Chemistry

A word of warning: Chemists often seem to have different ideas about what "nontoxic" means than the rest of us. A lot of chemistry experiments can pollute the air, result in water pollution, or have long term negative health effects on the chemist due to vapors. I'm working on finding a good sourcebook for both toxicology and ecological ramifications of certain chemicals but it will take me some time to find. For now, I would recommend Home Safe Home by Debra Lynn Dadd. Also, Superman's Not Coming by Erin Brockovich. It honestly seems that after swimming around in Chemistry long enough you get past the "holy shit everything in this discipline is poisonous!" hangup and go a little too hard in the other direction. Probably why they don't teach the real deal in school, 'cause they don't want the students to blow themselves up or grow new limbs or something.

DHMO The ramifications of DHMO in our day-to-day lives have not been fully researched and it is a highly dangerous substance under many common conditions. Please protest to ban it. Contact your politicians.

Books

A couple disappointments: Must Know High School Chemistry by Moore and Langley, and Chemistry: The Central Science. They're bad. Just bad! If you have to read them as part of your course load I am sorry.

• 10/7/22 Henley's Twentieth Century Book of Recipes, Formulas and Processes, edited by Gardner Dexter Hiscox - I gleefully get to inform you that some of these are extremely poisonous, or otherwise inadvisable. Gleeful, because for real, most stuff in Chemistry IS poisonous and the watered-down versions of Chemistry in school don't teach you anything. But most of these experiments/recipes are really cool and safe. Have fun.
• 12/29/22 Newly Revised Recipes for Art and Craft Materials by Helen Roney Sattler - contains a large assortment of really cool recipes for DIYing things like fixative, paint, colored fire, crayons and more
• 2/16/23 The Elements by Theodore Gray - the guide I wish I had when I was first studying the elements. Explains stuff about each you wouldn't find out unless you were a total geek and thankfully he is.
• 8/17/22 Theodore Gray's Completely Mad Science Experiments You Can Do At Home, But Probably Shouldn't - the book I wish I had when I first learned Chemistry. It is profoundly unsafe! Huzzah! And by the way so is being in a kitchen or running a household but since those are more common, those aren't really paid attention to dangerwise. The author has also written a website, Periodic Table Table, thank heavens. ***Please note: please do not actually do any of these experiments! Please! Risk is like drugs, know which you can experiment with (i.e. caffeine, sugar) and which you can't walk away from without serious damage***
• Currently trying to find a good way to buy an older version of Chemistry: The Central Science. It seems to be the best intro text on the market but I don't know yet. EDIT 5/30/21 I bought it! Hooray for old used textbooks on Better World Books dot Com! Will confirm if good. 6/26/21 It certainly can teach some chemistry but by the time you'd be done with it you'd probably hate chemistry, yourself, or both. It is extremely boring and has many practice problems, also boring. Currently looking for something better.
• The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry by Larry Gonick
• New 4/18/22: Barron's Painless Chemistry - I skimmed it. It looks good from a basic glance. I don't know if it is actually good. What little I could tell about it is that it seems to be a far more lightweight text than The Central Science and as such not as good of a primer.
• New 3/13/22: The Elements (series) by Benchmark Books (Marshall Cavendish). Each one of these covers a different Element and provides a nice overview of the Element in greater depth than books that try to cover them all in one book. Still not as much detail as I would like, but definitely a good start. I do want to point out that since the Elements are so important in Chemistry, it's a little embarrassing how little in-depth information on them is actually easy to find, so learning as much as you can about each is well worth your while. These are your ingredients for the whole universe, and much like how watching Good Eats will make you a better cook, knowing your Elements will make you a better scientist.
• A Kids' Guide to the Periodic Table by Edward P. Zovinko, PhD, and Ross A Clark, PhD - your standard run-of-the-mill "here are the elements" type of chemistry book, but entertaining and not too full of blather
• The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Elements by Lisa Congdon - Another "here are the elements" chemistry book, and entertaining. Elements are like cooking ingredients for everything in life; the more you study them the better. Kind of like studying anatomy if you're trying to become a doctor; you do not want to mess up with your knowledge of this topic.
• It's Elemental by Kate Biberdorf - not a textbook but an 'in' to Chemistry. In other words, what you can read if you find Chemistry super boring and need to develop some kind of interest in it in order to survive Chemistry classes
• Braving the Elements by Gray, Simon, and Trogler - written for the layman, very interesting, and a good introduction to the world of chemistry, but if you aren't already interested in chemistry, you'll probably get bored. Also, not sufficient as a Chemistry textbook that stands on its own, but relatively speaking not a difficult read.
• Creations of Fire by Cathy Cobb and Harold Goldwhite - not a chemistry textbook but a history of chemistry, and an interesting one at that
• I'm currently trying to find a good source to read the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. Will let you know if it's worth it. Here is an Amazon Review
• NEW 3/3/22: How To Make A Universe With 92 Ingredients by Adrian Dingle - fun introduction to the Elements, with extra interesting information about how the Elements make up the stuff around you. Definitely worth the read for any age despite its obvious marketing towards younger children.
• HELPFUL FOR HOMESCHOOL: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture by Robert Bruce Thompson. Why it is so good: the lab safety and lab notebook procedures outlined are extremely important and just plain good practice. Once those habits are ingrained you won't screw up your lab work. As much.
• Clayden’s Organic Chemistry - this comes highly recommended from a friend but I have not read it yet

Practical and Lab Stuff

• Set up your own chemistry lab at home Instructable

Tips

• If you don't listen to heavy metal while learning about the heavy metals, are you even human? Might I suggest the fine bands Cannibal Corpse, Sepultura, Judas Priest, and Otep?
• While experimenting with the fire stuff, and you will, find some dolls to blow up and/or burn

Online resources

• ThoughtCo Chemistry 101 articles
• College level Chemistry MIT OpenCourseWare
• Katomic Puzzle game using old-fashioned 2D depictions of chemicals. Not how those chemicals actually look, for one thing because molecules and atoms are in perpetual motion.
• See: Cooking because if you can cook, you can do Chemistry. They're related.

Some reasons why Chemistry can help you: Section added 10/9/24

• Chemistry is everywhere. It's helping the fuel in your car work. It's the formulation behind your dish soap and liquid soap, the preservatives in your food and body products, the fertilizers that help you stay alive thanks to you know, food. Also in just about everything else. If you've got a habit of reading ingredients on labels you are familiar with some chemicals, but consider the chemicals that go into producing all your everyday items as well. Dyes, additions to metals in making steel, matches, the materials that make up plastics and glass. In case you haven't noticed, chemicals are expensive! What if you could DIY them? Just saying.
• Chemistry, if you learned it alongside Toxicology and a good medical education, could help you avoid making chemicals that harm people and planet but are still just as effective. It would take you a really long time to learn but you could theoretically do it.
• If you are good at cooking... with additional education you can be good at Chemistry. And you can do a lot more with Chemistry.
• It's a fun hobby. This is a discipline of both Fire, yes, the fun stuff, and Water. Chemistry originally supposedly got its name from Al-Chimia Wikipedia reference, the Arabic word for Alchemy. Provided you don't blow up your home lab or otherwise make a smol bit of an error, you can tinker around with it in your free time. Making miracles in your free time isn't a bad way to spend it.
• You will not need to worry about accidentally mixing the wrong chemicals when DIYing homemade cleaning products ever again
• You will know which chemicals are the right ones to use in every given situation, exactly how much of them to use, and exactly how to use them. In the usual scenarios this will just make your efforts more successful and more efficient and in the worst case scenario you will avert certain disaster. In the best case scenarios you will find solutions to problems where without Chemistry knowledge there would have been none.
• Just a few things that knowing Chemistry is really important for: medicine, cooking, preserving food (crucial!), farming, gardening, cleaning, water purification and treatment, water storage, materials engineering, in fact all engineering, environmental remediation, and eventually space travel and the life support systems required for it. It's going to be critical in the next couple thousand years for a lot of things.

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