Taking Action Against The Action Lab 

Big ups to you

You a real one action lab, your content is real educational and the work you put in deserves recognition, keep it up man :]

Man this is respectable that you justify your claims and back them with actual sources, I was not hoping this... It would be better if you put this on a community post, but this itself deserves respect

The scientific process at work.

As for point 1, he specifically targeted the "sugar breaks bonds" thing

So your Phd thesis, which I can only imagine as not only being extremely tough but also probably pretty expensive ... is about salt dissolving in water? Am I getting this correct? If so, why? EDIT: It has just dawned on me that "salt" in this context is probably a class of chemicals and not sodium chloride like I originally assumed. But still... what was there to discover?

@@arthurtapper1092 I don't know, I guess a deeper understanding of how extremely common compounds react. Not every thesis is a nobel prize, that's not how scientific progress works. I'm also interested in op's motivation and findings in their dissertation, though.

Yes, that whole topic doesn't seem to be well defined. A change in "state of matter" is a purely physical reaction. So when you boil salt water, the water becomes vapor and the salt gets left behind. So it doesn't seem like a chemical reaction to begin with. Though there are some physical reactions that involve some chemical reactions as well.

@@arthurtapper1092 My PhD was actually on battery cathodes. However, my post-doc research was on salts dissolving in water. It is a more complex topic than it may appear for a number of reasons. First, a lot of substances become charged ions in water, so research on salts is applicable to a wide variety of substances (including most minerals). Second, dissolution and sedimentation is a major way that rocks move around on the earth surface, and that process often involves salts (minerals) dissolving in water. The behavior of these salts depends in a non-trivial way on temperature, pressure, and concentration of various salts. Hence, why this topic has seen continued study for the past century.

Are not salts already ionized, just in a crystal lattice? The electrons have already changed atoms as part of the chemical reaction to create the salt. In the case of sodium chloride, isn't water just substituting its polar intermolecular forces for ionic attraction in the crystal lattice?

@@theuncalledfor I've never heard anyone say that it doesn't exist, but the fact of the matter is that it's not a force. That's just how we describe it in casual speech, but by definition centrifugal "force" is not actually happening. You aren't pulled away from the center of a rotating object, it actually accelerates you in a straight line from the point where you contact it (you are being thrown sideways in the direction of the spin, not the opposite direction). What people call "centrifugal force" is torque which can only be felt if you are rigidly attached to the rotating object, because the sideways momentum imparted by the object is stopped and converted into rotational momentum. But there is no unique "force" happening, that's an inaccurate way to describe the property.

@@theuncalledfor The centrifugal force is caused by the object's inertia. It's the same principal with bullets and how they apply force to what they hit. They have momentum and will transfer a force, and thus energy to whatever they come into contact with. But by all means, if you're ever shot at, go ahead and imagine that "the force the bullet applies isn't real", I'm sure that will turn out well for you...

@@theuncalledfor So despite my explanation you still say it isn't real. Please take a high school physics course and get back to me.

​@@greg77389 ""the force the bullet applies isn't real"" - The problem with this comparison is that if you draw a free body diagram of a bullet impacting a soft body, the force is very real - it's drag!

@@theuncalledfor centrifugal “force” is really just the result of acceleration in a non-inertial frame of reference. It’s a non-existent force because it isn’t a force, even though it may be thought of and worked mathematically as a fictional force. For example, if you have people in a centrifuge which starts spinning, and the floor is removed and the people “stick” to the walls, that’s actually caused by friction. It’s friction that’s holding the people to the wall, because the frame of reference is spinning, which gives everyone centripetal acceleration (and thus centripetal force), which in turn increases apparent weight relative to the wall (the normal force), which creates friction which finally counters gravity (opposite direction) and keeps people in place.

LOL

:(

@@That_Chemist At least I have some theory down pat. Its just difficult to learn chemistry properly when your small town doesnt even have a lab in the highschool. So I live vicariously through RU-vidrs

the internet is a good place to find science - but we have to hold each other accountable

@@That_Chemist especially since my grade depends on that now So thank you for the informative videos, and even the story ones. Ranking ones. They help me a lot when I need to study for my exams, keeps chemistry fun.

Brings to mind Wolfgang Pauli's famous criticism of one of his undergrad's attempts at a paper on Quantum Mechanics: "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!" or "This is not only not correct; it is also not even wrong."

The important point here is that solubility is a very complex phenomenon that pretty much defies broad explanations. Anyone who’s ever tried to recrystallize a novel compound can attest to the head slapping futility of getting things to dissolve according to “rules”

@@wildfyr89 True. The logic behind “solids dissolving is an endothermic process” and “gasses dissolving is an exothermic process” is because solids (especially crystals) are much more ordered than liquids which are much more ordered than gasses. You would expect that when you are dissolving a solid, because the overall entropy of the solid-liquid system increases, the temperature will go down but when you are dissolving gases, the entropy of the gas-liquid system decreases so the temperature should go up. However, when you factor in stuff like the heat of hydration (which is a LOT for sodium hydroxide, for example) you end up with completely different results. I mean, dissolving sulfur trioxide vapours in water is an insanely exothermic process but dissolving methylamine in water is slightly endothermic (if I remember correctly, don’t quote me on that last one).

Exactly, he seems to have dismissed Chatelier's principle; exothermic reactions (like calcium acetate's dissolution) are disfavored on higher temperatures since the heat absorption from the reverse reaction becomes more entropically favorable (dQ = T*dS) and the equilibrium will shift "left" to maximize entropy in the system. James did get the right idea.

@@enderyu I was actually looking for this comment because I hoped someone else would point it out. The problem is that upon dissolution there are many factors that come to play apart from (for crystalline compounds) lattice energy, we also have stuff like hydration energy that’s highly variable and substance specific. We can’t just reduce it to absurdity (as pointed out above) and only look at how entropy would change upon dissolution of any compound. And I would believe that although he generally disregarded Henry‘s law (and the van‘t hoff relation) when it comes to gas solubility, applying the principle of le Chatelier to the dissolution of CO2 is actually possible and valid due to the CO2-carbonic acid equilibrium and associated enthalpies.

Indeed - when making 50% NaOH solution it becomes noticable.

@@BitwiseMobile Almost but Gibbs include enthalpy term and the entropy term

@@BitwiseMobile Enthalpy change and Gibbs free energy are RELATED, but not the same. Gibbs free energy equals the enthalpy change, ΔH, SUBTRACTED by the product of the temperature and the entropy change. It should also be noted that if the free energy change is not negative, the reaction is not feasible under those conditions and will not occur spontaneously.

Then I was not the only one thinking "surely he will include entropy and temp to calculate Gibb's free energy". I mean that is high school level chem after all.

@@BitwiseMobile g=h+t^s

I dont think he accounted for anything but thier ad revenue

Is n-hexane or triethyl aluminium water?

Yes, but you're changing completely the chemical environment... Therefore you are changing completely the thermodynamics of the mixture

@@wow-roblox8370 since when do you need water to have solubility....

@@henryrroland is it chemistry if there isn't an exception at every half a step?

@@prateekkarn9277 Hahaha In this case, we have no exceptions, it's thermodynamics. But to do the things right we have to consider the right ΔH, ΔS, 𝛾, 𝜑

Like it's good to make this video to point out what he got wrong it's just kinda funny.

That's kind of always been the case with scientists.

bro the entire history of academia is just scientists, philosophers and other experts in their fields beefing with each other to see who's theory holds up the best.

i find the approach of this video more than just harsh, almost smug, for a situation that seems to fall within debate as to what's completely correct. im an outsider when it comes to chemistry, only enjoy watching content of it, but im not entirely certain the approach this video had was the best.

He was definately being an asshole. Almost like he thought action labs was purposely getting it wrong for some great conspiracy. He got it wrong. Correct him, but you don't need to be an ass about it but I guess it gets you views.

@@rosecitytid1631 it only helps him and others drive this narrative that all "pop" science is misguided and purposefully sharing information wrong, it's pretty unfriendly and doesn't entice many to join the community.

@@rosecitytid1631 there is a lot of scientific misinformation on the internet, and I think that if someone is going to work as a science communicator, there should be an expectation that the person doing the communicating is also doing their due diligence. I havet finished the video yet, but I don't think I have seen anything I would describe as asshole-ish.

I agree, I was put off about how much action lab was.. almost vilified? In the video and comment section. Making mistakes about this sort of thing is completely understandable, it's not like he just accidentally made a bomb and killed 30 people. I would bet that people who are so harsh about other people's inconsequential mistakes probably either harbour a lot of self hatred or lack self awareness.

We need to normalize references in educational content, maybe that means YT needs to put disclaimers on educational videos without references

@@That_Chemist couldn't agree more.

"From time to time" ie every time

@@That_Chemist the only way youtube knows to do that stuff would be shitty neural networks deciding what isnt or isnt a source. I don't want youtube doing that lol

It's always seemed to me like he's just a guy fiddling about with cool science stuff because it's cool, rather than someone who actually comes from a science background. His explanations always come across as very "I'm paraphrasing a NewScientist article and understood about 70% of it" - and there's no problem with that, because afaik he hasn't claimed to be an actual scientist, but when you have such a big platform it's probably best to put in either a disclaimer or do a fact check first.

I think that the bigger your audience is, the more responsibility you have - think about how many human hours are spent on a video for a channel even of my size - this weighs on me heavily

@@That_Chemist I 100% agree with you there. I feel like he could've found someone to give him the proper explanation. Or get a consult or something

​@@That_Chemist Audience size matters *far* less then the actual importance of the subject. While 90,000 people might have been misinformed, the info may have been useful for maybe a dozen people. Most, if not all, of those dozen would already know he is wrong. Not to say it isn't important to be right, but the stakes here are *really* low for such a niche, and mostly useless, subject. I would say him talking about this, even erroneously, is a net positive as I was now brought here to more factual information.

​@@ShmoeBoe "I was now brought here to more factual information." And if Action Lab had provided that information *in the first place,* you wouldn't *need* to come here. How many of his errors have you unknowingly accepted?

But thinking with entropy is quite difficult, and the pop science explanation of entropy is usually subtly wrong. (I am a not chemist I just develop a quantum chemistry software)

@@mattmurphy7030 -It is also nonsensical.- -"Quantum chemistry" sounds like some buzzwords smushed together without a single thought into if it's actually sensible.- -Quantum Related to "Quanta", usually referring to the dynamics of atomic scales and below.- -Chemistry Related to the study of substances and their interactions at a atomic level.- -These two fields -_-can-_- interact in a multitude of ways, but "a quantum chemistry software" doesn't make sense. There's no description of what the software actually -_-does,-_- it's just somehow "quantum chemistry".- Edit: I didn't think to look it up beforehand. Sorry to Adam Rak, it is actually a legitimate field.

@@nikkiofthevalley quantum chemistry is a legitimate field. Just because you think it sounds sonsensical doesn't mean it is. Maybe look up if your criticism is valid for 5 minutes before posting it online...

@@blubberbernd2347 I honestly have no clue why I didn't think to that up.

@@nikkiofthevalley granted. We all act a little rash from time to time

true lol

WE wouldn’t work. Our metabolisms are fueled by the same oxidation reactions fires are

oh my gosh, that is also true lol - we also are exothermic machines

Actually, not really... The synthesis of NH₃ is exothermic, and its definitely decrease the production in high temperatures, but its still happens.

And fire is not a reversible reaction

It's a common thing to hear. Un-something and non-something can be good descriptive words for people to grasp a concept

Lmao that's exactly what I said when I heard that

🤣

@@mikewheeler9011 and then there's just shit English

I had the same thoughts when I heard that 😆. Although, in his defence, maybe he said that cuz most of his audience have no idea about Chemistry 😕.

Exactly

It's True

😂 as long as it is entertaining for you lenger1234

Hi I'm the one guy who watches him to become a chemist

Speak for yourself, please!!!!

Check out action labs comment on this video.

If I had made a mistake in giving an explanation that I presented to an audience, I would want to know. At the risk of sounding a bit harsh, it is the responsibility of the presenter to make sure that what they are presenting is accurate. These sorts of things aren't just don't on the fly. They are carefully planned and produced, so there is no excuse for introducing gross errors into one's presentation. The presenter should have checked their work before publishing it, and if in spite of that mistakes still get through, the proper thing to do is acknowledge them, accept the valid and constructive criticism, and then attempt to correct the error, because the presentation is for the sake of the audience, the presenter's ego. Anyone who cannot except valid criticism, immediately becoming defensive no matter what the criticism might be, is not a serious person. Even if no factual errors are made, there is still room for criticism. A person who truly knows their subject should be able to listen to criticism, and have the confidence to determine whether or not it's valid, and then either accept or reject it as appropriate, because the end goal is to educate the audience, and anyone who is serious wants to listen to any feedback that might better achieve that goal.

Just felt to me like he was extremely enthusiastic and went at it too fast

He's greedy for ad revenue, and his nasal voice is grating. Floods the shorts section of the site with garbage. Glad someone is calling him on his poor research.

@@my_unreasonably_long_username The nasal voice is ok by itself as long as his science is right. Which it isn't.

@@my_unreasonably_long_username yup, while making the videos ridiculously long

just use "physicochemical" if you want to be trendy with the soft matter crowd

I feel the same. I do enjoy seeing random science curiosities in my sub feed, especially when I haven't seen a lot of them done before. It's fine if you just take the demonstrations at face value as "this thing exists" (like I had no idea some things dissolve better colder), but yeah, for a full explanation maybe not. Hopefully he unlists the video / makes an update

or like when a student corrects the teacher in front of the class

@@That_Chemist I had to do that once with a wrong formula in the whiteboard. It was so awkard after he admitted to being wrong.

@@user-kh1es5gg9m My teacher be like: I have purposely written the formula wrong and congrats for pointing that out, +1 extra credit 😂

a PhD *from BYU* , a university founded by and named after the second head of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young.

@@SeanCMonahan a school which *does* in fact have good degree programs. The issue is that having a degree, whether from a prestigious school or not, doesn't guarantee competence.

Action lab Guy ISNT just a random guy?

There's a "good" video by the Chemical Safety Review Board about a massive explosion ay "T2 Industries"... The guys who ran it had degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering, but that didn't stop them from flattening the neighborhood. I think it's my favorite chemical name : Methyl Cyclopentadienal Manganese Tricarbonyl

This reminds me of the M.D.’s promoting vaccine hesitancy.

I have understood it always this way too. That if something releases energy when dissolving, you need to remove the released energy to make it dissolve more. To drive the reaction forward as they say. I guess I should have known chemistry is not that simple.

The idea of using a different solvent is a much, much better answer than cookie-cutter recrystallization (dissolve in hot solvent, allow to cool). Just saying "recrystallize normally" demonstrates no understanding of the process whatsoever. Trying something else, on the other hand, is an instinct that every chemist must cultivate, even when (especially when!) there is no clear understanding of why the original idea isn't working.

tbh this is confusing as it depends on the impurities you are trying to remove.

Keep up the good work!

I wouldn't call it disinformation, it's not intentionally teaching people the wrong thing to keep them from learning.

I might do these more frequently - I hope it helps address the problem

Idk man I think the chempilations are fun

Sure, but TC's not trying to make an entire career out of this (...is he?). The chempilations are very niche, but I love very niche relatable stuff.

If I do make a career out of reaction videos like this I will become a very sad person

Well if you are talking about the dissolving part, you should be in 100% in both camps, because both cases are oberservable and some cases are "in between" (meaning depending on the definitions you are using you are able to label the process as chemical or physical). The real problem is that there often is no absolute definition out there, the closed being to absolute definitions is the IUPAC golden book I'd say, but even with their definitions there might be some problems sometimes.

He has a platform, and I think it would be great if he was thorough before he uploaded a video (especially a sponsored one!)

Same, they taught us that the temperature can favor exothermic or endothermic reactions, and that the shift in equilibrium is due to chateliers principle

maybe its an outdated or oversimplified concept that the school system never updated. as _something of a science enthusiast myself_ , i remember being taught science that was outdated or over simplified to the point of being wrong, several times. if action labs gets his science from resources for the school system, then it is natural he would get some things wrong

@@lrizzard Don’t think it is the education System fault in this case. This explanation is not on the book. I think it was the teachers fault in this case, I have seen he give other clearly wrong explanations(which were also not on the book).

He is capable of doing better - I want to see him become his best!

@@That_Chemist Did you send him your video (or at least your conclusions) privately to give him a chance to make corrections before you went public with it yourself?

@That Chemist I am glad I found this comment. I didn't get the impression of wanting an improvement or wanting to help from the video. It felt more like a straight callout post for the first half. I have been enjoying your videos for a few months. Keep it up man. I hope AL does his best to take responsibility for the size of his audience and the effect he can have.

goofy 💀

I find that using the quality of the community (comment section) is a decent litmus test for the quality of a creator, and Action Lab doesn't have a good community so i actively avoid him.

Current and relevant, or ephemeral, opportunistic, and merely popular? Certainly not relevant to anyone but RU-vid viewers, and by style, presentation, and attitude indistinguishable from crackpots. Just another self-referencing echo chamber.

@@tcarney57 That's true of all science dude.

@@AlexWaardenburg If that's true, then climate-change deniers and other right-wing anti-intellectuals are justified in believing science is all just opinion, interpersonal competition, and bias. Making it into a side show hurts trust in science.

Chemistry when you get to blow things up: :D Chemistry when it turns out to all just applied Quantum Physics (but limited to only EM-force, and you never get analytical solutions) and statistical mechanics: :(

its an important consideration! Calcium salts tend to have poor solubility, and having water definitely helps their solubility (even in water) - its kind of weird, because we talk about solvents like they just totally swamp a molecule, but they need to get and stay really close if they are going to form a stable complex - it's *complex*

I’m trying to remember what I read about the conditions required for negative temperatures. A system having negative temperature, is equivalent to having negative coolness (where coolness is inverse temperature), and... Ok, looked it up on Wikipedia, which reminds me the fact what I read and was trying to remember, which is that for a system to be capable of a negative temperature, there must be a small(er) number of possible high energy states, such that adding high energy to the system (above a given amount of energy) reduces the amount of possible states it could be in. The Wikipedia article does mention [something about lasers] being an example of a system with negative temperature, but I don’t understand enough to be confident, without reading further, that it means that lasers in general have negative temperature, or just something like “with certain kinds of lasers in certain situations, there is something with a negative temperature.”. I know that lasers are coherent, and so, aiui, the photons are... hm, I want to say that they are approximately in a symmetric state, but I’m likely getting mixed up with a Bose-Einstein condensate, And maybe the coherent state thing is more like, uh, Being approximately an eigenstate of the annihilation operator? So, a superposition of states (with different weightings) which are each the result of applying the creation operator some number of times to the vacuum state, and uh, where each of these states are therefore symmetric states? Like, I want to say it sorta corresponds to a Poisson distribution of how many photons there are? But... I’m also not sure how that all fits in with the uh, whole “particles moving” bit, or where these photons are in space. I would expect the photon creation operator would create one with a given momentum with completely undefined position, and only by integrating that over different momenta with different phases would you get something in a beam, but I’m not sure how that works out with like, the coherent state just being an infinite sum of applying it different numbers of times. I’m clearly forgetting something. Ah, probably what I was taught was about coherent states was using the raising and lowering operators for a quantum harmonic oscillator, and I was *told* that something similar is going on with photons in lasers, but I wasn’t *shown* the details of how that works.

@@drdca8263 Interesting, i wasn't aware of most of that. i think i need to do some more research on that. I'm pretty certain at least some of the video i mentioned was questionable, perhaps I'm forgetting the details.

Thanks!

If you’re decent, learn not to.

They’re fun to watch if my brain is off but it’s definitely pop sci. Action Lab’s ferrofluid video is kind of neat if just for the shots of it moving.

I hope my other videos are useful for you as well!

@@That_Chemist oh I've watched a handful today. great work bud.

@@CreamAle Are you drunk?

@@gregwhite6998 ?

They're drunk on science!...okay that pun was bad even for me

thank you for saying this, these are exactly my thoughts about the whole thing.

I just wanna say styropyro is the man

Wouldn't it be exothermic?

Fire is not a reversible process, so you cant apply Chatelier's principle. The reverse reaction should balance out the continuous forward reaction, but the theoretical temperature necessary to reach such equilibrium is way too high to happen in practice.

do you mean exothermic??

@@enderyu even so TAL made his thing sound absolute

Yep, I meant exothermic. Brain fart. Thanks for the correction.

It’s an important distinction because a chemical process involves breaking intermolecular bonds from on atom to another and physical and intramolecular bond from one molecule to another. Both involve physics and chemistry. It’s not some feud between the two disciplines it’s literally just being wrong.

@@Jeremy-gy7me ah yes, bonds, the most clearly defined interactions in all of nature /s can't you just be less dumb? please?

@@Jeremy-gy7me is it really? You are going to tell me that Na+ and Cl- are the same substance as NaCl since NaCl has only undergone a physical reaction when added to water?

@@manso306 He did not reply to you bruv

@@nerobernardino88 woops thanks, I think I should go to sleep

Except that there is an explanation of combustion equilibrium from Le Chatelier's principle. A reaction being exothermic or endothermic is just a question of whether you can consider the evolution of heat to be a product or reactant and so if a fuel is in an enclosed space such that the products of combustion accumulate, the reaction will slow down even if there is still fuel left because its concentration will have gone down

@@samuelblackmon And if it's not in an enclosed condition? I see your point but don't think it's quite relevant to all conditions, if it's only under certain conditionals, it's indicative that the condition is the limiting factor and not the reaction itself.

@@brianstevens3858 no, the point is that Le Chatelier's principle makes a prediction about the combustion reaction and you can test it and it proves true. A fire is constantly shedding heat and exhaust gasses. If you put it in conditions where it cannot do so then Le Chatelier's principle predicts that the reaction equilibrium will shift such that not all the fuel is consumed

@@samuelblackmon What I am saying is that if the reactants are allowed to react in an open condition, then we can predict they will not extinguish themselves by being diluted by the post reaction product. This means the reaction itself is not the causative but rather having the enclosed local condition of being swamped by the reaction products, if going to go there, then the end result is that all reactions are going to be both endo and exo thermic because the products have properties too, where does it end? The reaction itself is not self extinguishing, by adding in the byproducts {or the results} you have changed the values of the reaction to include the exhaust gas and of course it will be limiting. I can smother a fire by adding halon by applying a limiting factor you have modified the result, it says nothing about the oxidation of the fuel reaction itself.

@@brianstevens3858 I think I've lost track of what your point is. Your original comment seemed to suggest you had some problem with the idea of Le Chatelier's principle being applied to combustion and my replies were pointing out that they do in fact apply

This. Action Lab also has this very condescending attitude that treats the viewers like idiots (this includes his tone of voice as well as the exact wording he chooses to 'teach' us idiots these concepts). This is not how science educators should operate.

sorry to hear that :(

@@That_Chemist - It's unfortunate because he presents some interesting subjects and certainly has an enquiring mind. He genuinely seems to want to share his knowledge and help people to understand. I applaud that. It is essential, however, to be prepared to accept that sometimes what one thinks is factual, may prove to be otherwise, and to re-evaluate.

Greed!

while stretching it out for 20 extra minutes

@@obsessivecorvid action lab does videos under 6 minutes

And an almost pathologic aversion to PPE

Yes I never actually believed him to be accurate compared to the other science channels like the king of random but I have lost interest in that about a year ago. I really never trusted action lab

acctully

We all make mistakes, but when we do we need to correct those mistakes as much as possible - I want him to improve

He also manages to stretch the videos out for like 10 extra minutes

He has a PhD in chemical engineering - his video was within this scope

@@That_Chemist I guess that I'm wrong. Maybe he will respond. It would be pretty troubling if it was an intentional misrepresentation.

me neither

I learned deoxyribonucleic acid from bill Nye at that age. Good science communicators distill correct information. Action lab is greedy and poorly researched.