I just finished watching the first season of the AMC television series Breaking Bad. The series chronicles the life of a high school chemistry teacher Walter White who learns that he has terminal lung cancer and who then turns to the production and sale of methamphetamine to hopefully create an inheritance for his teenage son and wife. The first season offers hints that Walter was once a promising theoretical chemist and that teaching high school is beneath his talent level.

The writing and acting on the series are excellent, but chemistry also plays an important part. The opening credits feature symbols from the Periodic Table in green and letters in the title and in the names of the cast also use this device. The title appears as Breaking Bad. Br is the Periodic Table symbol for bromine and Ba is the Periodic Table for barium. The opening credits also display the molecular formula for amphetamine,C₁₀H₁₅N and the number for the compound’s molecular mass, 149.24. The compound has 10 carbon atoms, 15 hydrogen atoms, and one nitrogen atom.

The actor who plays Walter explained in an interview that ” breaking bad” is a Southern colloquialism for someone who has taken ceased to be law abiding and has chosen a life of crime for as little as a day or as long as a lifetime. One of the engaging elements of the series is the way in which Walt uses his chemical knowledge to “break bad.” Walt and his cohort and ex student Jesse Pinkerman are forced to kill a pair of drug dealers in the first episode and are then faced with the dilemma of how to dispose of  the body of one of them, Emilio. Walt chooses to dissolve the body in hydrofluoric acid. Jesse ignores Walt’s admonition to put the body in a plastic tub and instead puts the body and the compound in a bathtub on the second story of his home. The acid then dissolves the body, the tub, and the floor beneath the tub and the floor beneath that.

In a later episode Walt is forced to face off against the vicious dealer who has replaced Emilio and beaten Jesse senseless and sent him to the hospital. Walt purports to bring the dealer a bag of crystal meth but which is actually the explosive, fulminate of mercury. Walt hurls a small piece against the floor which produces a violent explosion that wards off the drug dealers and convinces them to give him the money for the crystal meth that they had earlier taken off Jesse.

The real Periodic Table has been in the news recently in an equally fascinating fashion. Scientist at the Center for Heavy Ion Research have named Element 112, Copernicum, after the Fifteenth Century astronomer Copernicus, who was the first to recognize that the Earth and the planets travelled around the Sun. This had a fundamental effect on human thinking. At the time most believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe and that all the other celestial bodies revolved around it. This put an end to the theological view that the Earth was the center of the Universe. Note that the version of the Periodic Table above ends at Element 110

A team of scientists led by Sigrund Hofmann first discovered the element in February 1996. Using a 100 meter long linear accelerator the team fired zinc ions on to a lead foil. The atomic nuclei of the two elements fused to produce the new element 112 which was only stable for a fraction of a second. After the existence of the element was confirmed by other independent experiments the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) invited the team to propose a name for the new element, which led the team to suggest copernicum with the chemical symbol,Cn.

In an article in the April 8,2010 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle science writer David Perlman reports that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working with Russian scientists on a new super heavy element, 117. Mr. Perlman reports that only six atoms of the element have been produced at an atom smasher in Russia. Like all the super heavy elements 117 decays by radioactivity, but that it decays more slowly than most super heavies and may exist in or near an island of stability of super heavies. In the theoretical middle of this island heavier elements might last for months or even years so that their properties and uses could be explored. The scientists have produced an isotope of 117 which has 177 neutrons as well as 117 protons. As with copernicum, the scientists will eventually be allowed to name the element, but for now they  call it ununseptium in a play on its element number. Mr. Perlman ends the article by concluding that to reach the island of stability the element will have to have 184 neutrons and that no technology yet exists to produce that element.

Perhaps in a new version of Breaking Bad produced twenty years from now the children of Jesse and Walt will be working with a miniature atom smasher and a miniature linear accelerator in the basement of an Albuquerque home and breaking bad by producing a molecule with atoms of heavy elements with yet unknown properties. That may be a small problem compared to finding an actor who has the adjoining letters Cn in his or her name so that they can be highlighted in green.

Tags: American Scientists, Periodic Table