Things I Won't Work With: Azidoazide Azides, More or Less (2013)
science.org
science.org
Apparently it's not as bad as they say.
Clearly that's because he had the good sense not to put it near a spectrometer.
> Apparently it's not as bad as they say.
Maybe so, but people also do incredibly stupid shit on YouTube for attention, so maybe not.
You clearly never had the pleasure of discovering ElectroBOOM.
From the article:
"We're talking high-nitrogen compounds here (a specialty of Klapötke's group), and the question is not whether such things are going to be explosive hazards. (That's been settled by their empirical formulas, which generally look like typographical errors). The question is whether you're going to be able to get a long enough look at the material before it realizes its dream of turning into an expanding cloud of hot nitrogen gas."
You can make the nastiest thing imaginable but there's pretty hard limits on how much chemical energy can blow up in your face per milligram of reactants. On the other hand, even if you think something is "better behaved" if there's enough of it it will still do horrible stuff if anything goes wrong.
This guy is the best.
Amazing they were able to characterize this stuff (that is get the x-rays, NMR specs, etc). I think the only way this stuff could be useful is if it could be somehow completely immobilized in a liquid or solid until use. Sounds insanely dangerous!
Chemically a totally different material.
Shock sensitivity Insensitive
Friction sensitivity Insensitive to 353 N
Anegdoticaly - my grandpa told stories that after WW2 he and other kids found a lot of munitions in the forest and played with them. And TNT was so safe they used it as a fuel in stoves and it would just burn without exploding (and for quite a long time). Not sure how true it is, maybe it was a different material they just called TNT.
I've read I think all of them before, but they're fun to reread here and there.
His other writing is similarly great, but much of it is for a far more chemist audience.
Not all of them are titled "Things I won't work with", but others seem still on-theme.
If it doesn't show up in your browser, try this: https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...
Yeah I think it's not visible on my browser, maybe because mobile? At least they didn't remove the functionality, just hid it :/
(I suspect it’s a recent addition, though; I don’t recall that panel being there last time.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
How is the smell able to travel so quickly? And through walls no less?
However, there's a running theory that he has kinda burnt out his nose working with certain compounds, as he seems mostly unphased by smelly chemicals that other people very much struggle working with.
15 mph really isn't much for wind, though? In fact that's about how much wind there is where I am right now, so that doesn't strike me as an unreasonable condition.
It sounds like this substance is bad enough that a couple of molecules per Litre would make the air smell awful, which together with the previous point may explain how the bad smell could be detected at such a distance so quickly.
> [Chlorine trifluoride] is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water –with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminum, etc. — because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
Given that he DGAF that his scale doesn't work, he probably isn't interested in building an NMR spectrometer in his shed.
I'm genuinely unsure what other product would be made if you react isocyanogen tetrabromide with sodium azide, you could get a mix of azide and bromide on the isocyanogen, but that's super unlikely (bromide and azide double displacement is favourable reaction in this case, the bromine being more than happy to fuck off with the sodium) and you would get a distinct bromine cloud off any detonation or deflagration of the product.
1 https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
Next day I learned (to much amusement of my chemistry teacher) that it scared the hell out of a cleaning lady who managed to trigger it off accidently while cleaning the chemistry lab.
> 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.
> Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four molecules of FOOF to give sulfur hexafluoride, 2 molecules of HF and four oxygens. . .and 433 kcal, which is the kind of every-man-for-himself exotherm that you want to avoid at all cost.
and
> Organometallic reagents come from large tribes, and there are always wild cousins up in the hills. A good place to look for the livelier ones is in the simplest alkyl derivatives, and you should go all the way down to the methyls if you want to know their real character. Ignore the halides. Methylmagnesium bromide you can get in multiliter kegs; they might as well sell it in Pottery Barn.
and
> ... compounds with lots of nitrogens in them – more specifically, compounds with a high percentage of nitrogen by weight – are a spirited bunch. They hear the distant call of the wild, and they know that with just one leap of the fence they can fly free as molecules of nitrogen gas. And that’s never an orderly process.
and
> perchloric anhydride (dichlorine heptoxide) [is] a liquid with a boiling point of around 80 C, and I'd like to shake the hand of whoever determined that property, assuming he has one left.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=science.org
... doesn't show it. And this search, for the word "azides":
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
... doesn't show anything in the last year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32566743
I misremembered