Every Type of Chemistry Explained 

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“Blowing up your neighborhood” chemistry and “getting arrested” chemistry are my favorites!

Geochemistry: Chemistry that involves licking rocks and eating sediment

I was REALLY good at getting the different shapes into the right holes during daycare playtime. So when I heard about how proteins and ligands are basically the same thing but smaller, I was all in.

You missed plasma chemistry: Getting a gas really hot, but not quite hot enough to become physics.

As a chemical engineer I reallly really need chemist to include more thermal properties in papers including new mechanisms catalyst and new molecules. It’s like chemist are scared of thermodynamics. It makes my life so difficult when I have to find 30 papers of the same mechanism just to find a single thermal property.

"Microwave chemistry" sounds like something out of a Florida man type news story

As a Green Polymer chemist, I honestly think you could make a whole video just about this one field. Polymer chemistry is a sort of brigde between synthetic chemistry and material science/engineering. Polymers are so unique compared to other molecules because of their size so unlike small molecules you can see and hold polymers, meaning that their study extends far beyond just characterization. Also, while I do agree that green chemistry has it's faults, I would say the bigger problem is everyone CLAIMING to have made something "green," only to then go on and pull some stupid process out of their ass, which will never be industrially viable. If you'd like some good people to read for green polymer chemistry I'd recommend Michael Meier, Anne McNeil, and Joshua Worch. I think these three PIs really show some of the good work being done.

I wish I could show this to my students because a number of them ask what my PhD is about and "shooting lasers in the dungeon of the chemistry building" gives them more questions than answers

I'm a first year college student and your descriptions of biochem and chemical engineering helped me realize that chemical engineering is better for what I want to do. My school doesn't have that great engineering programs so I will likely go somewhere else after I graduate.

"the atmosphere is the nature's bin", I think it's more humanity's bin

I like RU-vid chemistry, the kind where I can watch someone else do things I have no interest in doing myself.

"My chemistry was mostly fluorine chemistry..." [*concern intensifies*] Damn near every orgo textbook I've looked at has largely confined its treatment of fluorine in organic chem to "don't," plus or minus some explanation of *why* you shouldn't. I suppose somebody has yo figure out where/when you *can*, so your efforts in this regard are appreciated!

I'm a nanomaterials chemist, mostly working with nanomaterials for energy conversion and storage, chemical sensing, and readtion engineering. Currently I'm fascinated with something called plasmon enhanced catalysis, which absolutely blows my mind

Video idea: it would be really cool if you did videos on these individual fields. Like an extended overview of the history or its prominent figures. Or maybe videos on new and promising sub fields, like mechanochemistry (BC mechanochem is based).

Thank you for this video. I was always curious about how many fields there are in the chemistry world, and I bet when it comes to subfields we can go on and on!

The veritasium edit was amazing 😂 thank you for blessing us

My favourite fields are pharmacodynamics and neurochemistry, which I study pretty often, albeit on a surface level, and from which derive much pleasure. One of my favourite subjects is release of endogenous opioids 10-20 minutes after ingesting capsaicin.

For me, as a *true* inorganic (water + oxide) chemist, any "inorganic" chemistry involving C-H or C-C containing ligands is organometallic.

This is really cool and even as a biochem major I had no idea there were so many different fields! I wish we spent just a day going of these careers in my gen chem 1 class.

Organometallic Chemistry is this super weird uncle that you meet once a year at Thanksgiving and try to ignore for the better. He has some pretty weird views and Noone really understands why he's doing anything but he gets invited anyways. But seriously - our field combines some of the worst aspects from inorganic and organic chemistry. We're doing multi step synthesis work for our ligands starting on the gallon scale just to do dozends of in situ studies on the single digit milligram scale and then do insane numbers of crystallizations and reproductions praying to the crystal gods. Not to speak of the unspeakable horrors when you realize that you've lost several grams of precious metal precursor somewhere in your synthesis.

Somehow, i got hired as an analytical chemist, and now i can't escape. I miss the organic days.

Now do types of chemists. And don't forget to include the best one, basement.

I really like radiochemistry. And as soon as I get a geiger tube for alpha particles aswell, I'll do some myself😝

Definitely a monomer moment.

14:48 My lecture of Heterocycles this semester is done by a prof who does "green" chemistry. It is so annoying to listen to him, because he thinks all of us students want to work in (organic) synthesis (because everything else is a waste of time), and always promotes his research because it is so "good" and "green" and "important to the world" etc. The most hillarious which happened during one of his lecures was, that he was not on time "because he had a photo shooting" which was related to him and his work group being one of the candidates for a 100mil € fund for his "green" chemistry.

Tip for students: If you wanna make a ton of money as a chemist, pick chemical engineering or electrochemistry. Chemical engineers are always in high demand, and electrochemistry is super hot right now because of solar panels, batteries (electric cars), fuel cells, hydrogen production, etc.

The parafilm has me ROLLING lol

this video is amazing and the pacing of your switching between each type of chemistry back and forth was perfect. love the content as always and your sense of humor! keep it up! I have no background in chemical science but I look forward to a new That Chemist video every time i pop open this website. much love!

I love the "emerging from the edge" picture of nilered at the beginning!!!

This is the video I wish I had in highschool. It took me months to figure out which major I wanted to go into (materials science and engineering), and you distinctly describe it in a couple minutes

Is it just me or is biochem becoming increasingly dominant in chemistry nobel prize winnings?

I worked in medical (pathology) labs. They had the usual biochemistry lab where the focus was mainly on discrete auto-analysers. They did have a special lab in a clean room for measuring metals in nano and pico quantities. They used exceptionally pure reagents but what got me was the use of plastic volumetric flasks as glass would leach metal ions into solution. There were also toxicologists who specialised in assaying drugs and their metabolites. They had a impressive array of instruments such as HPLCs, GLCs plus many more. Their pride and joy was a baby mass spec. This was a long time ago so I guess all of this would be archaic by now.

You knocked it out of the park with this video. Great info. Great pacing. Thank you.

I just realized that "either" and "ether" sound identical if you happen to live in a suitable area.

I just finished a biomaterials class which was essentially polymer chemistry, it was fun. I really admire method chemists, that is probably the most impressive to me.

I’m a biochem undergrad but I really enjoy neurochemistry and psychopharmacology so I like learning about different psychiatric meds and how they work. I also like learning about how the imbalance of neurotransmitters can cause psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Damn Joey that was eye-opening. I haven't heard of Maingroup or Flow chemistry, and green chemistry was mentioned to TODAY for the first time, so great timing! You definitely achieved some neurochemistry bro ❤

The topic, the animations and the memes made this Video really entertaining!🤩👍 Summing up all those fieldst must have cost a lot of work an time. Thanks!

I love the „polymers and monomers“ toungebreaker section this vid! Did you have to redo those lines a lot?

Ok, now do a Venn diagram that shows the overlap between the types.

Glad to see computational chemistry represented

Thanks for the Video. I have a mildly infuriating story. I participated in the Austrian chemistry Olympiad last year, the 2nd part of the final is 5h in which you have to do a synthesis, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis and do a bit of theory to them (expect for the qualitative). We had to dispose of heavy metals during the exam, I went to pour it through a funnel at the front of the class. Since the bottle is very dark, and I couldn't see the water level due to the funnel, I ended up spilling it all over the table. The cleanup cost me 10 minutes, because of which I wasn't able to complete the theory...

Love your videos! Fun while learning 😊

Fun video! Personal favorite is organic chemistry, definitely (organic chemistry is BEST chemistry) and the particular flavor I'm hoping to become employed in is cosmetics chemistry. All of my research is in dyes, though, and that's a hell of a lot of fun too.

Great vid, both informative and entertaining!

13:34 in some cases, sonication has been used to fragment DNA as a preparatory step in sequqncing studies With good endonucleases and long-read sequencing maturing, id have to research where this technique would still be applicable

the chem undergrad who is planning to go gradschool must watch this video.

I'm currently working towards a bachelor of science in pharmacology! Cool to see it come up in the video :) Most of the courses, especially after the first year, are microbio, biochem and pharmaceuticals! Super excited

this is genuinely really helpful for a silly little highschooler like me that has no clue what field of chem i really want to do when i go to college, i just know i wanna play with the silly powders

I see Nigel in the thumbnail so I'm guessing piss chemistry is on the list

This overwhelmed me because it's basically what I do the last ten years with ba in applied physical chemistry and master in theoretical biochemistry I answered the question which kind of chemistry you like with all of it.

What about supramolecular chemistry 😊

This is a chemistry meme video and I am here for it

Taking a Marine Geochemistry course right now. Way more interesting than it sounds!!

Time for my daily dose of chemistry! Thanks for doing what you do! 🥳 Have you thought about doing a radioactive elements/isotopes tierlist?

14:00 And the microchip scale! "Lab on a chip" is how blood glucose test strips work. This was only invented in the past 25 years.

Love you dude thx for the vids

Actually designing a tetra peptide-platinum based anti cancer drug for my thesis.

Love that you also slip some nitbits of Theoretical Chemistry, which is one of difficult thing to learn because proving it in a simulation requires certain steps to do 😅😊

Hey bud I think this topic is fairly new and practically unexplored: It's about reactions in deep eutectic solvents. You can make Grignard reactions at and in AIR with it. One professor at my university is doing research into it. If you're interested look uf Eva Hevia and deep eutectic solvents. Who knows what other reactions we'll be able to do with these solvents while also not caring about air/moisture.

You forgot Yellow Chemistry .

I'm a biochemistry student and this video was amazing to have some insight into what i'm going to study in the future!

Chemistry overlap: I am a analytical chemist, focusing primarily in food chemistry and I have had a PET scan.

*Nigel* "Wanna some Red Phosphorus?? No...? Bummers."

Please do a video on Flourine chemistry. Specifically, ClF3, as there are ZERO high quality videos showing reactions with it. Apparently Ex&F and ChemicalForce just won't touch the stuff.

I'm considering studying technical chemistry, though it just sounds like not quite being a chemist or chemical engineer, because it's hard to find information on the field

Thanks for this video! Learning is funny!

I JUST finished my quantitative analytical chem course at university! it was so hard but super cool. i may take advanced analytical later on, but idk 😅

Chem undergrad here, this is such a great video thank you for making this!

My lab is formally in the chemistry department at our uni, however really we do a lot of bioanalytical chemistry (proteomics via mass spectrometry). Mass spec is one of my favorite methods, because I've used it both for this and forensically to detect veterinary toxic metals in clinical samples. One of my favorite jokes in our lab is that to get better data, we should never wear deodorant; deodorant has lots of polysilloxane polymers which are volatile and so it can increase the background noise of our mass spec. Don't worry, we actually do wear deodorant.

There's also bio-inorganic chemistry. Come on, any chemist could be enticed by the cofactor of nitrogenase and the mysterious carbon atom in its middle.

The E&F clips absolutely made this

"My chemistry was mostly flourine chemistry" *concern*

Great listen whilst suffering through the hell that is physical chemistry exams 👍

Synthetic biology is constantly on that scifi grind. Metabolic engineers be like: "let's make organic chemists compete with enzymes for jobs."

Lol the good old dry ice in a bottle. Back in my high school years I did exactly that once, in my neighbourhood on a quiet Sunday. It was the first and the only time I did it, so the neighbours were very confused.

thanks for the helpful video! I'm a first year chem student!

Is there a good book about synthetic methodology you can recommend?

4:45 as a polymer chem phd student, we do not deal with tar problem. we just distill out the good stuff. sure it does get messy, but no harms in doing research

Thanks for the vid and to the thumbnail artist

What is the name of the channels in the lower right? 2:38. the one with 3 hexagons. is the purple guy also a reference to channel?

If I can add one I studied, it would be chemical ecology, a biology oriented branch who studies how organisms use chemicals to interact with eachother for example with pheromone or how predators detect their prey, etc.

Personally I like nuclear chemistry and “procrastinatingonprojectsthatarehardtosetupchemistry”.

Awesome video

in a discord im in we have a joke that medchem is just taking an existing drug and putting a trifluoromethyl group somewhere on it

Metallurgy is basically physical chemistry for pyromaniacs. Change my mind.

4:25 oh those happy styrenes dancing :)

As a biochemist I can prove that it moslelly about pharma, as a PhD in meme cenetics, I can admit that this video is a masterpice

Why is the styrene dancing? Really Goofy! Keep up the good work :D

10:01 So sad to see the stress of what he had done had caused veritasium to resort to stress eating.

Very good video!

Thank u for mentioning computational chemistry everyone always ignores us 💔

today i discovered i accidentally done sonochemistry for one of my old research project proposals

Hey, can you sometimes make a video about fluoro-pharmaceuticals including medications like Paroxetine, Fluoxetine and some used for diabetics?

Always funny to see geology treated as an afterthought when its applications are some of the most critical pillars of society 😂

A chocolate chip cocoa volcano would be a delicious chemistry project

"Chemistry touches every aspect of our lives" Duh, if you can touch it, then it's a chemical. Some chemical you can't even touch.

It feels wrong to hear "Ladies and gentlemen we gott'em. FBI OPEN UP" without mega deepfried Baby I'm Yours

I'm glad all that wastewater chemistry I was doing for 35 years is now called "flow chemistry". The one area, I wondered if you thought about is "Military Chemistry". Or is that the area that covers them all?