"Chemophobia" or "The art of ignoring science"
One of the chilling shifts in freedoms that have slowly occurred over time is the effective destruction of home hobbyist scientists. One of the hardest hit has been the home chemist, for reasons that should be immediately to any reader... what would your first thought be if you found out your scruffy-looking and anti-social neighbor had dozens of not hundreds of pieces of laboratory glassware? Let's say you were watering your begonias at the border of your property and his, and you just happened to look in his open window and see what looks like the alcohol still from M.A.S.H. combined with a Borg cube. What would your first reaction be? Right. Either "drug lab" or "bomb lab". It would almost never occur to anyone that there might be a totally harmless reason why someone has multiple distillation apparatus in their possession. Especially when there is no actual NEED for chemical experimentation, such as experiments to make perfume or chewing gum, when commercial alternatives exist, sometimes at far higher quality and far lower cost than DIY.The chemophobia that's put a damper on home science has also invaded America's classrooms, where hands-on labs are being replaced by liability-proof teacher demonstrations with the explicit message Don't try this at home. A guide for teachers of grades 7 through 12 issued by the American Chemical Society in 2001 makes the prospect of an hour in the lab seem fraught with peril: "Every chemical, without exception, is hazardous. Did you know that oxygen is poisonous if inhaled at a concentration a bit greater than its natural concentration in the air?" More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called "You Be the Chemist," created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like "How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?"
"A lot of schools don't have chemistry labs anymore," explains CEF educational coordinator Laurel Brent. "We want to give kids lessons that tie in to their real-world experiences without having them deal with a lot of strange chemicals in bottles that have big long names."
WTF?!?
To Bill Nye, the host of television's Emmy award-winning "Bill Nye: The Science Guy" on PBS in the 1990s, unreasonable fears about chemicals and home experimentation reflect a distrust of scientific expertise taking hold in society at large. "People who want to make meth will find ways to do it that don't require an Erlenmeyer flask. But raising a generation of people who are technically incompetent is a recipe for disaster."
"To criminalize the necessary materials of discovery is one of the worst things you can do in a free society," says Shawn Carlson, a 1999 MacArthur fellow and founder of the Society for Amateur Scientists. "The Mr. Coffee machine that every Texas legislator has near his desk has three violations of the law built into it: a filter funnel, a Pyrex beaker, and a heating element. The laws against meth should be the deterrent to making it - not criminalizing activities that train young people to appreciate science."
OK, I admit it. I used a chemistry set in my 5th grade school to make a moderately impressive "flashpoof green stinkcloud" purely by extremely lucky semi-random combination of bits and pieces in the science kit. I say semi-random because we (my co-conspirator friend) were trying to use scientific reasoning to create the most volatile combination we could create in the hopes that it would "do something cool". Not only did it make a rather shocking "PFFFFFFOOOOOT" sound but the cloud of DARK GREEN GAS that floated up to the ceiling was damn impressive. There were legends also of an experiment performed by the two science-nerdiest guys in the school, wherein they apparently got a combo that created a 20 foot high flamejet that lasted about 3 seconds (it is rumored to have scorched the ceiling tiles of the lab), but they actually used open flame so they were clearly trying for a more combustible approach. I learned some important lessons from this:
-Chemical reactions are not to be underestimated, ESPECIALLY when you KNOW you cannot accurately predict what will occur.
-Chicks who do not appear to dig nerds do in fact (at least momentarily) dig nerds that know how to make rushing air PFFFOOOOT noises and death- metal clouds of dark green hate out of common components from a school science kit.
-Teachers back in my day were a hell of a lot more liberal and free. Now, I did all this while the teacher was out of the room (naturally), but the teacher knew that I was using the kit and once the teacher heard about my cloud of death she made me stop.
These days this never would have happened, because for one thing the teacher would never have left the room due to liability issues with the school's insurance policy. Speaking of that policy, the science kit would have long since been neutered of anything remotely useful in science experiments, and therefore fairly safe and sanitized, so the teacher not being in the room is moot. For many, many years there has been a gradual "dumbing down" of school science kits, especially the higher level chemistry kits, so these days it would be extraordinarily difficult for a kid to come away with worse than a paper cut. This dumbing down likely occurred for a few reasons, chief of which is fear on the part of people without any chemistry knowledge that somehow little Timmy could find an undiscovered and novel way to combine ingredients that results in Timmy blowing his face off or setting fire to the house.
Doubt me? Here is a fascinating social experiment you can try. Get a highly non-volatile powder that is extremely inflammable, such as baby power. Put some in a spoon. Grab a victim that is NOT a chemist by profession or a recent college student with a Chem 101 requirement. Look really excited and say "Here is some baby powder... now watch THIS!" and proceed to lower a lit match into the powder while advancing on your subject with a demonic grin on your face. Your victim will virtually always start backpedaling BIGTIME, like it is a stick of dynamite. Fun variation include dipping the flame into the powder, then grandly saying "...and here is a SINGLE DROP of milk" as you add a drop of milk to the powder, then even more grandly say "... and NOW!!!" as you lower the flame onto the powder that has a drop of milk added to it.
I have done variations of this for years. If people think you are a "science geek" they seem to be prepared to believe ab-so-fucking-lutely ANYTHING, no matter how stupidly improbable. I think maybe twice in my life I did this and the subject just stood there, waiting for the cool thing they were supposed to see, because they KNEW what I was doing made absolutely no sense. Turns out these people played around with science experiments a lot when they were young, and were "almost 100% sure" I was full of shit. One chem major once offered to help me find a combination in the kitchen that WOULD do some spectacular effect. :)
Side note for the electronics geeks; this works for you too. Pull a circuit board out of an old mouse and walk towards your victim while grinning and saying "hey, you know that 'Klingon agonizer' from Star Trek?". You can also touch people with the really large capacitors the size of a stick of dynamite and they will flip out. I twisted two resistors and an LED together once and told someone it was a "microwave waveguide" that would cook their arm from the inside out using ambient cell phone radiation. Fucking n00bz...
The father of three young children, Shawn Carlson understands parental concerns about safety. But he believes that the exhilaration of risk has always been a powerful factor in engaging kids' interest in science, and should be actively encouraged - while minimizing the physical hazards. "We can get rid of most of the actual dangers, but it's important that we preserve the perception of danger in science," he says. "When I do experiments with my own kids, I'm more than happy to let them believe that if they're not careful, something could happen to them. It adds that extra element of 'my fate is in my hands - but if I do this right, everything will be fine.'"
The conservatives and the ignorant ARE right. Chemistry is not safe. You can get hurt. But taking all the risk out of life is even more dangerous and ultimately impossible. When I was young I did some stupid things ranging from dumb to rude to inconvenient to criminal to dangerous to life- threatening. It's part of growing up and learning. If you try to take all the risk out of living you're not only creating a race of bored couch potatoes, but you're also creating people who will do stupid things like mixing chlorine and ammonia while cleaning the toilet, and who will panic when things get out of hand.
Play is a preparation for adulthood, it teaches common sense around danger. And common sense in these matters is something that seems to be lacking more and more these days. In fact, to take the term "common sense" literally, which could be described as knowledge so basic that it is expected that virtually anyone should possess, I guess when you accidentally mix toilet bowl cleaner with laundry bleach and it starts hissing and making horrible fumes you should panic and run around in a circle like a chicken with your head cut off. That would be the COMMON reaction these days.
People who haven't had small accidents when they were young will have big accidents when they are grown up.
The problem is the day of "acceptable risk taking" is over. See, the big difference between me and little Timmy that didn't survive the accident with the chemistry set is that Timmy's parents have now lobbied Congress or local authorities to outlaw the very thing that killed their kids (probably becomes known as "the Timmy act of 2006").
Until we begin to accept again that there is indeed a level of acceptable losses, we'll forever be stuck in this overly-sterilized world. Lessons are learned through taking risks, and without the ability to take risks and learn those lessons people will grow up more ignorant and in the end more of a risk to themselves and those around them. You'll never truly know how long it takes to decelerate from 60mph until the first time you slam on your brakes, no matter how many times you've read it in a book. You'll never know how hot the stove actually is until the first time you burn yourself as a child, no matter how many times your parents have told you to not touch. I didn't fully respect the power of a bottled gas until I filled up an empty 2 liter bottle with fumes from my Bic lighter, put the flame near the opening, and vented the flaming gas onto the hand that was holding the lighter (removing all hair too). Now I do. :)
The common refrain from those who wish to legislate every "dangerous" thing out of existence is that they do not want the potential for abuse to ever be realized, no matter how unlikely the threat truly is. For those who fear science the internet is like their worst nightmare come true... radioactive isotopes, burning lasers that shoot 14 miles, uranium, heavy water and so on. Because these people aren't selling something conventionally understood by the "simple man" like black powder firework kits, they believe some vendors are putting them at risk by selling things that they don't necessarily want their neighbor to have convenient mail-order access to, thank you very much. The problem is fundamentally that they have no understanding at all of what is and is not dangerous, and of the things that are dangerous what is and is not practical. Is it likely a person will be randomly attacked on the street with a cutting laser? No. If someone attacks someone else with a cutting laser, is it the fault of the laser vendor? No, it is the fault of the idiot who decided to seriously misuse the laser. Hell, in most cases there is nothing to be concerned about but there is a major buzzword that sets people off. Uranium is a GREAT example. If you want to kill somebody with the uranium sold on the internet and in scientific supply houses your best bet would be to bludgeon them to death with it; uranium is heavy stuff, like lead. Getting a critical reaction going is very difficult, and somebody would likely notice if your neighbor started running a centrifuge farm or a bunch of calutrons to enrich his uranium (the power company, for one; they already spy on their customers to catch people running hydroponics farms, as part of the "War On Some Drugs". They'd notice your uranium-enriching operation).
Unfortunately, another common refrain to justify this is that shutting down businesses who sell potentially deadly materials is not limiting my freedoms, but protecting my life. I learned a phrase from a non-US resident that has stayed with me for a while now and perfectly sums up these kind of situations:
"You and every other coward who values false security over liberty.
Congratulations, you and your ilk are killing America."
These people are willing to impoverish future generations in exchange for a false sense of security, and what makes it really sad is they don't even realize that they are not only no safer, but have made the US a stupider, less informed, less educated place.
This attitude that because something CAN be abused it WILL be abused is dumb, the attitude that the only solution is to remove the temptation for abuse could be catastrophic for future freedoms or advancements, and the idea that everyone is out to get everyone else is essentially media hysteria. If everyone is out to get everyone, do they really need a chemistry kit and some Pyrex glassware... or would a blunt rock work even better? Do we need cutting lasers to wage war against out neighbor... or would a pitchfork do much better? I see no calls for a nationwide ban on pitchforks. If a guy uses a burning laser to wound a child at a school playground you can expect to see a call for a nationwide ban on ALL lasers without stringent licensing. If a guy goes nuts on a school playground with a pitchfork you will see tons of studies as to why he is such a deranged individual, and nary a call for a pitchfork-free America.
A provision in the 2002 Homeland Security Act mandates background checks and licensing requirements for model-rocket enthusiasts, on the grounds that the largely ammonium perchlorate-based fuel is an explosive. The Justice Department has argued that terrorists could utilize model rockets to shoot down commercial airliners. A bill pending in both houses of Congress would empower the Department of Homeland Security to regulate sales of ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer that Timothy McVeigh used to make the Oklahoma City bomb. "We finally have bipartisan support and encouragement from the chemical industry on this, which is important, because we've seen what can happen when these materials fall into the wrong hands," says US representative Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania), who is sponsoring the House bill. "As we move forward, we're going to be taking a very close look at other chemicals that should be regulated."
"You and every other coward who values false security over liberty.
Congratulations, you and your ilk are killing America."
Only pirates will own mp3s, only hackers will own compilers, and only terrorists will own home chemistry sets.
I started with an example of your seedy-looking neighbor having a ton of lab-grade glassware. Well, who decides who is "seedy looking"? Popular opinion? That always worked so well during the witch hunts, which usually targeted the most unpopular members of the community (rather than the real witches/terrorists/etc). The Spanish Inquisition, one of organized religion's proudest moments, is estimated to have resulted in around 2 million victims, and you can reasonably assume a very large majority of those were burned to death just because they were the unsocial ones that didn't fit in with the group (or worse yet, they told some community leader to fuck off). Nerds can make for really unpopular neighbors. They're the ones who'd rather sit at a computer and do god knows what nefarious things than take part in the community gossip games. Even if their activities are not actually nefarious they're labeled as "addicts" or similar veiled insult.
I'm trying to keep my personal opinions from excessively coloring this issue, but I do want to touch on the belief among some that the government WANTS this kind of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) to be perpetuated. There has been examples in history of a government having a definite interest in keeping the people dumb, or at least educated only in a fashion suitable for the government. Someone who does not know how to create a problem is no problem. One could say that we are not suffering a "dumbing down" but a "restriction of knowledge". "Dumbing-down" is the widespread acceptance of extremely oversimplified models as the entire truth of the matter, like genetics/eugenics in the early century (didn't end well), evolutionary theory (didn't end well... for college applicants from Kansas anyhow), and economic theory in the 90s (I think what some like to call "the internet bubble bursting" should be more accurately termed "the bunch of stupid investors crash").
If most people just avoid the science, it doesn't really harm the people or the science (though it doesn't particularly help either). What is a serious problem is the masses embracing science and getting it wrong. You can go out and buy caustics like sodium hydroxide or calcium hydroxide from the local hardware store. You can create chlorine gas quite easily using common household products. You can buy lethal poisons almost anywhere. It would be far, far better if more people had practical chemical experience because at the moment Joe Q. Public is mostly totally unaware of the risks he runs. He is afraid of "acid" because he does not know that acidity alone is harmless, but he knows that acid can dissolve a shark in six seconds in any Hollywood movie. He is unafraid of bleach, caustics, solvents, and any alkali which comes in a brightly colored plastic box, even though these items have just as much potential for harm.
How can the home chemist survive?
One key to working as a DIY chemist, says Matthew Ernst, the 25-year-old host of Sciencemadness, is realizing how many useful chemicals are still available as household products or items designed for specialized niches. Silver nitrate, for example, can be found at potters' supply stores, where it lends raku glazes an uncanny luster. "Amateur chemists become compulsive label readers," Ernst says. "Many compounds are available if the chemist is willing to split his shopping between the paint store, hardware store, ceramics supplier, gardening center, welding supplier, feed store, and metal recycler."
The increasingly strict regulatory climate has driven a wedge of paranoia between young chemists and their potential mentors. "I don't tell anyone about what I do at home," writes one anonymous high schooler on Sciencemadness.org, an online forum for amateur scientists. "A lot of ignorant people at my school will just spread rumors about me ... The teacher will hear about them and I will get into legal trouble ... I have so much glassware at my house, any excuse will not cut it. So I keep my mouth shut."
In short, start reading labels, educate yourself using older chemistry books that still reflect a desire for knowledge, and don't tell a fucking soul. Also, try not to blow up any buildings... it makes it really hard for the rest of us.
--Don
(C) 2006 Don Stratton
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