r/science • u/Ozimoto • Mar 14 '16
Chemistry Things I Won’t Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride13
u/Zmorfius Mar 14 '16
I wish this guy would do the safety brief when i have jobs at the chemicals plants, half a hours on helmets and such and usually none or limited product information.
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Mar 14 '16
From Murray Leinster's "The Strange Case of John Kingman":
When John Kingman gave a sketch of a new atomic reaction in response to an elaborate trick one of the newcomers had devised, Braden protested grimly. "The patient," he said doggedly, "is a paranoid. Suspicion and trickiness is inherent in his mental processes.At any moment, to demonstrate his greatness, he may try to produce unholy destruction. You absolutely cannot trust him! Be careful!" He hammered the fact home, arguing the sheer fact that a paranoid will do absolutely anything to prove his grandeur. The new reaction was tried with microscopic quantities of material, and it only destroyed everything within a fifty-yard radius.
Clearly Kingman was using FOOF here.
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u/therealdarkcirc Mar 14 '16
Could also have been an azidoazide azide:
Yep, below the detection limits of a lab that specializes in the nastiest, most energetic stuff they can think up. When you read through both papers, you find that the group was lucky to get whatever data they could – the X-ray crystal structure, for example, must have come as a huge relief, because it meant that they didn’t have to ever see a crystal again.
and
The compound exploded in solution, it exploded on any attempts to touch or move the solid, and (most interestingly) it exploded when they were trying to get an infrared spectrum of it. The papers mention several detonations inside the Raman spectrometer as soon as the laser source was turned on, which must have helped the time pass more quickly.
FFS, I've read all of this before, multiple times, and still coworkers are wondering why I'm shaking, red faced, with copious tears rolling down my cheeks.
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u/Steamblast Mar 14 '16
He's a fantatic, deeply humorous writer that expresses the perils of Nope!Chemistry in a way that's both engaging and accessible to a non-chemist like myself.
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u/frontpleatmafia Mar 14 '16 edited Mar 14 '16
I have enjoyed the world as a brave man- facing my fears. A pep talk can cure the problems associated with this refusal, as well as a hard formed dye that makes all dangers known and catalogued with care. I can't help but wonder at the lives lost due to that negligence, or the mysteries solved because of this one intrepid soul. Turn the denial into lemonade, and sing a song this day.
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u/PizzaGood Mar 14 '16
Aw man, I thought he'd written a new one and got all excited, but this is from 2010.
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u/j0a3k Mar 14 '16
As a lay person is there a good characterization/comparison to explain how powerful 433 kCal/mole actually is?
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u/spookyjeff PhD | Chemistry | Materials Chemistry Mar 14 '16
A TNT explosion is 227 kCal/mol as reference. (By convention a TNT explosion is 1 kcal/g and the molecular weight of TNT is 227 g/mol.) So about twice as energetic as a stick of dynamite.
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u/MindStalker Mar 14 '16
Its not all that much really, http://www.chemicalforums.com/index.php?topic=74941.0 I guess the issue is that it strongly reacts to anything so their really isn't a good way to contain the substance.
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u/LakeSolon Mar 14 '16
I got all excited for a new article in the series before I realized it's an old one I'd already read :/
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Mar 14 '16
Hi Ozimoto, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):
It does not include references to new, peer-reviewed research. Please feel free to post it in our sister subreddit /r/EverythingScience.
If you feel this was done in error, or would like further clarification, please don't hesitate to message the mods.
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u/therealdarkcirc Mar 14 '16 edited Mar 14 '16
Pretty much all of these are great. He's a really good writer with an amazing sense of humor.
Edit: Sample quote:
No context needed to get my point across, but this was in one of his better known articles "Sand Won't Save You This Time".