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A requiem for amateur chemistry

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Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#51

Post by WalterBright »

zokier wrote: post #5

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.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#52

Post by i_am_proteus »

musictubes wrote: post #13

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 surpr…

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.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#53

Post by photochemsyn »

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.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#54

Post by an_aparallel »

XorNot wrote: post #10
an_aparallel wrote: post #7

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 t…

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…

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.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#55

Post by WalterBright »

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 :-)

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#57

Post by girvo »

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.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#58

Post by hgsgm »

mncharity wrote: post #36
zokier wrote: post #5

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

> 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 ar…

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.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#59

Post by hgsgm »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #35
Metacelsus wrote: post #11

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 cur…

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.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#60

Post by qbasic_forever »

mncharity wrote: post #36
zokier wrote: post #5

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

> 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 ar…

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.
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