Why you gotta be so reactive? Just a little bit of water and you have to explode? It makes it really inconvenient to handle you. All I wanna do is caress your sulfury goodness. Well, maybe from across the room. Or on further reflection, from Brazil.
What? The moisture in the fucking air is too much to handle? Why you gonna waft that smoky shit my way? It smells worse than colon maggots marinating in beano. Ugh. I’d rather have gone to the Holstein Pie-Eating Contest than work with you.
I didn’t even look at you funny, and you’ve still eaten through the bottlecap? And drained down the side eating up the manufacturer’s label? WTF did it ever do to you? Adhere to your glass bottle too tightly, inciting jealousy and poisonous exhalations of chlorine?
Dammit, I’m never gonna ask what the halogens ever did to get called ‘noble’ again.
Oh yeah, did I mention that our facilities department turned off the airflow to the hood we were working in while this was going on? :mad: Link for anyone who thinks I need to go on some meds.
OK, now that’s grounds for a criminal complaint. I’d file on whoever did that in a second. At the very least get their incomtetent ass canned. That kind of thing can kill people.
Halogens aren’t noble. They’re sluts. Especially that tart Fluorine!
The noble gases are the ones at the far end of the periodic table, that don’t combine with ANYTHING except in laboratory conditions: Helium, Neon, Argon, Xenon, etc.
I know. Have you seen the way Fluorine behaves near any Silicon? Scandalous!
Seriously, if it really is that moisture sensitive, why are you not using a glovebox, even if it is just one of those little disposable ones? Or transferring it via sacrificial cannula or something?
From the website, it looks as if this is realted to the oxychlorides, like thionyl chloride and phosphorus oxychloride. Nasty substances – they dissolved neodymium salts in them in an effort to make a liquid (rather than solid0state) neodymium laser. Turns out that the liquids are incredibly reactive, and can cause pulmonary edema if you inhale them. A spill of 2 ml of thionyl chloride (the amount in one of those minitubes of Krazy Glue) once forced the evacuation of a building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, I understand.
OOoh! I actually like thionyl chloride! I love the way you can hear it sizzle when it drips into whatever you’ve got pooled in the reaction flask. Tszzzz! Tszzz! Tszzz!
There are some chemicals that crawl up your nose and insert themselves deep into your sinuses such that you will smell them all day long (even though they are technically long gone) and wish for the sweet release of death. If chlorosulfonic acid smells anything like benzyl chloroformate or methacryloyl chloride, you have my sympathies.
As a side note, it always amused me that in cell biology literature, a protein that binds to many other proteins is often referred to as “promiscuous.” One day I hope to write a review article titled IRS-1: The cheapest whore in the cell.
I actually routinely run a reaction that is performed neat, but you can kinda think of thionyl chloride as being the solvent. I freaking hate the stuff. Nothing like heating thionyl chloride at 70.
Other bad chemicals: Pyridine, thiophenol, ethyl acrylate, acrylonitrile, chlorosulfonyl chloride…I’m an organic chemist, so don’t get me started on nasty organic chemicals.
I never had any great problem with chlorosulfonic acid. I used many kilos sulfonylating N-acetylbenzylamine, and although CSA does tend to explode on contact with water, this behaviour is moderated enormously once your substrate is in there. It also comes in really cool aluminium cans.
XeF2 is a stable commercially available solid.
The compound I hate using the most: hydrazoic acid. Occasionally unavoidably used in Mitsunobu reactions or Schmidt-type ring expansions. The headache the merest whiff gives in indescribable.
