The Plain Chemist

Ambros frowned. His counsel had called him Doctor — they had arranged for him to be called Mister. Confidently Ambros went on to explain how he, the plain chemist, had been pushed along by a two-pronged authority. One prong was the G.B. Chem, which had schemed since 1936 for a greater and greater buna production the other prong was the Farben board, in whose older, sophisticated company he had found himself. 

His name, the man said, was Ambros, and he had no rank or serial number. He was a "plain chemist." Although he was a German, he had many French friends in fact, he had lived at Ludwigshafen, only forty kilometers from the French border, which made him very nearly a Frenchman. 

By the end of the seventeenth century, then, scientists were not really any closer to enumerating the elements than were the Greek philosophers. Yet a hundred years later the British chemist John Dalton (1766-1844) wrote a textbook that outlined a recognizably modern atomic theory and gave a list of elements that, while still very incomplete and sometimes plain wrong, is in content and in spirit a clear precursor to today s tabulation of the hundred and more elements. Why had our understanding of the elements changed so fast ... 

Chapter 1 of Volume 15 deals with density functional theory (DFT). As with many quantum mechanical calculations, it is easy to become wrapped up in the theory and lose sight of the chemical phenomena we are trying to explain with the calculations. Equally important to how the numerical calculations are done is how the results can be interpreted to gain chemical insight. Dr. F. Matthias Bickelhaupt and Professor Evert Jan Baerends show how the results of DFT calculations can be analyzed to open up chemical understanding. This chapter illustrates that the plain numbers from a quantum mechanical calculation can be interpreted to be conceptually useful to chemists. In many ways, this chapter evokes memories of the famous way Professor Roald Hoffmann has extracted information from extended Hiickel molecular orbital calculations. 

A cocoa butter CRM has been prepared in the course of this project in order to facilitate the work of the analytical chemist [16]. The CRM IRMM 801 aims to ensure a high comparability of the analytical results achieved. It was used as a calibrant for the establishment of a standardised database containing data from more than 74 different CBs and 94 CBEs. The latter resulted in the application of a simple equation by testing laboratories detecting CBEs in mixture with CB and in plain... 

You have just purchased or stolen the most comprehensive and detailed book on the underground production of ecstasy, metham-phetamine and psychedelic amphetamines ever published. Strike (your host) is an ecstasy and amphetamine chemist from Texas who used to be very frustrated with the lack of common-sense information about the production of amphetamines. Strike remedied this for Strike and now Strike is gonna remedy it for you, too. This book is packed with the latest street methods for making amphetamines - written in plain English with the detail that no other book can offer. 

METHOD 1 This section is going to be as thoroughly helpful to those interested in X production as it will be to those interested in amphetamine production. The process is known as the Knoeve-nagel-Walter condensation which can turn a substituted benzal-dehyde such as piperonal (X) or plain old benzaldehyde (speed) into an intermediate called a p-nitropropene. This intermediate can then be transformed into MDA (Benzedrine for speed) or MD-P2P (P2P for speed) depending on the capabilities of the chemist. 

Technically, the chemist could avoid the complex glassware apparatus of this procedure for a more crude approach [104]. This report shows some dudes de-methylating an amphetamine with concentrated HCI in a pressure cooker. A similar approach with good yields was also employed in ref. 83 and should work as well or better on guaiacol. Hydroiodic acid or hydrobromic acid will work better than hydrochloric acid but, you know, whatever floats the chemist s boat. To do this the chemist can just plain reflux HI or HBr with the guaiacol for a few hours and process as before or she can use HI, HBr or HCI and place the reactants in a pipe bomb for a few hours. 

The problem with the Arrhenius definitions is that they are specific to one particular solvent, water. When chemists studied nonaqueous solvents, such as liquid ammonia, they found that a number of substances showed the same pattern of acid-base behavior, but plainly the Arrhenius definitions could not be used. A major advance in our understanding of what it means to be an acid or a base came in 1923, when two chemists working independently, Thomas Lowry in England and Johannes Bronsted in Denmark, came up with the same idea. Their insight was to realize that the key process responsible for the properties of acids and bases was the transfer of a proton (a hydrogen ion) from one substance to another. The Bronsted-Lowry definition of acids and bases is as follows ... 

The preceding analysis only too plainly shows the wretched state of our laboratory in Mexico, after having been for thirty years under the direction of so distinguished a chemist as M. Elhuyar, the discoverer of wolfram and cerium[ ]. It is true that under the old government, this savant found himself obliged to become a man of business, undoubtedly much against his inclination for it is impossible that he who has once imbibed a taste for science can ever abandon it (5). 

To make working with such extreme numbers easier, chemists turn to scientific notation, which is a special kind of exponential notation. Exponential notation simply means writing a number in a way that includes exponents. In scientific notation, every number is written as the product of two numbers, a coefficient and a power of 10. In plain old exponential notation, a coefficient can be any value of a number multiplied by a power with a base of 10 (such as 10" ). But scientists have rules for coefficients in scientific notation. In scientific notation, the coefficient is always at least 1 and always less than 10. For example, the coefficient could be 7, 3.48, or 6.0001. 

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