeb 6
@vfig @rygorous every sign is a story
Show threadFabian GiesenFeb 6

@aeva @vfig sometimes, even the skeletal formula is.

for example, when it reads FFF NO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifluoronitrosomethane

Trifluoronitrosomethane - Wikipedia

Show threadFabian GiesenFeb 6
@aeva @vfig (granted, AFAICT, as far as fluorine chemistry gets, this stuff is relatively tame. But that's a big qualifier.)
Show threadvfigFeb 6
@rygorous @aeva "somewhat more kinetically stable than expected due to its fluorine"