A requiem for amateur chemistry | Hacker News Reader

A requiem for amateur chemistry

lcamtuf.substack.com

286 pointswalterbell152 comments

Another aspect of this issue is the apparent difference in intellectual preparedness of kids today. I think this is partly due to educational environment and partly a result of selection bias (in that accounts of the past focus on the "smart" kids).

When I was a teenager, rummaging around the attic at grandma's house I stumbled upon my dad's old scientific stuff. I was shocked at the sophistication of what a high schooler did in the 1950s. For example, there were projects to build radio circuitry, with the expectation you would have a mathematical understanding of the function of every component. By my time in the 1970s, home electronics projects aimed at teenagers had devolved to "Stick this here, and that there, and connect the battery, and gee whiz isn't that neat!"

He also did what would today be college level chem experiments, without aid or supervision. A batch of nitroglycerin was one of his less wise projects. I think it was memories of his own near-disasters that caused him to watch over me like a hawk during my own youthful experimenting.

The level of ability and initiative in a high school student as shown in the movie October Sky (1999) was certainly not typical in the 1950s, but I think it was more common than modern experience would lead you to expect.

Actually-educational things for kids haven't gone away entirely, though they've certainly changed shape. There are a lot of kids and teenager related products around programming and microcontroller-related hobby projects that teach and require deeper understanding of the concepts. Building a radio, on the other hand, when AM/FM radio is now 90-100 years old instead of 20-30... that wouldn't interest me nearly as much anyway.

At the extreme end of "kids today" (ok, ten years ago), you have Palmer Luckey building VR headsets.

Does anyone have figures on what percentage of 1950s kids were using those sophisticated chemistry or radio kits?

Something to help appreciate the relation of science to youth culture in the 1950s is the popularity of sci-fi movies. Aside from rare exceptions like Destination Moon (1950), 1950s sci-fi was produced with no pedagogic intent. Studios churned out these movies because science (okay, sci-fi) was what attracted the teen market. In the 1960s, teen tastes shifted to horror and the film studios followed.

If you are interested in 1950s American sci-fi cinema, the comprehensive survey is Bill Warren's Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2016).

The mathematics of radios are a lot more difficult than the basic boolean logic and discrete math for intro to programming. Radios and circuits are in differential equations territory. A thorough explanation of the RF concept of "ground" and transmission lines is impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details.

> [things]...impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details.

Something about my dad's generation is that I observed them to be more ready to resort to workbench tinkering to get over patches where their math gave out. Following your point, maybe this results from their early experiences of aiming beyond their math capabilities.

RLC circuits and the associated differential equations definitely were part of the high-school curriculum when I was there fifteen years ago. That’s 90% of what you need for an intro to RF concept.

My understanding is that the US doesn’t require a lot of maths in high school which might explain why people view this later there.

I'm not sure I follow. My father had a hobbyist radio kit in his youth, but he didn't understand all the details then. He later learned diffeq in college. It was and still is quite easy to build many already-discovered things without understanding them.

You are thinking of assembling pre-made kits. The math is for designing circuits from scratch.

I may be showing my filter bubble, but what fraction of highschoolers get to first order systems of linear differential equations? We heavily covered them in BC calc but I guess I don't know if that's the curriculum or my teacher going the extra mile

I covered them in high school, but in isolation. I think it'd have to be a dedicated high school program explicitly built to cover differential equations and tie them back to physics and then also get far enough into EM for that to be the way you can teach about radios. Not even remotely all high school students could handle that and I think even in an accelerated program you'd have to consciously be sacrificing something else to get there, e.g., organic chemistry or something. There's only so much time.

I mean, even in college, the physics I took that did EM with full, undiluted multivariable calculus was considered the accelerated/advanced track. "Normal" EM worked with a lot less math.

I'm sure the 1950s kids were indeed learning handwaving approximations. That's not a criticism. You can get a long way on good handwaving approximations.

aside from the question of novelty, i think i can buy a pocket am/fm radio for us$6 today https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-por... so building a radio from scratch doesn't have the same cachet it had in the 01950s when a radio was a major household appliance people would save up for

you can definitely kit-build an am or fm radio from a kit without any understanding of the concepts, the radioshack '200-in-1' 'science fair' kit had wiring netlists for both am and fm radios, and didn't really explain the concepts. similarly you can solder together a microcontroller board and write circuitpython on it without any understanding of the concepts

in any of these cases there are a shitload of concepts to learn

i don't know much about chemistry but i think you have measurement error, valence electrons, vacuum filtration, density, oxidation states, precipitation, ph, solubility, activity, decantation, density, enthalpy, recrystallization, pressure, solubility product, never give an acid a drink, entropy, flasks bubbling over, gibbs free energy, hplc, equilibrium, distillation, the arrhenius law, sublimation, ligands, spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, ...

in analog electronics you have measurement error, voltage, current, energy, capacitance, resistance, complex impedance, inductance, frequency, power, charge, parasitics, exponential decay, diffeqs, linear time-invariant systems, lti system transfer functions, convolution, the fourier transform, filtering, and only then do you get into nonlinear systems: rectification, inductive kick, transistor action, transistor switches, the ebers-moll model, miller capacitance, schmitt triggers, oscillators, etc. iirc that's just the first two chapters of horowitz and hill and there are thirteen more chapters and sixteen appendices. to be fair some of them are digital

in programming you have the whole programming iceberg at https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/. but even if you only get into the stuff that is actually involved in blinking an led on an esp32 as a microcontroller-related hobby project you have c, a compiler, a parser, context-free grammars, finite state machines, variables, lvalues vs. rvalues, subroutines, formal vs. actual parameters, arrays, hash tables, linked lists, pattern matching, optimizing transformations, denotational semantics, undefined behavior, structs, rtl, assembly language, machine code, symbol tables, linkers, register machines, propositional logic, de morgan's theorem, synchronous logic, metastable flip-flop states when crossing clock domains, jtag, debuggers, ram, flash, tcp/ip (tcp ip arp routing checksums ethernet), wi-fi, direct-sequence spread-spectrum communication, ofdm, shannon's theorem, csma/ca vs. csma/cd, pwm, etc

there's a shitload to learn but you can do stuff without knowing more than a tiny amount of it

> By my time in the 1970s, home electronics projects aimed at teenagers had devolved to "Stick this here, and that there, and connect the battery, and gee whiz isn't that neat!"

I'm much younger than you, but that wasn't my experience at all. My dad got me this kit [1] when I was in fifth grade, and it was great. I got completely lost when it talked about transistors, but the projects were still fun (considering my videogame time was limited) and in retrospect the instructions were very well written.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elenco-EP-50-Electronic-Playground-50...

Perhaps I was being overly dismissive, but that's the kind of thing I had in mind. You have a small set of components and a limited set of illustrative circuits to make by laying in wires. The older projects I referred to involved designing circuits for practically usable equipment. So it was a much higher order of difficulty.

By the way, I had similar things as a kid and loved them. I don't mean to trample on anyone's fond memories.

Is that the one with the good manual? Most of these spring clip electronics sets come with pretty crappy manuals, very light on theory and with uninspired circuits (i.e. in "130 in 1" there are maybe 10 good circuits and endless variations of those).

Whereas an Elenco brand kit I found at the thrift store came with a fantastic manual, that taught electronics right from the basics, using the kit's components to illustrate as it went.

>an Elenco brand kit

That's the one that I linked! I managed to find their manual online.

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/235888/Elenco-Electronics-...

Yep, that's how I remember it (I passed the kit on to nephews in another town). An earnest attempt to teach electronics. Night-and-day difference to the typial Radio Shack N-in-1 kits.

Yeah, I faced that issue as well. I had three kits, IIRC:

1. Radio Shack crystal radio. That was relatively simple, but I don't think the manual explained how it worked too well. 2. Radio Shack 10-in-1 Jr Electronic Lab Kit. I don't recall how good the manual was, but I didn't really learn much from that. 3. Some unknown brand 150-in-1 kit. IIRC that basically just had circuit diagrams, and didn't really explain anything.

It is not like average teenager understood those in 1950 however. And it is not even the case that kids today were less educated either.

You have today individual kids doing leetcode on pretty high level. You have then doing a lot of stuff, but it is different stuff. Meanwhile radio and circuits are not cool anymore nor new anymore. Comparably less people is even interested.

> ...it is not even the case that kids today were less educated either.

This claim could be supported or contradicted by evidence. Do you have any?

My experience is not K-12 education, but at the college level, standardized measures such as the GRE show declining levels of ability over the decades. A given score today doesn't mean the same as 40 years ago, because the test has needed to be recalibrated for a lower average performance.

High school drop out rates were 27.2% in 1960. This is one third of students not even finishing high school. Meanwhile college enrolment rates were miniscule compared to today. Yet also, getting into top university requires way more effort then it used to in 1950-1960.

> standardized measures such as the GRE show declining levels of ability over the decades. A given score today doesn't mean the same as 40 years ago, because the test has needed to be recalibrated for a lower average performance.

Are they incomparable or they show regress?

The data dont show consistend decline in years where it did not changes, but there are massive drops in scores when the test was recalibrated. It also shows multiple whole new topics being tested against 1960:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_327.10.a...

I agree with your points about high school completion and college enrollment, however I think the reason for the increased difficulty of getting into a school is due to increased competition rather than an increase in absolute standards. A way to test this would be to look at the history of schools that use admissions tests. (I'm thinking of elaborate tests such as at Cal-Tech.)

> The data dont show consistend decline in years where it did not changes, but there are massive drops in scores when the test was recalibrated.

I'm a bit confused about what you are referring to, but I think that by "recalibrated" you are referring to 2011 when they introduced the revised scale. I think I can clear this up by explaining about standardized testing.

The purpose of the GRE, SAT, and some other tests created by the Educational Testing Service is not to measure absolute performance of individuals but relative performance of populations. The goal of test design is to adjust the difficulty of the test to provide maximal discrimination in the tails. So when the average performance of a population changes, they have to adjust the difficulty of the test to keep the results curve in a nice shape. This is what I meant by "recalibration". If they achieve their goals in this, average scores shouldn't change much over the years.

Lower average could mean just that much more people have access to (higher) education now.

You are correct. It is generally believed that the large increase in percentage of students going to college is a major contributing factor in the decline of average performance. I have read reports claiming that secondary education at the very high end has retained its quality, but I haven't looked into that myself. So, it may be plausible to claim that while the average level of performance has declined, there is still the same population of high achievers in absolute numbers. I would be interested if somebody knows a good reference on that.

I'm very sad (physically so) when I run into these things.

Another anecdata:

- found an old junior high school math book: they had lessons on finances, taxes, maybe compounding interests. All in simple terms, no mathematical proofs or analysis. Still very useful long term knowledge.

- someone on reddit posted pictures of his grand father's notebook. Biology lecture notes about plants. It was utterly beautiful, drawings and writing, superb regularity, density .. Saying it looked like a product wouldn't be exaggerating a lot.

And now your comment got me to think that this seem to be a worldwide trend, not even a nation-wide education system degradation. That's super odd.

i've always had the impression that a high school diploma meant a lot more back then. hard to say if high school education has been lowered to match the lesser value of a diploma, or if the esteem a diploma commands has dropped with lowered standards.

i wonder what forces are at play to cause that change.

It's a pity that governments have deemed 'interesting' chemistry an illegitimate hobby. Many chemists and biologists I know were inspired as kids by potentially risky chemical reactions - they were fun :). My boss grew up in the UK, relished those experiments growing up, and said they led him to eventually complete a PhD in chemistry. He later went on to win a Nobel Prize (as a molecular biologist, though). Maybe we've made the world safer, but I wonder how many potential great chemists will never get inspired and avoid the field.

The UK did have a unique problem with "amateur chemists" when I was growing up though, and even now the shadow of Republicanism means I need to keep all the nitrate fertiliser and tractor diesel securely locked up.

But think about all the valuable product managers we have instead!

The valuable ones are so rare as to be counted on one hand.

(And likely even if that hand were missing several fingers from mistakes in amateur chemistry.)

To be clear I sincerely do value the PMs that work for me and I work with. But I’d still rather they have a PhD in chemistry. But then again I wish we all did.

Yes, when I was a child, I also have made a large number of chemical experiments, guided by the many old books and magazines describing chemical experiments that were available by then.

Those have been among the most memorable events of my childhood, along with building various simple electronic devices. Both kinds of activities had a major influence on my later professional education.

I agree with the parent article that this seems much more difficult to do now, at least casually, unless you are already very committed to attempt to do such things and to circumvent any obstacles.

Don't governments allow it when it's done under supervision?

At least in the US there are no regulations specifically stopping you from amateur chemistry.

The challenges tend to be:

- it’s hard (not impossible) to procure some chemicals because most suppliers will only sell to businesses

- there are regulations around safety hazards like storage of flammable liquid in residential area (these are good regulations, I’d rather my neighbor isn’t storing 20 gals of ether for example)

- there are regulations around manufacturing explosives (even in tiny quantities)

But that said, there is nothing stopping someone from jumping through the needed hoops. Incorporate a business (not very expensive), get a license from the ATF (mostly time to do paperwork and stuff - like buying a machine gun), follow fire regulations.

The other option is to just procure chemicals through other products. Naphtha is basically a mixture of hexanes. You can buy a lot of nitrate salts used for food or gardening. It’s not hard to procure metals.

where do you get cobalt, strontium, and rubidium

https://www.americanelements.com/strontium-metal-7440-24-6

you said 'The other option is to just procure chemicals through other products. Naphtha is basically a mixture of hexanes. You can buy a lot of nitrate salts used for food or gardening. It’s not hard to procure metals.' but this americanelements link doesn't seem to be a case of 'procure chemicals through other products' but rather 'buy from a place that lists things by cas number and probably only sells to corporations'

Try eBay.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/125395009075 etc

that also doesn't look like 'procure chemicals through other products', that's a listing for 10 grams of, supposedly, pure strontium

Yes, in the very restricted setting of schools, where the concept of "fun" is usually not included, but rather avoided at all cost.

I recall many of the described experiments from high school chemistry labs. That was in the 1980s though. My kids did the "silver mirror" at least in recent years.

Maybe, but while my high school chemistry teacher okayed me making a small batch of nitroglycerin, the principal very much did not.

To me chemistry suffers from being actually quite difficult field. Even by doing these sorts of experiments it is difficult to build up good intuition and actually start using chemistry to achieve some specific goals; contrast to e.g. electronics or programming where after some very basics you can start building your own things

Mechanical engineering (I'm an ME) turned out to be very very hard to do as a hobby. Even with a complete machine shop, it takes a loooong time to make something simple, such as a steam engine. My engine finally worked, but the hours expended on it were extensive.

With software I can build amazing programs in short amounts of time.

Engines usually push (their contemporary) materials to their limits so it's not really a surprise that they're harder to make from scratch. The infrastructure to make ICEs is one of the largest in the world and they are only so cheap because of their scale and production steadily getting automated since the post war consumer boom.

Making that automation, however, has been easier than ever! DIY CNC designs are a dime dozen ranging from routers to pick and places to mills, there are at least half a dozen serious open source competitors for the firmware to drive them, and the welding equipment and skills necessary to make a CNC rigid enough to cut steel is more accessible than ever (designs exist even!). All the parts you need for all kinds of mechanical contraptions and automation buildouts are available from McMaster Carr with same/next day shipping in some regions and there are even low cost open source robotic arms with six degrees of freedom! Something as simple as aluminum extrusions have created a sea change in how mechanical structures are built and modified from cells in automated factories to 3d printers to automated labs. Hell, you can make 3d printed liquid cooled rocket engine nozzle in metal by uploading a CAD file and test it in Mojave a few weeks later without ever touching manufacturing equipment. /rant

The typical "model engineering" steam engine doesn't push materials to the limits. Cylinders are typically cast iron or bored out of brass rod. Tolerances aren't too tight.

It is a slow process because metal is kind of recalcitrant, and making one-off parts is a lot more time consuming than manufacturing in series. To be a model engineer you have to love the process and love spending time alone in the workshop. Another tedious/fascinating aspect is the jigs and fixtures that are often necessary to make even one example of a particular part. Model engineers have to devise ways of performing machining operations (often conceptually very simple operations) and it really has to be something you love. If you see the manufacturing process purely as a barrier to realizing what you designed on paper, it can be a real drag.

So, rather than a high-tech thing, pushing limits, I think the task here (making a small steam engine) is an example of craftsmanship (with lathe, file etc.) and of doing something that is intellectually/conceptually/materially very simple and undemanding, but doing by hand using inherently slow traditional processes. It's an aesthetic choice (and CNC, aluminum extrusions etc. would be ruled out for aesthetic reasons).

Steam is basically the classical example of an ECE

That sounds pretty awesome. None of that was available when I was working on my engine. I had a lathe and a milling machine, and little skill with them.

And yet I get way more satisfaction out of building some small wood contraption than I get out of building anything in software, big or small.

> chemistry suffers from being actually quite difficult field

I wonder how much of that is inherent, and how much is artifact of highly suboptimal education? Chemistry education research has been unusually scathing, characterizing chem ed content using adjectives like "incoherent". My favorite high-school state standard insisted students be taught both that atoms are conserved in chemical reactions, and that atoms are by definition electrically neutral. :P And the incentives around say teaching orgo, are more about serving as med school proxy, than using chemistry to achieve real goals. What might chemistry look like if taught well? How difficult would it still be? It seems a very open question?

A great man[0] once said, "Chemistry is easy, you just remember all the rules, and remember all the exceptions to the rules."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/ExplosionsFire2 I couldn't find the specific video, despite having a great time of rewatching a bunch of them. Amateur chemistry isn't quite dead yet. Ed: found it https://youtu.be/psUc_oBXE6c?t=18

I would start the same way my high school chemistry teacher did when she said. "sometimes science isn't safe". My uncle's childhood chemistry set had radium in it. There are a lot more of us than there were back then, it is ok if some of us die in the pursuit of knowledge. It is a worthy goal, in that people like Curie paved a way to a better standard of living for the rest of us. If you can't demonstrate any cool experiments how are you going to attract future chemists? A different uncle who actually became a chemist had a crc reference that made your fingers itch just to turn the pages. I'm half convinced it would qualify as a superfund site and it was just a reference book. We worry too much about the wrong things. I'm sure all the big pharma in the water supply is fine, but chocolate has way too much cadmium!

For me it was only once I realized chemistry is just a specialization of physics that I really started to understand and care about it more. I learned way more about chemistry from a couple college physics classes than the chem class and lab I was required to take.

Out-of-school chem self-studier here. Can you elaborate?

Everything I learned in my first chem class was just bad rehashing of electron orbits and configurations from physics. I'm sure things get more interesting with organic chemistry, but the classical stuff/basic elements I thought were easier to understand just thinking about the physics of their atomic structure.

Chemistry is fundamentally microscopic in a way that machinery is not, and chaotic in a way that electricity is not. (A big part of electronics is wrapping microscopics in friendly abstractions like "batteries" and "resistors".)

Molecules are small and diverse (it takes alkynes to make a world!) and the world is big.

Certainly chemistry also has abstractions that make it easier to handle. For instance, acids and bases are such; if you know something is an acid, you can trust it to behave in certain ways in certain situations regardless of the microscopic structure of the molecules.

I think (low confidence) this is due to basic chem being not-composable. And of course, possibly dangerous in a hard to detect way.

My thoughts exactly. When our little program crashes, even in C or assembly, your operating system cleans it up for you. Just redo-it better next time. Compare that with chemistry.

Maybe what is needed for chemistry is an "operating system" that safely handles and cleans up the experiment ran. Maybe this is what actually should be sold for basic chemistry. Like the kitchen robots but for nasty materials.

You would also be wrong.

Chemistry is very composable, if you are doing these experiments you are likely learning the theory and can quickly work out that variants exist, and enumerate those variants to find new things to test, expanding knowledge.

As for hazards: most of the hazards are very easy to detect or mitigate. Work at a small scale, wear PPE, etc.

The problem is that you need to be fairly far up the chain of mathematics and physics before you can build intuition about inorganic chemstry.

Oddly, organic chemistry is, to a certain extent, easier to build intutition about as the lower levels are a lot of "this reaction takes thingit A from the molecule and puts on thingit B with n% efficiency." This make organic very similar to solving jigsaw puzzles.

Come on, I was balancing equations at the age of 8. Knowing the multiplication table is enough.

It's very easy to think up balanced reactions that are completely nonsensical and the reason for that is hidden deep in quantum realm.

It is, but this will have to wait until late high school, when kids are old enough for matrices and complex numbers and Dirac equation and the origin of 2x^2 (2, 8, 18, 32 — the electron shells etc). You still can have meaningful and useful exercises meanwhile.

Given a reaction, you can balance it with fairly simple math.

However, if you want intuition as to how to create a new reaction or a novel molecule, simple math really isn't enough.

That is true, and something that I just realized by watching some Chem YTbers

Because it's like "oh look, this works like this, ok"? Then something similar doesn't work. Or works in a different way. "Oh just try the $guys_name reaction" ah yes because this guy discovered that you could do it like that (which is not a really intuitive way)

Oh look, this is actually simple to try at home. But if you try this other thing that might look similar it can kill you in a horrible way...

The youtube channel Cody's Lab certainly deserves a mention here. For example, the extraction of iodine from seaweed is an excellent 10-min watch. It's mostly on the inorganic side, just search the channel for a random element and something interesting will pop up - try potassium, iron, silver, bromine, gallium, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/user/theCodyReeder/featured

(Should note however, that demonstrating robust safety standards is not this channel's strong point).

For an older view of chemistry, the book "The Romance of Modern Chemistry (1909)" covers quite a bit of interesting material, and there's also a good librivox recording of it. It's really amazing how much chemical knowledge was discovered in the 19th century, even if they didn't have solid theories (QM etc.) to explain their discoveries.

https://archive.org/details/romance_modern_chemistry_1008_li...

Also, there are some nice youtube videos on various simple organic synthesis methods, such as aspirin from salicylic acid and acetic anhydride. You can buy small quantities of acetic anhydride but I imagine it gets reported (this is the same reaction used to convert morphine to heroin, which sort of demonstrates the foolishness of the war on drugs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4NMpO1xI8U

Chemistry can be a lot of fun and is very interesting, but successful work really requires painstaking attention to detail, expensive equipment (good spectroscopy), management of waste, careful note-taking, a fair amount of manual dexterity, knowledge of risks and hazards, etc.

Ctrl-F for "waste" only turned up your comment. Waste management of all the experiments the article describes had me wincing as an industrial chemist. I'd say it's not so much the safety of home chemistry that keeps me away from introducing it to my kids as much as the sheer complexity of disposing of all these myriad chemicals and reactions. My guess is that's the main culprit in removing most interesting chemicals from home chemistry kits, and no one in this thread really appreciates that.

How dangerous for most waste products is it to put them in a sealed glass container and then in a sealed box and then bury it in the backyard.

The problem with plans like this are typically the seals. It is difficult to be a good sealant and chemically stable w.r.t. a variety of solvents and environmental stressors (heat, cold) for extended periods of time. Most seals get brittle and develop cracks long before the container shows any wear and tear. Burying expounds the issue, as now you also have to worry about stuff leaking in, instead of just stuff leaking out.

I too grew up finding those cool chemistry books in the library. For that reason I have collected some of my favorites. Kenneth Swezey's books were particularly good. Fortunately a few of them are on archive.org. I wish they still polished books like this — rather than "grossology" books or whatever.

Swezey on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/chemistrymagic00swez

https://archive.org/details/sciencemagic0000swez

https://archive.org/details/afterdinnerscien00swez

The state I live in, Queensland in Australia, literally bans ownership of most useful glassware. Amateur chemistry is well and truly dead and buried here, and yet drugs (their reasoning for the ban) are still widely available.

Australian law seems to be very aggressive in eliminating perceived materials of misbehavior. I'm thinking of how the laws against guns were extended to even BB-guns and slingshots. Is this an extension of the English legal tradition or is it uniquely Australian?

Uniquely Australian. I do love this country, and love living here, but the “larrikin” culture we put forward is frankly a facade — we’re a culture of rules and rule followers. Laws on laws on laws, for better or worse.

It’s not inherently a bad thing, either, but can have some somewhat absurd outcomes at times.

And it’s state-by-state. Queensland where I live is a fascinating mix of extremely wide reaching laws banning all sorts of things for perceived possible harm, as well as being less strict than some other states. “Gel blasters” being legal here and banned elsewhere are an interesting example of that.

What's a gel blaster? And how do they enforce the glassware ban -- schools, universities and "protect" companies okay, but people and "improper" companies not?

Exactly.

A gel blaster is basically a BB gun that fires “soft” (they’re not soft) gel balls

I owe my start in science thanks to amateur chemistry (it was my hobby in middle and high school). I almost blew myself up once, and also burned my hand with bromine. And my clothes got quite a few holes from acids (mainly H2SO4 that came from Ace Hardware as drain cleaner). But I learned so much! I'm glad my parents didn't stop me.

Let's see: spilled some nitrogen tri-iodide on the floor in my high school. Even on the following day people were walking on the dried crystals, setting off small explosions that stained the linoleum brown (or was it violet?, it was 40 years ago...).

Also burned off my best friend's eye brows/lashes when he got a little too closely at the blackpowder I had lit.

A carbon arc I made using battery cells drew so much current through the salt-water "rheostat" that it boiled off ... hydrogen? I tripped over one of the wires and the whole casserole dish full of salt water (and with a live 110-volts wire soaking in it) came crashing down, shattering on the basement floor. The extension zip-cord was already smoking at that point anyway so I suppose it was a matter time before something gave. (The circuit breaker went a few times, but that was easily resettable).

Dry ice dumped into hot water in a 2-liter plastic bottle (lid screwed on tight) gave a nice demonstration of, I do not know, the explosive breaking point of PET plastics? I thought I had invented blowing up Coke bottles with dry-ice until the internet came around. I'm still however unaware of anyone also putting dry ice and hot water in a Dawn dish soap bottle and inverting it for a nice little water-rocket (until about the 3rd or 4th time when the plastic of the detergent bottle becomes a little "work-hardened" and explodes on the launch pad).

I think I made chloroform once (Nitric acid and ... formaldehyde? I don't remember). It smelled very nice though, whatever it was. I didn't take enough a whiff to find out for sure if it was the real thing.

My dad told me about covering potassium permanganate with glycerine as a small demonstration of spontaneous combustion.

Honestly though, I'm not sure I learned a lot of chemistry. If anything, the playing around with identifying metal salts by the color of their flame is about as close as I got to Real Science™. Perhaps though I got something out of it, something for my curiosity? Maybe an appreciation at least for atoms and compounds and their reactivity?

Chemistry is very hard to learn meaningfully/usefully, but it's great at teaching you that and how you can discover what something is and what it can do via indirect observations and interactions, without taking it apart and looking at all its pieces and how they fit together.

When I was in my early teens I had a short period (after reading "The Mysterious Island") when I got really interested in chemistry. This kinda ended quickly and abruptly after I synthesised some nitroglycerin and actually after I tested it around our house. Fun times. Some stuff probably still orbiting Earth and I had to lie a lot to explain all the shattered glass. My parents never figured out what I did but that was the end of my lab. (Make note to screen my kid's purchases for any nitrogen compounds...)

A high school friend's older brother did PhD research in short-acting drugs that were legal because they were so obscure. We got banned from my high school chem lab after an after-hours session left a uniform white residue on all surfaces. My friend said we were mopping up water with an eraser. The VP found this explanation wanting.

I switched to math.

Monitoring your kid's purchases?

Homeland Security: Just another free service we offer

The author mentions cyanotypes and salt printing. Photography is what got me interested in chemistry as a kid. Understanding how film, paper, light, and chemicals all interacted was a lot of fun. Even figuring out how to make your prints last (proper clearing, toning, and washing etc.) involved understanding chemistry at a basic level. Most of the at home chemistry experiments they list are one and done. I’d be surprised if any of them inspired a kid to dig more.

I will say that starting in the 90s doing your own photo related chemical work could get you in trouble. If you trawl through the old usenet photo groups you’ll find stories of people being hassled by cops for owning scales and glassware. I’m sure it’s worse now.

I don't know that it's even bad now. I have a home darkroom for gelatin silver b&w prints.

I got asked some questions by suppliers when I bought glassware last decade. I answered "photography" and that's the extent of my hassles.

Photographer's Formulary (https://stores.photoformulary.com/) sells most of what one needs for conventional and alternative processes.

Used photo-chemicals! They can help you turn “brass” coins into “silver” coins. Thus, 3 copecks (a glass of fruit soda) can be turned into 20 copecks look-alike (an ice-cream and a fruit soda!). Practical alchemy.

Not sure if we dared to do the actual trick. Probably we did. At least we got some similarly processed coins back from an ice-cream sellers. That was so unfair!

Craziest thing, basically the same process is still used to make microprocessors.

Given the ease of entry for other STEM disciplines, it is evident to see how Amateur Chemistry can easily be seen as having a high barrier of entry. Not only do you need to sought the chemical reagents and equipments, you also need a mentor or a supervisor to ensure that the experiments are conducted in a safe manner.

Another thing I've noticed while growing up in India is that being a chemist in the 21st is no longer deemed a desirable nor profitable career pathway, compared to being a developer. I'm not sure if such sentiment carries in the rest of the world.

In Germany, a professional chemist once told me to have a "career" in chemistry, you pretty much need to get your PHD (that alone is highly selective), which means you enter the workforce at age 35 on average - which sets you back ten years of life income (which you are unlikely to recoup.

The alternative is lab assistant (still usually holding Master's degrees for doing essentially the same experiment over and over and over again for different batches of the same product, which means relatively low pay) and chemical workers (there's a reason there's a worker's rights song about them [1]).

Doing experiments and learning new stuff in the process is fun. But to make a career of that you have to spend a lot of your life and your life's earnings - or go into industry, which is essentially factory work (which is not about experiments or learning new stuff)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Z8xryXylY

> being a chemist in the 21st is no longer deemed a desirable nor profitable career

Perhaps those in some profitable chemistry careers now keep their knowledge in smaller circles.

When I was at Caltech, I was surprised at the number of students who indulged in a fair amount of amateur chemistry (as did I). In fact it seemed to be a common theme with them - I suspect Caltech liked to admit those types. It's sad that avenue for curious youngsters has been cut off.

After all, Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was formed by techers who played with rockets. They named it "Jet" rather than "Rocket" to mislead the locals who were concerned about what was going on there :-)

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-t...

I have the talk by Theodore Gray that I hosted, where he does some experiments with fire. This was a fun one to get approval from Facilities for.

> This was a fun one to get approval from Facilities for

That’s one paper trail I would love seeing

Theo is like 10 different kinds of genius. From the outside anyway, that man has lived an enviable life.

I think you'd be disappointed.

Now, the paper trail on the ticket a Googler filed, asking for a pony in his office: that would be worth having.

Amateur chemistry may be dead but you can still experience it vicariously on YouTube. For example Explosions&Fire has documented playing around with many chemicals. There are probably a lot more channels but I haven't delved too deeply into this area.

NileRed/NileBlue is another example.

Periodic videos and Alex Szydlo are good if basic channels. Alex is to me the Cliff Stoll of chemistry:)

We have unreal engine, we have really good programmers, we have countless frameworks.... how far off are we from a bio-chemical sandbox simulation?

We have soft body dynamics simulations like Beam Ng drive, anything like this for chemistry? i've searched on Steam a few times and nothing sticks out.

Im imagining a literal photoreal highschool chem lab set up. I would love something like this, without all the risk of toxicity, danger, poison, and so on.

Or is something like this effectively censored to prevent the wrong people learning the wrong things?

Actual chemistry simulations are still computationally unfeasible. In the "ten thousand atoms is a lot" territory.

So you could certainly make a game with hardcoded reaction paths for it, but capturing the actual scope and breadth of real chemistry just isn't really going to happen.

On the other hand you do raise a really good point about something which bugged me a lot when I was learning lab chemistry: getting the mechanical sensibility for what processes you need to do is hard and frankly IMO it's not taught particularly well. There would, I think, be a lot of value in a decent fidelity VR simulation of some of these processes just so you could get a sense of what the mechanical arrangement of things you need to do will actually be.

i.e. testing out a particular glassware and fluid path apparatus would have a lot of utility in making experimental work more structured and developing the intuition for what things should look like.

we have blender, webGL, three.js, godot, blend2web, so much tech...and the pedagogy is...where? in the toilet ...idk? i really need to get smarter asap...lol. So many cool ideas to explore, particularly in STEM.

A simulator like this would require a lot of simplifications: a table of template chemical reactions and thermochemical mixing rules which are bound to be wrong in edge cases. It doesn't take many reagents before you hit a combinatorial wall where the combination has never been tried in practice, and while it could be estimated with quantum mechanics in theory, that gets expensive.

This is what popped into my head as well. In situations where you have multiple phases so that Phase A is required to reach a certain temp before adding Phase B, but Phase A must reach a specific temp then cool back down within a range before adding Phase B. Once Phase A and Phase B are combined, do you stir, blend, whisk, whip, etc? What happens when you need to use 0.14 grams, but add 0.15 grams?

Each little variance as minor as they may seem will affect the results. Making something one time is a definite achievement. Making the same thing multiple times, or successfully scaling the formula up/down is also noteworthy as well. (assuming doing things by hand as amateur from the title implies to me)

All of that to say, it would be MFing impressive if some sort of simulation could accurately demonstrate these kinds of variations in the results. Could be useful to try to recreate where something went wrong as a sort of reversing/debugging the result.

sorry i'm not sure whos comment to reply under - so i'll just stick it here - thanks for the explanations :) I am ignorant of maths, chem, comp science...so my question was posed purely for my own knowledge.

What i described could be likened to raytracing for light...but for chemicals...

If something like this is possible, would there be no use or other limitations to making a "descriptive" simulation. ie. libraries of animated reactions? Or is this what comicjk is refering to?

assuming the kinds of experiments listed in this article will turn out similar results if performed with similar materials?

It's more like, we can do raytracing, but what's really needed here is simulating actual photons scattering, complete with all the quantum effects that involves.

That's a good response. I was trying to figure out how to reply, but didn't like anything I came up with. I would honestly have no idea on how to program a computer to simulate the individual atoms and the activity of their electrons. How to tell the computer when two atoms can bond with the sharing of an electron, how to tell it when a covalent bond can be made, etc. That's probably a lot to do with I barely understand it myself.

Also, I'd assume the the sim would assume all equipment is 100% pollutant free, all ingredients are 100% pure so that there is no adulterants being introduced to the formula. Also a room of perfect humidity and temperature etc.

Maybe not the answer you expect, but a sufficiently ab-initio simulation is not something our current knowledge of chemistry permits! You could approach your problem with various degrees of approximation. Personally, I'm optimistic that we may make great progress in this area in the coming years, decades, and centuries. It's traditionally described as a lack of computing power, but I'm guessing there's a fair chunk of knowledge yet undiscovered that could help.

Some years back there was work on VR lab sims. I fuzzily recall niches of "virtual high-school lab", "intro to lab best practices", and "protocol training in life sciences"? No idea if any of it reached market.

Very true. Also the general knowledge of chemistry in the general population is absolutely abysmal. So much of our modern world relies on chemistry yet barely anyone knows shit about it.

Is there a primer I could read to refresh my knowledge of basic chemistry? I prefer the written format. A 50-100 pages document would be ideal. I don't mind chemical equations and math.

You can probably start with college level books since they dont really teach much chemistry in high school anyway.

I was thinking about something less expensive and beefy than one of those $100+, 800 pages textbooks. [1] [2] [3] [4] Something closer in format to the MIT Essential Knowledge Series.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Chemistry-Rich-Bauer/dp/...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Introduction-General-Organi...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Chemistry-6th-Nivaldo-Tr...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Chemistry-Foundation-Ste...

You can get used, earlier-edition college textbooks very cheaply. The question sets are changed each edition but the text is not meaningfully. I buy some for fun reading and some for reference.

This is the best summation. Period.

https://melscience.com/US-en/chemistry/ — chemical kits (with some very interesting reagents and experiments) by subscription, something new for your kids (and yourselves) for $30/month.

(not affiliated by them, just a happy customer)

…and, DIY genetic engineering kits: splice some genes and grow fluorescent yeast. https://www.the-odin.com/

…and, you can follow any of the numerous Youtube instructions for building a DIY Wilson chamber (with some isopropyl alcohol and dry ice), buy some uranium salts (perfectly legal in the US), and watch elementary particles with your own eyes!

…and, it is possible to open an actual Sigma-Aldrich account as a hobbyist researcher, and buy nearly anything you want, after signing some papers that you won’t be making drugs, explosives and stuff! (their reactives are insanely expensive though).

…and, you can build a fusor and do real nuclear fusion in your garage! (This is a big project with about $10,000 in the bill of materials, but still accessible to amateurs (some 14 year old kids built working fusors successfully), and with great and supporting community of other people who already built their own neutron source).

…and you can construct a homemade nitrogen laser! Works for real, very dangerous. There are other amateur laser constructions.

Everything is possible if you know where to look.

As a child (age ~10) I had a "Young Chemist" set, which included dry NaOH, some acids, potassium permanganate, magnesium metal and a lot of various colourful salts. It came with a book that listed experiments, specifying which required adults and I had to promise to stick to that rule. Long before that I had a pocket knife (everybody did) and we played knife games with the lads (throwing knives into the ground in various ways, no I don't remember any injuries).

Today's children are much more deprived of the chance to be dangerous to themselves or others and therefore have much less scope to decide to not do harm.

Do your children a favour, give them the option to do bad things and teach them not to.

Apropos chemistry itself, it's still what it was 40 years ago and all of the chemicals the old sets had are available on Ebay, and scans of old BoMs and manuals are available online, so you can get your kids all the excitement of yesteryear without breaking bank (on par with an AAA game title).

I wonder if some other country might be different? Brasil?

IIRC, countries with major resource extraction industries, internationally outsourced for lack of domestic expertise, with associated lost value capture, are more highly incentivized to increase STEM graduates. Unlike the US, where the research I recall, said there's no shortage outside of programming (and PhD flexibility). And indeed without programming, there'd be a large oversupply.

In addition to WoD and WoT and consumer product safety, there's also liability, and insurance, and others. I've been struck by increasing societal viscosity these last decades, and a seemingly increasing intolerance of risk and harm.

So perhaps some other country, with different internals and context, might be a ready market for 1960's US chemistry sets?

I believe you can do okay just looking for chemicals via Amazon. You have to source them individually, of course. Chemistry sets for kids are, as the author states, pretty much junk.

Someone a decade or so ago had a web site that would sell you a decent chemistry set. I have forgotten the link. I believe it was sort of targeting home-schoolers.

Probably this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1742632993/heirloom-che...

That's very nice, but it wasn't that fancy, ha ha. It was a kit (box) that came with your dozen test tubes, drying rack, alcohol burner and stand, thermometer, a few beakers, droppers, pipettes ... that sort of thing. And quite a few chemicals as well! I believe too there was a book/PDF that went through a course on basic chemistry that paired well with the set.

A country where you can order the chemicals for amateur chemistry by mail would be a developed AND a free country at the same time. I'm very interested in such an example

This one ?

https://archive.ph/0iu7V

I have been going through Brilliant's Chemistry courses[1] and was happy to find that in the article the author mentions the way to make a mirror. When i first got to know it in the Brilliant course I was amazed it required sugar!

I fantasize of going back in time and bootstrapping my arrival with useful future knowledge like this. I can't imagine the fortune I would make selling mirrors in the time of the Romans :D

Anyway, I really would like the author to provide a kit for the experiments mentioned.

[1] https://brilliant.org/courses/chemical-reaction/

> It is equally difficult to source ideas for the curriculum. Many classic amateur chemistry books are out of print, and there is little incentive to publish more.

So then! My place of work, the Science History Institute, has a number of old amateur chemistry experiment books digitized online and freely accessible. My job includes developing and managing the web site/app we use to manage our digitized content and present it to you!

Let's see if I wind up giving our site the kiss of death, which will be embarrassing for me, it's usually pretty solid, but, it doesn't usually get much traffic and doesn't yet have a lot of defenses against it, this is a small non-profit operation. :( But I can't resist sharing this very relevant content!

Most of these are booklets which accompanied particular chemistry sets. (Also should probably say conduct at your own risk?).

Note there are PDF download options available under the "download" menu.

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/tvu6pby

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/upl4n7s

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/e7ft0h9

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/bmt5ls5

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/4kvkrsz

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/so1jbnu

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/cqmqcyh

Oh hey, here's a bonus one about electrical rather than chemistry experiments, from 1891!

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/ssax7fn

We also have some of the actual chemistry sets in our museum, and pictures of some of them online, for those interested:

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/catalog?f%5Bformat_facet%...

And finally, here's a Google Arts & Culture online museum exhibition we made about Chemistry Sets. (This was one of the first online Google A&C things our curators made, which possibly shows...) https://artsandculture.google.com/story/nAXRsuiYboFtKA

Thank you, hoarding now.

Also always loved this one from UNESCO (not what I usually associate UNESCO with): https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780385052757

Another bonus, how about a 1901 booklet on "New Methods of Testing Explosives"?

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/70rgtuf

Excellent work, thanks for preserving amateur/DIY/hacker science history!

Of possible interest: Experiments without explosions

https://archive.org/details/ExperimentsWithoutExplosions

Not a fair take. If you have the pre-requisite knowledge, it is easier than ever. Just order the ingredients online (even the semi-regulated ones can be easily obtained from overseas) at prices that are impossibly low compared to the RadioShack days where everything is overpriced with value being mostly captured by thermofisher middlemen and retailers.

I think the lack of science kits is because CS, iPads and coding have replaced messy kitchen science for children growing up now. Swift Playgrounds only needs a tablet and it is just as educational without needing any cleanup or supervision.

Sure, it's easier than ever to break the law, but not sure that's a fair argument.

In many parts of Europe - e.g., in Germany and in the UK - the purchase of many common "dangerous" reagents is regulated and illegal without a license that isn't available to hobbyists. The government takes the view that it's simply not a legitimate hobby.

In the US, the situation is better, but some essential chemicals are unobtainable due to DEA legislation (iodine, phosphorous). Many others are subject to DHS and DEA monitoring (including KYC mandates) and a patchwork of state laws that prompted most reagent manufacturers to stop shipping to non-commercial customers altogether - and in recent years, also caused them to also crack down on resellers (requiring every reseller to attest that they will not re-ship to civilians). In the past five years or so, eBay also had major crackdowns, banning everything from sulfuric acid to potassium iodide. So did Amazon.

And that's before we get into raids on YouTube chemists, etc. Heck, Texas prohibited people from buying or owning laboratory glassware until recently. Wikipedia has a good summary.

The internet made chemistry easier for a while by facilitating trade, but that era is coming to a halt.

You don't understand the industry. You are thinking in the context of nice academic labs with thick budgets.

Where do you think the fentanyl people are getting their ingredients from? Asia. You can easily get most industrial/pharmaceutical chemistry pre-cursors and analogues/isomers for the semi-legal/regulated substances. Whether it can clear customs is another story but for kitchen chemistry the internet is more than sufficient.

Go to an aggregator like "Alibaba" and do a search. You will be surprised at what you can find.

> If you have the pre-requisite knowledge

Isn't this a pretty big barrier though?

In the times the article discussed, plenty of parents bought chemistry kits for science-inclined kids without any real idea of what they were; assured by the packaging and availability that they were appropriate. For the most part they were correct.

That's hard to imagine these days.

In today's world, you also do not get a knock on the door from some LEO/TLA member because you purchased a certain combination of iPads, electronic devices, but buy a combo of chemistry ingredients and you'll enjoy a nice little chat.

One justification used to promote cashless digital payments.

Any legit seller of these ingredients would be expected to keep records of the transactions with some sort of KYC. If you were procuring from someone, I would think cash would be the precise anonymous payment format being sought. Digital payments just aren't quite as anonymous as people make them out to be.

Agree. Chemicals at the local hobby shop (not Radio Shack, ha ha) were outrageously priced - for like a few grams of the chemical. With online sites (even Amazon) we do indeed live in interesting times.

At least some connection with the following, surely? Years ago Scientific American had an Amateur Scientist column. This was sadly abandoned in 2001 apparently due to the lack of an appropriate contributor. Its projects are listed here.

http://amasci.com/amateur/sciamdx.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Scientist

I have had a lot of fun with model rockets with my kids. But it has gotten so much more difficult to find a place to legally launch a model rocket in California. And you are extremely restricted on what you can do with a rocket.

I get the idea of not wanting to start a fire, and not wanting to use fuel that is dangerous but it goes way past that. Fireworks are more dangerous, and so is the way most people drive around my neighborhood. I think the nanny state went way overboard on model rockets, IMO.

I finished a PhD in a chemistry discipline and I can attribute to it an early interest sparked by access to books in the school library on amateur chemistry experiments. Even then, it was an older book and pretty hard to find materials for a lot of the experiments ("available from your local drug store" usually meant "not available at all.")

Shame that fear is dominating over permissiveness and the fostering of natural curiosity.

I had a Salter Science set as a kid and did a lot of things very interesting for a 12 year old. The set didn't have any of the equipment for electrochemistry so I pulled out carbon rods from old batteries and got the rest of the stuff myself.

The manual was pretty good too. I bought reagents and glassware off Amazon to try to get my kids interested but they don't seem to be that keen on the idea.

https://archive.org/details/the_golden_book_of_chemistry_exp...

https://archive.org/details/1960-the-golden-book-of-chemistr...

https://archive.org/details/TheGoldenBookOfChemistryExperime...

You can buy chemicals online in small quantities for home schools. When I was home schooling my children over the pandemic, we bought a lot of different chemicals, like HCl, concentrated H2O2, etc. It was pretty great!

This is more of a spear at the title than the content, which is orthogonal: I'm spending a good chunk of my spare time working on chemistry. I'm building a molecular model of proteins in an aqueous environment on the computer. The computing and knowledge resources available make this approachable - probably more so than anytime in history.

Teaching Chemistry: https://www.chemedx.org/

A number of chemistry investigations, as distinct from experiments, for high school students: http://seniorchem.com/

In case anyone is looking for a great chemistry tutorial series, there is a fellow in YouTube, he also has Apple and Google apps, called Chemguy. I saw a few kids using it for high school help, and even though I studied and worked as a chemical engineer, I found it a lot of fun to watch. (And learn)

Hydrogen peroxide as not a developer for the cyanotype process. There is indeed no developer involved in the cyanotype process.Hydrogen peroxide just speeds up oxidation.

>The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (1960)

This is my go-to. "Hey, kids - let's learn how to cut glass tubes and produce gases like Hydrogen and Chlorine!" Most parents recoil.

But it's not really that dangerous in a well-ventilated, adult-supervised setting. The Hydrogen will make a nice "pop", and the chlorine might rust a few screws.

The important thing is to make the kids feel like they are learning about dangerous, forbidden knowledge. That'll help them stay safe, and encourage them to learn more.

https://archive.org/details/1960-the-golden-book-of-chemistr...

Instead, bored teenagers do potentially deadly TikTok challenges.

That happens when you forbid everything that seems dangerous.

The magic will always be there for those who seek it. Careful, though.

The fact that iodine is banned in some countries is just maddening!

That calls for thyroid problems, though.

You can simulate most chemistry safely in video games (like Fallout 4).

My father was a physicist, working for Westinghouse for many years when they did R&D in phosphors & other lighting. When I was a kid in the 60's he had a combination darkroom and chemistry lab in our basement. Every Sunday afternoon was dedicated to a chemistry demonstration. We kids were mostly interested in the experiments that went boom, of course. He had a shelf of chemicals of all sorts; liquid mercury, various acids, you name it. I guess he just "borrowed" them from his lab at the office. We would make hydrogen balloons by mixing zinc with hydrochloric acid in an empty coke bottle. We would grew walnut sized crystals of copper sulphate and other molecules. He bought a giant Fresnel lens from Edmund Scientific that we would use to melt lead using just the sun. When I became a father I would do things like the ammonium dichromate volcano for my kids; now you can't even buy that stuff anymore without being suspected of terrorism.

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