Was this guy actually anything special at Chemistry? I'm

>>7782126
well, he was excellent not because he knew about reactions, but because he could improvise them and make them terribly efficient

>>7782126
I PREFERRED IT WHEN CHEMISTRY GIVE PEOPLE THOUGHTS OF EXPLOSION AND NOT THIS MEME

>>7782133
I believe this is what makes a good anything. Not the knowledge, but the skill, the spark of inventiveness and uniqueness.

tl;dr: he's a movie character

Wasn't he coinventer of some drug/whatever that started a billion dollar company? That sounds pretty smart.

>>7782126
>most of what he seemed to do or talk about was a bunch of High School/Undergrad Chemistry concepts
You mean when he was teaching his high school class? Or when he was explaining things to his relatives/acquaintances who don't know any chemistry?

>>7782126
>Was this guy actually anything special at Chemistry?

Well, he help create something that made those two people he worked with super rich. If he hadn't sold his share for 5k then he would have been just as rich. Life was a bitch and he had to settle for a high school teaching job. I wonder why he didn't at least try to become a teacher at the community college level.

> nobel prize in chemistry
> not good at all

choose 1

>>7782126
>How good do you actually think he was?
Did you even watch the show?

>>7782126
>Was this guy actually anything special at Chemistry?
Yes.
Its pretty clear that he requires phenylacetone and methylamine (which also happens to be an important plot device in the series) for making meth, so it is clear that he used reductive amination for synthesis. Even if we assume all that is basic chemistry, reductive amination yields a racemic mixture and it is only the d methamphetamine that gets you high. I don't think there's any method of chiral resolution that would get you 99.1% of the dextro isomer, so coming up with that is probably what makes him good at chemistry.

>>7782126
It's a fucking TV show. But yeah not shit he's supposed to be really fucking smart.

If you watch the earlier seasons there's a bunch of chemists talking and then they mention that walt solved one of their problems they were stuck on for months in like a week.

Though when they go to steal the methanol it's a liquid at room temp so I'm not really too sure why it's in a barrel. I'm almost positive it's a solid at room temp.

STUDY OF CHEMICALS?

NO

STUDY

OF

MATTER

>>7782459
Methanol melts at -96 C

>>7782459
Most of the chemistry in the show is BS

>>7782482
Whoops I'm fucking retarded.

>>7782459
its not methanol, its methylamine.

>>7782126
see
>>7782133

In the first episode when it shows Walt's daily routine of waking up in a haze of depression to use that stepper thing it shows his PhD hanging on the wall which reads "Proton Radiography".

He was probably unemployed because his PhD isnt marketable at all. some pchem bullshit

I watched the show hoping it would inspire me to appreciate chemistry the same way watching numb3rs got me excited about the practical use of math in everyday life. I learned only three things about chemistry from the show, how to disolve a dead body, how to make a battery using loose change and how to make mayonaise in a beaker.

Disappointing in that respect but it was otherwise a decent drama.

>>7782736
>the same way watching numb3rs got me excited about the practical use of math in everyday life.


....

>>7782766

Maybe not everyday life but real life nevertheless. It encouraged me to think in a mathy sort of way about various problems and phenomena.

>>7782736
>mayo in a beaker
I think i missed this, what ep?
All I remember is the coffee setup

>>7782766
*tips fedora*

>>7782780

It's in one of the DVD extras. If I recall he doesn't really make mayo but mixes egg whites with I think vinegar and then it instantly congeals into a creamy substance and the students watching him are gawking at it.

Might be on youtube.

>>7782780
>>7782787

Found it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7hApnTwqfY

Isn't it pretty accurate that most illicit amphetamine is produced in "superlabs" like the one in the show?

>>7782789
Is that actually possible? I've made mayonnaise before and you have to add the oil incredibly slowly so that it won't split.

>>7782813

He did use an electric whisk that whipped it onto a cream almost instantly. Perhaps that doesn't give it enough time to split before congealing?

Maybe an actual chemfag can chime in, I'm curious too.

>>7782813
how do you make it?

i've been making a type of mayo which involves 2 parts oil 1 part milk, first 2 times it worked like a charm (blender) but then it just wont go creamy, could it be the salt?

>>7782836
Been a while but it was at a restaurant where we would make large quantities, but I have seen the same method on home cooking shows.
Basically put 10-20 eggs and other ingredients (depending on type of mayonnaise) in a blender and add at least 1-2 litres of oil almost drip by drip especially at first.
Been a while, now I am studying chemistry (no lie).

>>7782836

>milk, no eggs
>type of mayo

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

>>7782859
my sister is a chef, and she makes this egg free mayo "lactonnaise" which like i said includes oil and milk

so unless you're a chef, shut the fuck up,

>>7782866
Lactonnaise is to mayonnaise what tofurky is to turkey.

>>7782874
i said "type"

ffs you fucking autists, this is why you're still virgins

>>7782795
A good portion of it, yes. People who studied chemistry and everything making huge quantities of it with industrial equipment. Also because meth is a pretty simple chemical, everyone who took organic chemistry could be taught to make decent batch of it.

>>7782126
>Was this guy actually anything special at Chemistry?
All the details in the show were a joke. I mean, come on, he's a brilliant chemist because he can cook 99% pure meth? Meth is easy. Purification is easy.

The whole difficulty of making money from meth is in selling it. Random trailer chimps make meth in their kitchens. People who have good ways to distribute it don't usually struggle with supply issues.

They didn't even start out claiming he was doing anything special. At first, he was just doing things with reasonable lab procedure and proper supplies and equipment, whereas the competition was dumb kids throwing in mystery ingredients. They decided to hype him up as some kind of chemical genius much later in the show.

What kind of a genius chemist needs to steal methylamine? You can buy urea or other ammonia sources as fertilizer, ice-melter, or diesel engine emission cleaner in practically unlimited amounts (relative to the demands of drug production) without attracting attention. Methanol is also not hard to come by. If you can't make your own methylamine, you're not much of a chemist.

So they give him the practical problems of a typical non-chemist trying to make meth from a recipe, on the one hand, like dependence on controlled precursors, and on the other hand, they're hyping him up as a genius chemist.

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>>7782126
You could use the example of William James Sidis, sure he was intelligent and knew lots, but the application of that vast amount of knowledge was poor. He was intelligent, not useful. Memory/knowledge is all well and good, it is the application of aforementioned memory/knowledge that actually means something.

>>7783244
autism, the post

>>7783329
brainlet, the post

>>7783244

But if he had used a different source wouldn't the compound change and he would not have been able to achieve 99%? Walter would have had to change his entire procedure to try to achieve 99% and since he's using a different source that may not have been possible. That was the whole point of getting 99% since addicts would want even more and they would do anything to buy more.

>>7783346
>if he had used a different source wouldn't the compound change
Chemistry more serious.

It doesn't matter where the atoms come from (with the exception of some special cases involving differences of isotopes), only what arrangement they're in at the end.

>>7783392
This is very true.

>>7783392
>>7783346
...and as for the "99%" and addicts going crazy for it:
a) the purity is not particularly important, what matters is what the impurities are,
b) 99% is not a high level of purity, particularly for a drug, and
c) addicts' concern with purity is generally in regards to the material the drug is cut with, and the possibility that other drugs have been substituted for what the dealer claims to be selling. They're not going to be blown away by ultra-pure meth, they're just happy when they get something as-labelled and unadulterated.

Clean meth isn't very hard to make, but people who are responsible and competent usually have better ways to make money than to commit crime, so a lot of the product on the street is made by people who don't know what they're doing or are taking nasty shortcuts.

>>7783253
>projecting your insecurities about not being intelligent

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>>7783498
>projecting your insecurities about not being intelligent
>attempting to dominate on the internet
Gosh, you're a mighty keyboard warrior.

In one of the episodes you can see he has an award for being part of a team that won a nobel prize.

>>7783244
This, plus the thorium salt tube furnace bullshit in season 1. The entire show seems like the writers spent a half hour on erowid and called it good.

>The whole difficulty of making money from meth is in selling it
Theres a little more to it than that, but basically. At the very least, most clandestine chemistry involves less actual chemistry than chemical engineering does. Supply and distribution logistics are positively nightmarish, and like 90% of your job is account executive. Stuff like dependence on controlled precursors definitely shouldn't be downplayed.

It's just not a job suited for the absentminded professor/awkward genius type. You go in to work every day and have to face the fact that a retarded socialite could do your job better than you

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>>7783244
>Random trailer chimps make meth in their kitchens.

this 2bh.

If Walt was actually smart he'd be synthesising and selling RCs over the deep web

pic related

not even illegal yet

>>7782836
Not even any vinegar? Mayo is tangy

>>7784756
but then there would not be a tv show made for normies

>>7783244
You know, I always wondered about why he didn't synthesize his own methyl amine.

>>7784756
RC = Research Chemical?

>>7784832
PLOT HOLE
L
O
T

H
O
L
E

>>7784832
Probably because if they just bought all the ingredients for it it might tip off the cops/DEA on who was doing it. By just stealing the methlyamine it's untraceable.

Plus they got to rob a fucking train for it, which if you have any neurons not crippled by autism is obviously the real reason they did it they way they did.