Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride (2010)
125 comments
·March 31, 2025ChrisMarshallNY
genocidicbunny
There's something reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's style to Derek's "Things I Won't Work With" series.
Bluestein
This makes the rounds here every so oft, and I always read it again, seconded ...
stuartjohnson12
> Hangzhou Sage Chemical Company. They offer it in 100g, 500g, and 1 kilo amounts, which is interesting, because I don't think a kilo of dioxygen difluoride has ever existed. Someone should call them on this - ask for the free shipping, and if they object, tell them Amazon offers it on this item. Serves 'em right. Morons.
Gold
s0rce
Some chemical suppliers seem to have autogenerated items, some/many are non-sense and I guess they just hope that you find something and they can make it? I found the example below a while ago but they have since removed it.
ahazred8ta
The argon powder is still there. Great for Apr01. https://www.nanochemazone.com/argon-powder/ -- https://web.archive.org/web/20250331192328/https://www.nanoc...
LorenPechtel
Is argon powder actually impossible? Of course it couldn't exist as pictured but below 80K does anything prohibit it?
HPsquared
Off topic, but I Googled "argon powder" and the AI overview thing hallucinated that the term means metal powders used for 3D printing, stored under argon to prevent oxidation. There are no actual results using the term in that sense, as far as I can tell.
Google search should not be returning an incorrect hallucination that sounds plausible ahead of the actual search results. It's so confidently wrong. Google is SO BAD NOW at searching for specific expressions.
leoc
Someone finding themselves obliged to make and deliver a kilo of this stuff would be a strong opening for a shounen manga.
JoshTriplett
More likely an isekai story, for variety over the usual truck.
wiredfool
Absolute classic of the genera
At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature.
If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic.perihelions
Previously:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dioxygen%20difluoride
And others in the series:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=things%20won%27t%20work
https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...
High overlap with: (rocket fuels)
thedanbob
I hated high school chemistry but both this series and that book are among my favorite scientific reads.
jandrewrogers
One of the fun parts of chemistry is that most chemicals that ordinarily exist are quite far from having the most extreme possible properties that you can ascribe to a chemical. It doesn’t really matter what the property is. This is almost by definition, as “extreme properties” is roughly a synonym for “extremely unfavorable thermodynamics”.
Nonetheless, chemists are obsessed with these because in theory you can engineer chemicals with completely implausible, or at the very least counter-intuitive, properties in a lab if you can figure out how to do it. It is the equivalent of extreme performance-engineering geekery in software. You do it because you can, not necessarily because you have a use case.
Topics like “theoretical limits of high explosive power” [0] and a lot of other things that will put you on a government list are something chemists definitely geek out on.
IlikeKitties
Not a Chemist but reminded me about this article: https://gizmodo.com/chlorine-trifluoride-the-chemical-that-s...
> Just to get the ball rolling, here’s a few of the more unusual things chlorine trifluoride is known to set fire to on contact: glass, sand, asbestos, rust, concrete, people, pyrex, cloth, and the dreams of children…
borski
He wrote that one too, heh: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...
It’s linked in the article
QuesnayJr
That's a different article. The Gizmodo article has a byline of "Melissa" and apparently is originally from TodayIFoundOut.com.
groby_b
So, might be "inspiration". I suspect "Melissa" did not "find out today" - chlorine trifluoride isn't exactly the stuff you discuss at your average dinner table.
You need a whole bunch of expertise to write about it. Gizmodo does not usually have this expertise, but its writers do usually recognize snappy writing that might go viral.
btilly
Derek Lowe also did chlorine trifluoride: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo....
CommieBobDole
"It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers"
gmueckl
This is a quote from "Ignition!" The particular quoted passage from that book is one of the highlights of the unique ironic tone the author used to describe real and dangerous chemical research.
The book firmly establishes its tone with the first two pictures at the front: a successful rocket engine test and the remaining rubble of the same test stand after a failed test.
LorenPechtel
Makes me wonder if it could burn a fire elemental. :)
They seem to model any chemical damage as "acid" and fire elementals aren't immune to acid so I would be inclined to say it would.
speed_spread
Knowing that rust can burn should make the joy of a few Linux maintainers.
GarnetFloride
The Rocketdyne Tripropellant rocket had great specific impulse, one of the best. But-- there are many reasons it never caught on: one of the byproducts was FOOF, along with other things like hydrofluoric acid.
the8472
The line between serious proposals and shitposting is thin.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19700022572 https://x.com/ToughSf/status/1769958999279927787
fweimer
Hmm, maybe it was part of NAIL SPIKE? https://reactormag.com/a-tall-tail/
samplatt
SO happy to finally see this get mentioned in one of the yearly FOOF threads on this site <3
khuey
The 50s and 60s were a wild time.
rbanffy
Sounds OK in vacuum...
Sharlin
If you want to actually get momentum out of a rocket, the reaction products are going to touch the combustion chamber walls and the nozzle. While film cooling can help with minimizing heat transfer from the hot stuff, I doubt it’s enough to keep this stuff from eating your engine from the inside.
GarnetFloride
Yeah, that was one of the downsides.
They actually did build a test article and ran the engine a few times, enough to gather the data but it indeed ate the engine, and the concrete and the rocks and coated it all with explosive powder.
They did imagine coating the proposed launch complex with quartz but it quickly became obvious it was going to be way too expensive to actually build.
shadowgovt
"These modern SpaceX kids and their fancy reusables. Back in my day, when we went to space, we used the whole engine!"
null
blantonl
This guy's writing style makes him a worldwide treasure, and probably inspired a few young chemists.
I'll always read and re-read his blog posts when they are posted here.
relwin
YouTube chemists visit Dr. Kraus' fluorine lab in Germany: https://youtu.be/UzIH6raTxyE?si=74Pfn0i8Whq09Iim
RandomBacon
Bit rot: the article links to http://www.lateralscience.co.uk which is now just an advertisement for online gambling.
philipkglass
Here's a good snapshot of that page as it appeared in 2010, when this article linked to it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100430182802/http://www.latera...
sortalongo
> 433 kcal/mole
For reference, TNT is 1kcal/g. This is 6.2 kcal/g.
moffkalast
Less of a FOOF and more of a BOOM
rbanffy
I remember this article and I'm laughing before I even click the link. What a delightful read. Even more delightful I've never encountered this molecule.
> fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature. But that's how you get it to react with oxygen to make a product that's worse in pretty much every way.
That kind of prose is why I love reading this chap's stuff.