and of course hf features
in the tv show breaking bad which i'm
glad to say i've never seen
why are you glad to say that it's really
good
well perhaps perhaps one day i might
watch it when i'm old
[Music]
for a long time people have wanted to
hear what you think of breaking bad
before you watch this episode what did
you know about breaking bad and what
were you expecting
well i knew it was about a chemistry
teacher
and i knew that he was making
some sort of drug but i didn't know
which one
and i really didn't know much more about
that
except that i think i'd heard that there
were a lot of episodes
and that at some stage hf hydrogen
fluoride played a part
but that was about it why had a show
about chemistry
not attracted you until now well i don't
actually watch much tv
i mean i watch quite a i will until
the pandemic i went to the cinema
quite regularly and obviously breaking
bad is not in the cinema
i suppose it was not on terrestrial
television we don't have streaming
services on
our tv so i just never watched and
professor as a chemist when you make
people
like you know out and about is it a
common joke for you to have to put up
with the cliche of
oh do you know how to make drugs and
things like that no
i mean it's i'm not sure anybody's ever
asked me
well i mean you you have you have asked
me but i'm
i can't remember anybody else ever
asking me i've never asked you to make
drugs
no no no but i mean you've just asked me
the question
but no i i've no idea i can't remember
anybody asking me that
so professor so far i've only convinced
you to watch the first episode the pilot
and the pilot starts with this iconic
shot of a pair of trousers floating
through the air
and i get the impression that's one of
the shots that made the biggest
impression on you
yeah i really liked it i i started
wondering whether you could fly
trousers as a pair of as a kite
but i was slightly disappointed because
given that later on you see where the
trousers came from
i think it's physically impossible that
they could have been run over by the
van that the teacher was driving
but um the floating trousers was really
good
they look a bit like a pair of trousers
you'd wear no no i don't think so
no well possibly but i'm not very
very fussy about clothes these are my
good clothes
you can't go home smelling like a meth
lab after the introductory sequence we
have like the title screen for the show
which involves
breaking bad being written with bromine
and barium and
the periodic table and all these sort of
uh chemistry formula
i thought that would really excite you
yeah i thought that was quite clever
i thought it was a bit more subtle than
these things where they're drawn like
element symbols with the atomic weight
and so on in as well and i quite like
that
and i started thinking how
my name could be spelled with argon in
the martin and
i couldn't decide whether polonium or
lithium would look better in
polyurethane
early in the episode we see walter the
star of the show
in a chemistry setting as a teacher with
his students
for i don't know you know five minutes
or so trying to conduct a chemistry
class
well that's that's all of life right
it's just it's the constant it's the
cycle it's
solution the lesson was quite good there
were one or two things
one thing i really liked was his flame
tests
which i thought were really good where
he sprayed
something that gave a red and a green
color i think it's probably copper and
barium
that could have been strontium but
strontium might have been a bit exotic
for the
props department of the show there were
other things that were quite strange
particularly in the view of him walter
being rather safety conscious later on
that he was not wearing
safety glasses i also was quite
interested in him asking what chemistry
was
yes i'm not sure anybody's been asked me
that
my son when he was at high school was
asked what is in organic chemistry
and he said in a rather loud whisper to
his friends
it's what my dad does chemistry is the
study of
matter but i prefer to see it as the
study of
change walters answered that it was the
study of change
would have been better if he'd mixed it
up with the other definition which was
study of matter and if you said it was
the way that matter changes
i think that might have been quite good
i was also not
totally convinced by him lighting a
bunsen burner and saying that that was
electrons
lighting the burner but overall i
thought
the reaction of the class was a bit
disappointing from what was quite
uh exciting chemistry teacher
i think chemistry being the study of
change was a really nice answer i mean
it
obviously it also foreshadows what's
going to happen in this television show
but
um but i thought it's a quite quite a
poetic answer
there was one thing that struck me about
him is that he looks quite like a
well-known british scientist robert
winston
who's quite a famous popularizer of
science or used to be
i know very few chemists that have
mustaches actually
later on or quite shortly after that
scene
you see that he's got a second job
in the car wash um i don't know how you
describe it a
manual car wash and
that underlines quite an important point
i think that
chemistry teachers or science teachers
often don't have the social status that
they really ought to have
because it's such an important job i'm
not sure that that's the point that they
were trying to make in this particular
film but
i think it's quite an important thing to
see
i think the point they're trying to make
is that chemistry teachers don't earn a
lot of money
which is the whole reason that he breaks
bad
yeah i mean that might be true but um
i don't i've no idea what chemistry
teachers are
naturally so we also see a scene shortly
after when he
when he's looting the school lab and
he's taking all sorts of things from the
uh
from the shelves i thought you must have
frowned upon that
you're a bit of a goody two shoes was i
shocked by his dishonesty
um well that was part of the story
wasn't it but the
what surprised me a bit more was
the size of flasks that they had
in the um school store
particularly the um they they all were
on a much larger scale than i would have
expected in the school chemistry lab
shortly after the theft we see him
talking with jesse
about uh you know preparing to make the
crystal meth
and he admonishes him for cooking with a
volumetric flask rather than a cooking
flask
and like i thought you'd like that
getting a little bit of a little bit of
teaching in there about how to use the
equipment
no this is a volumetric flask you
wouldn't cook in one of these
uh yeah i do uh no you don't
yes i think i mean that that was quite
nice and um though
i must say earlier in my career when i
didn't know things
so well i tried to cook in a volumetric
flask
but i think that the two th there's
something
that i felt didn't ring very true with
his first meeting with jesse
when jesse escapes from
a police raid jesse has already left the
school
and walter recognizes him honestly i
never expected you to amount to much but
methamphetamine
i didn't picture that and certainly as a
university teacher
i rarely recognize students when they
come back
because they've changed they've grown up
so
i wasn't sure that walter would have
immediately recognized his student
on the other hand it's clear that he
although
jesse was a bad student that walter
still managed to teach him something
volumetric flask is for general mixing
and titration
you wouldn't apply heat to a volumetric
flask that's what a boiling flask
is for did you learn nothing from my
chemistry class
no you flunked me there's this
interaction between them where
um they're talking about the the cooking
the preparation of crystal meth
and jesse says it's an art
cooking is art i saw your setup
ridiculous
you and i will not make garbage we will
produce
a chemically pure and stable product
that performs as advertised no
adulterants
no baby formula no chili powder oh no
chili peas my signature
not anymore walter's not having any of
that he says this is not art this is
just pure and simple chemistry
where would you come down on is there
art to chemistry well i think
there is art in doing preparative
chemistry well
i've never been a very good preparative
chemist
and that's why late in the later stages
of my career i have built machines to
make chemicals
because i'm not very good at
manipulating them
so i think there is quite a lot of art
and particularly organic chemists
very much believe that what they do
is an art as well as being a science a
real theme that runs through this scene
as well
is like even though he's doing something
bad walter is taking a real pride in the
chemistry isn't he
he says we're going to produce things
that are pure and stable there's a real
kind of
chemist's pride in him despite what he's
doing yeah very much so
um you mentioned cooking the um drugs
and i there was that jessica calls
himself captain cook
which for you as an australian and for
me
would have raised the idea of captain
cook the explorer
which perhaps won't have resonated so
much with the
american audience and also i remember
that captain cook was murdered
so i wonder whether this is something
that is going to happen in a later
episode
oh look you're already thinking i like
it also we see walter talking to jesse
about wanting to put safety like an
eyewash station in place and he's very
sort of
safety conscious i know you used to be
the health and safety officer
for your chemistry department we were
you glowing with pride at that point
yeah i was very pleased with that though
as i pointed out walter wasn't wearing
safety glasses when
demonstrating to his students and the
students
sitting not far from the bench weren't
wearing
safety glasses either though
i was a bit surprised by the safety
equipment
that walter used when he was started
making his
um crystal meth where he was wearing a
leather
apron and his underpants and nothing
else
and i would have thought he would have
been wearing
um a lab coat though
from the point of view of the drama it
would not look
have looked quite as good wearing a lab
coat once when
i was working in a lab in my previous
university which was very hot
37 degrees centigrade nearly body heat
i wore a lab coat but stripped to the
waist
so i was just i was um just wearing
trousers and a lab coat
because it was so hot but i still wore a
lab coat
you've never done chemistry in just your
underwear no
that at this point we have this montage
when he when he makes the crystal meth
you know it's quite stylistic and
fast editing and things like that but we
do see lots of equipment and
powders and things being poured and it's
our first real kind of look at lots and
lots of chemistry happening what did you
think of that bit
well i thought it was quite nice as a
montage
it didn't make any chemical sense at all
first of all i should say
i had to look up what methaphetamine was
because i didn't know its formula but
i don't see why they were using red
phosphorus
and also what looked as if it might have
been cobalt chloride or
cobalt sulfate the other thing is i was
quite surprised by the
volume of fumes that were coming out of
the top of the
motorhome that they were using as the
lab so
i'm not sure what it was that was coming
out
but i suppose i'm slightly
less worried about slight inaccuracies
of the chemistry
than the impression of actually doing it
and of course he uses chemistry to get
out of the pickle with the bad guys
in in this scene where he he throws down
some red phosphorus and there's an
explosion and then there are fumes that
overwhelm the bad guys give you any idea
what's going on there
is that plausible no i don't think it is
they said they were making phosphine ph3
like ammonia which is nh3
which burns quite easily and if they'd
had flames
it would have burnt the phosphine and i
suspect
and i haven't calculated this if you
looked at the volume
of the inside of the motorhome
and the volume of gas that he might have
produced
there wouldn't have been enough to
produce
well first of all the reaction he had
probably wouldn't have produced the gas
but ignoring that i don't know that it
would have produced enough gas
to produce the toxic effect that they
said was formed
and the other thing is i'm not
absolutely certain that the reaction
would have happened fast enough
for the bad guys not to shoot him anyway
they wear gas masks at the end when this
gas has been removed
and i very rarely have ever seen labs
with gas masks occasionally
you have breathing apparatus in case
something goes wrong but whether they
would have had gas masks that were good
enough
i don't know but again i think you have
to allow a little bit of dramatic
license
there are going to be some things
things that you'll come to learn about
me in the next
few days so you finally have watched an
episode of breaking bad after all these
years i cannot tell you how many viewers
have asked to know what you think of
breaking bad
you've now seen one episode what did you
think of it just
as an overall thing not just the
chemistry but just as a
you know a piece of storytelling so my
overall verdict
is that it's quite good
let me just explain for american viewers
quite good in english means not bad
doesn't mean it's outstanding
[Music]
but i think i mean i was quite pleased
to have seen it because i suppose i had
some curiosity what it was about
not that much curiosity you've waited
this long yeah well i mean
sometimes one has to restrain oneself i
think
i mean it is positive that it's brought
chemistry
to a wider audience i think
well i don't know how the rest of the
story is going to develop
there are things which struck me like
the guns that everywhere which are
clearly much more common in america than
in
the uk i'm not sure that i know anybody
who's ever handled
a pistol and it's a long time since i've
handled any
firearms but i think
overall it was quite fun are you
inclined to watch any more
um
how many episodes are there there's
quite a few
i think i think what a good idea might
be just to
zero in a bit more on the chemistry now
perhaps some of the viewers
would like to suggest scenes and
sections or episodes or parts of the
series
they would particularly like you to
watch and i might be able to put
together a bit of a
collection for you and we could just
deal with those rather than the whole
series
i think that's a great idea um i think
i mean i'm always interested how
chemistry
is um portrayed in films
plays and so on my brother wrote my
brother is a playwright
in case you don't know if he writes
plays and films and he's a film director
he wrote a play for the national theatre
about chemistry
and i had to provide the dialogue
about chemistry for that play
and on the opening night in the national
theatre in london
when one of the actors said
hexafluoroisopropanol
i was the only person in the audience
who laughed
why is that funny well
i thought it sounded really funny people
saying that in the middle of
national theater but on the other hand
i think that anything that brings
chemistry to the public in a way
that is not about learning at school
when people are bored
is very positive i should say enough
about the scene where they were making
the
crystal meth the first time they got
some enormous crystals
which look really nice this is glass
grade
you got crystals in here two inches
three inches long
but that is rather unrealistic because
if you want to get big crystals
you have to grow them very slowly i
don't think
that they were there for days when they
were doing the chemistry
or at least in the story
so that was a bit unrealistic but on the
other hand to get the idea
that the chemistry teacher could make
much better
compounds than his pupil was probably
pretty realistic
the other point which i did notice
is that one of the bad guys was smoking
in the lab
put the cigarette out
please and walter stops him
because it's dangerous with organic
solvents and a lighted cigarette
and this reminded me of a friend of mine
who was
safety officer for a tobacco company the
labs of the tobacco company
and he banned smoking
and he was brought in front of the
directors
who said how's this going to look for
our company if we're banning smoking in
our labs
and he replied well how's it going to
look for the company
if somebody smokes and blows up the
whole lab
so he was allowed to ban it there is
also a story of
a chemist
when i was an undergraduate one of the
professors who was teaching lab classes
was said to have been smoking
and put a bit of the ash into
the solution that one of my fellow
students was trying to get crystals from
and the tiny particles of ash acted as a
nucleus
to start the crystals growing and so
this solution that wouldn't crystallize
suddenly crystallized beautifully when
the cigarette ash fell in
i wouldn't for a moment recommend that
any of you try smoking
in the lab or anywhere else
or anywhere else yes
most chemists are fascinated by what
they've always been told
that hf hydrofluoric acid
eats human flesh