The quintessential chemistry story: someone sets out to make something and ends up creating something useful but completely different by accident.
The quintessential chemistry story: someone sets out to make something and ends up creating something useful but completely different by accident.
Saccharin: Chemist working on coal tar derivatives noticed a sweet taste on his hand from contamination.
Aspartame: Chemist working on anti-ulcer drugs discovers his finger's taste sweet when he licked them to turn a page.
Sucralose: Chemist working on novel uses of sucrose and synthetic derivatives asked a coworker to 'test' a compound. Coworker thought he said, 'Taste'.
Tasting unknown chemicals can't always end so well can it?
Reminded me of these entertaining columns: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2011/11/11/th...
"Say what? I’d call for all the chemists who’ve ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio"
They're all educational and very entertaining, even to a non-chemist like myself. Recommended for a chuckle, there are some really awful compounds he covers with wit.
Edit 1: original link de-borked.
Edit 2: full list of his 'things I won't work with' columns https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...
a method to make a more stable form of it, by mixing it with TNT. Yes, this is an example of something that becomes less explosive as a one-to-one cocrystal with TNT. Although, as the authors point out, if you heat those crystals up the two components separate out, and you’re left with crystals of pure CL-20 soaking in liquid TNT, a situation that will heighten your awareness of the fleeting nature of life.
"At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature."
further on
"The paper goes on to react FOOF [dioxygen difluoride] with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth...), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic."
"But I have to admit, I’d never thought much about the next analog of hydrogen peroxide. Instead of having two oxygens in there, why not three: HOOOH? Indeed, why not? This is a general principle that can be extended to many other similar situations. Instead of being locked in a self-storage unit with two rabid wolverines, why not three?" [1]
[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/th...
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/21/1960s-rock-musi...
See also also also also also also Viagra
See also also also also also also also Post-It notes (specifically, the adhesive they use)
EDIT: To put it another way, we can't solve NP problems by doing chemistry experiments.
BQP gets you collapsing measurements.
The Schrödinger equation (NP-hard) gives you all probabilities at once, solving it is equivalent to performing non-collapsing measurements.
Theoretically all chemistry is quantum physics with nucleons, electrons and photons (quantum chemistry). You need to numerically simulate what happens in reactions and it's very expensive.
Even that is not always enough. Gold has appears yellow because 5d orbital's distance from nucleus increases and 6s orbital's distance decreases due to relativistic effects. You need relativistic quantum chemistry to figure that out.
Getting all the details in such a model right seems to be the same kind of problem as getting a weather-prediction model right—in that, as you add factors, all your predictions asymptotically approach correctness, with smaller and smaller preturbations.
Those preturbations might cause one or two elements “local” to some part of the configuration-space to be misclassified; but remember, here, that the point is to get a predictive screening test, one that hopefully gives more false positives than false negatives. Any time it says “this molecule might look cool if you made it”, we can just make it and see; and then, if it looks different than we were expecting, we can refine the model with the additional details that make that novel molecule also appear correctly in it.
YInMn molecule has way more electrons that can be solved numerically. Indium atom alone has more than 40.
So you're trying to figure out how our tastebuds work, in response to a novel stimulus.
Sweetness is, as you’ve defined it, a chemical property, so it’s not one of the things I was talking about being “easy” to predict.
But pigmentation is a physical property, as it is a reaction between a molecule and inbound photons†. Likewise, the output of a “pigmentation calculation”—if we know of one—should just be more photons. Wavefunction in, wavefunction out.
We know how photons work. We know how our eyes perceive them. As long as we have a framework for figuring out how a material physically manipulates the photons absorbed by it, we should be able to calculate the pigmentation of every simple molecule by brute force.
——
† The pigmented molecule can be in the chemical form or physical state that gives it that pigment very ephemerally, due to e.g. a clock reaction. But at any given instant in time, we can say “the molecule is in this state, so what function does it apply to inbound photons now.”
Note also that I’m defining pigmentation here, not total appearance, so this ignores any fluorescence, phosphorescence, triboluminescence, Cherenkov radiation, etc. that the molecule also emits and which we perceive as light. All those purely-physical processes are able to be admitted into this model without actually making it untenable, but it becomes harder to understand, since it becomes a Feynman diagram thing, rather than simple transformation over wavefunctions.
'In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.'