Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments

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1. philipkglassNov 2024
   I loved doing chemistry experiments and demos at home as a kid. I had books like the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments [1] but this is a modern guide that I would gladly recommend:

   Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture by Robert Bruce Thompson

   https://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Guide-Home-Chemistry-Expe...

   [1] https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/Brent_GBC.p...

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2. sciencemadnessMay 2020
   When I was a kid in the 1980s it didn't seem harder than my other hobby, programming a Commodore 64. The relative difficulty is probably higher now, and of course your friends/neighbors/postal carrier may be more paranoid that anyone with chemistry equipment is a "drug cook."

   My hands-on work with chemistry started by growing crystals when I was in the second grade. By third grade I was making very simple fireworks. I remember showing some of them off to classmates at my birthday party when I turned 9. By the time I was 10 I had taken over half of the family garage for my home lab.

   I double majored in chemistry and computer science in college. I went on to graduate school afterward, working with computational chemistry and HPC. That's where I faced up to the reality of the job market. I didn't want to be an overworked, underpaid postdoc. Competition for academic tenure is brutal. The job prospects for non-academic chemists did not look promising. Since I had already been writing software for 15 years at that point, it was easy to transition to software as a career when I was done with school. I still love chemistry and would work in it or an allied field if it offered pay/perks comparable to software development.

   Even software-in-the-field-of-chemistry underpays: when I started applying for software jobs Schrödinger made me an offer, but the pay was a third less than an entry level backend developer position for a West Coast startup. And they wanted me to relocate to New York City at my own expense.

   Even though I am glum about the employment prospects for chemists in the USA, I still love chemistry and encourage any interest I find. If you are looking to encourage a child -- or even take it up as a hobby yourself -- a good place to start is Robert Bruce Thompson's Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments:

   http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596514921.do

   For more advanced hobbyists there are still a few forums around like that on Sciencemadness. (I think that Sciencemadness is probably the best one in English, but I am biased.)

   Forum: https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/

   You'll need to send an email requesting an account if you want to sign up. Trying to keep up with playing whack-a-mole against automated link-spam bots was too exhausting.

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3. billswiftFeb 2012
   The article mostly ranges from silliness to fear-mongering, but at least it ends on a rational note:

   "Allow me to translate Ms Wilderman's words into plain English," wrote Robert Bruce Thompson, the author of Illustrated Guide To Home Chemistry Experiments. "'Mr Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals, so I'll abuse my power to steal his property and shut him down.' There's a word for what just happened in Massachusetts. Tyranny."

   "Robert Bruce Thompson, the author of Illustrated Guide To Home Chemistry Experiments", also the author of PC Hardware in a Nutshell and other O'Reilly books.

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