Technicians are just as important and none of you should feel lesser ❤

Love technicians, wanted to be one but wasn't hard enough! Now I'm a cook, though, so similar scenario. Great channel innit

It seems all the most important jobs are VASTLY under appreciated, like garbage collectors or teachers or ANY blue collar job for that matter. If you don't have a fancy title and a fancy suit you must not do anything important, right? So sad...

Why isn’t Neil a chemist(i.e not pharmacist) or Professor of Chemistry?

@@roberttelarket4934 I don't know if he's a professor but definitely a chemist. It's just a different career path. Loosely speaking a professor is employed to lead research in a particular department and teach, etc. Technicians at universities are more part of the infrastructure and work behind the scenes, they know how it all works, how to fix it, how to not break it and so on. When I was doing chemistry I would always find myself learning a lot more from the techs. Great bunch.

He does! Listen how the narrator is talking about Neil doing everything! Look how I don't know the guy's name but I know Neil's name :)

Yes ! I fully agree.

I like the implication that Neil is some dangerous force that has to be satiated with fun chemistry. It seems pretty believable really

Feed him some villagers from time to time

Such as reacting boron trioxide (B2O3) or boric acid (H3BO3) with Magnesium nitride to create an ultra hard cubic Boron nitride. ;)

@@koenth2359 You can't satisfy a dragon with just a few villagers. He needs more!

Well said !

this bothered me so much lol

Hamiltons dad rules

At 80-plus, I quite agree !!🙂😉

alkali metal nitrogen compounds tend to be a bit excitable.

or what if other gases, like helium or xenon is in the beaker, instead of air

@@Paonporteur thanks for the info. That would be cool though 😁

Yes it would be interesting to see if the magnesium would react to completion with an excess of N2. I also wonder if external heating while in the N2, without first burning in oxygen, would work.

@@robertroy8803 I agree. A resistive heating element should be able to reach and survive at the 850C or so this reaction apparently takes. Then of course it brings me to wonder if you could use a magnesium ribbon as the resistive heating element itself in the pure N2 atmosphere. That would be fun to try out.

Yeah similar thoughts, tungsten wire inside to heat the magnesium and flush the whole container with N2 before starting. Would be interesting.

@@robertroy8803 Ignition by laser might work when lowered in the N2 vapour? This is more a question because I'm no expert.

This was the basic idea of putting a candle in.

Yes - Health and Safety, less fun but Chemists live longer.

Back in the Dark Ages of the early 1960's, a year before my college course in Inorganic Chemistry, a professor had a serious accident with burning metal powder in the classroom. That demonstration involved pouring liquid Air onto a pile of Aluminum powder. The powder was placed on a slab of aluminum, about 1/2 inch thick, set over a lab sink. The same demo had been performed for years, without incident. *This* time, it detonated rather than deflagrating (normal burning)! The professor was thrown back against the wall, many windows were blown out, and much of the class was temporarily deafened. The aluminum slab, kept as a warning for the future, had a dent over an inch deep, from a completely unconfined explosion of maybe 20 grams of Al powder. The irony of the situation was that on the prof's office desk was the current issue of a chemistry teachers' journal, warning about the dangers of this very experiment; no one had read it yet...

sounds more like phosphorous than Mg, though smoke from both is fairly benign.

@@Muonium1 Magnesium is used instead of phosphorus in Geneva-compliant incendiary munitions as well as in tracer burners, i believe.

@@Muonium1 That's a ridiculous claim to make for either magnesium or phosphorus. Magnesium oxide has properties similar to quicklime (aka calcium oxide), so if you breathe in magnesium oxide smoke, it will rapidly react with the moisture in your mouth, nose, throat and lungs to make magnesium hydroxide. This is mostly insoluble, so the inside of your lungs would get coated with a layer of it - if that happened enough and a thick enough layer formed, it could suffocate you by blocking your lungs ability to absorb oxygen. Phosphorus oxide smoke is orders of magnitude worse - it also reacts with the moisture in your mouth, nose, throat and lungs, but this time the product of that reaction is phosphoric acid. This is water soluble and is a fairly strong acid, and will pull fluid from your lung tissue and blood by osmosis, filling your lungs with acid solution from within, drowning you in your own bodily fluids. This is a horrible way to die, and is why phosphorus munitions are classed as chemical weapons if used against people, which is listed as a war crime by the United Nations. So in both case, hardly benign. More like the complete opposite.

@@lloydevans2900 maybe actually touch grass once in your lifetime instead of incessantly making a fool of yourself on the internet? just a suggestion. I've been in classrooms literally countless times where both of these experiments are done, breathed the oxides of both, and like literally everyone else in the room suffered ZERO ill effects - shocker, I know. There are hundreds of videos on youtube alone of the 'philosopher's stone' phosphorous burning experiment being done in lecture halls and classrooms outside of a hood with the room filled with the resultant smoke. no one died. Presumably you've also never read the label on a bottle of Coke before either. Amazing.

Of all the things I've never considered - whether a piano can explode has never been one of them. What is the answer please?

Glad you’re back

How? So many I don't knows and maybes. The guy repeated the same experiment for 25 years expecting a different result. Fire him basically.

Unreactive? Many of the most explosive things are based on nitrogen. Anfo. Nityroglycerin. TNT. C4.