Thank you to our Dutch friend for a brand new set of subtitles! We appreciate your efforts in helping make out content more accessible for a wider audience. Dank je!

Can I get contact information of this professor?

@Donald Sleightholme Hydrogen

I'm not sure that Dutch subtitles will help anyone. Virtually everyone in the Netherlands speaks English as a second language. German would be more useful since Germans grow up watching most of their media dubbed in the German language rather than using subtitles (an incredible failure in their educational system - I have to assume it is intentional).

V

The translations are quite good. Often when the dutch subtitles say verbinding it should be binding expect for once in the lecture. It could be confusing to people learning chemistry.

Thank you very much for putting this on YouTube. Its great to see chemistry being taught in such an interesting way. This is the way to keep kids interested and wondering about the world around us.

Keeps adults interested, too

Best video on youtube.

And to reduce the number of fingers in the world.

That was just great. A very well presented lecture using a well-chosen set of examples, e.g. not just "a series of things that went bang" but a lot of different *kinds* of bangs, each illustrating a slightly different set of physical principles and really getting the audience to think about the material. I know that I was left with a series of questions, such as "I've never even heard of Silane. Why *is* it pyrophoric, anyway?" so of course I had to go look that up and now I have even *more* questions, which of course is the goal of all good science, right? :) As a former (very young) chemistry student myself, I'd love it if we taught this kind of material in American schools again.

@Lee Trask Lol I did a Romper room ball, what a ground shaker ....

@Marie Tobias I can relate to that as my father worked on a bedspring antennae at a top secret base on the Island of Crete in the Medeterainian, I.E. (H.A.R.P.) Ever so often my dad and I would get in his Studebaker Silver Hawk ( the fastest car on the Island of Crete at that time) and we would drive to the other side of the Island to a harbor where my dad would meet with a man and hand him a top secret sealed manilla envelope. Sometimes we would meet with the man and it would be on some freighter or Destroyer and sometimes it would be a submarine, otherwise the Greeks had an airport and we would go there to meet a plane. The antennae had various purposes and one of the main things it did was to take a signal and bounce it off of the Troposphere and everything in the signal would scatter into fragments and then trickle down to earth so that only a very special receiver could pick up the peices and put them back together again and that could only be done hopefully by the CIA. It was also a cold war early warning radar station and that was also a very well kept secret on base. There were a hand full of some of the most died in the wool pencile pocket protector wearing geeks who worked under my dad as they spent most of thier time keeping radars operating. It was many years later that a couple of them came around looking for thier old friend and I had to inform them of his passing. It was then that I realized how compartmentalized the whole thing was. I discovered in conversation that they had no idea that there were radars on that base in fact they seemed to refuse to believe it when I told them. I had spent enough time around radars and bizzar electronic equipment with my dad that I suppose by osmosis It enabled me to find employment doing electronic repair having no formal training. There were certain times that an unidentified object would appear on the scope at unobtainable mach numbers and just make a ninety degree turn and then zip to altitudes not measured by the scopes and then disappear. There was no doubt that base was being watched. I talked a little bit about that on another forum on day and actually got a phone call from Stanton Friedman, what a surprise. This video was a good demonstration although it didn't really delve into great detail of some of the physics of the various different aspects of gunpowder as a propellant and the use of Cordite. also In a literal sense that practically anything can be made to explode if milled to a fine enough powder, such as various types of grain to flower even dirt can explode under the right conditions. I have worked with carbon fiber prepreg and made some sheets of the material from thin to thick, very useful material and very light. I imagine you must be familiar with the story of Bob Widlar from Fairchild though he was stolen from Ball.

Let's try an oxy-acetylene balloon of about one foot diameter.

It'd sure beat 'gender studies' and all the 'woke' stuff they're teaching, now. You'd actually get educated, again! What a notion!

@Daniel Crawford Yeah, you want to avoid it if possible.

He captured the imagination of his audience in the lecture theatre and right here at Youtube. A quality lecture, never a dull moment, keeps you sharp even if its been 30 years since your education. This is how you turn young minds to science.

@Agni Das A lecture also somewhat lacking due to the unfortunate omission of any rendering of a significant nuclear explosion.

he doesn't even give the definitions of terms ...

Better than any lecture I have had in school so far!!! Great work thanks for sharing!

+Mr. Stars There, Their, kids. Sorry just had to jump in on this.

Yeas*

^nah m8^

i like how he explained everything. made is sound simple and easy. wish i had teacher like him.

yep and with a teacher like him its easy. i had one and am top in my field now, sorry you get a bad hand of cards but we can always try again in the next life

L Train45 Good point...

We need more teachers like him to make kids interested and amazed by science. Great lecture!

@NEY Industries hey! I’m a grandma 🙁. What happened to your anti discrimination political correctness?

the problem is, in school you can't just make impressive presentations you also have to deliver the theory. So teachers have a toughrer job.

My science teacher was boring.. She gave us nothing but dictation.. No experiments at all.. Ive learned more about chemistry watching this one video than her three years as my science teacher in high school..

I think Sudbury, and unschooling (and everyday experience of kids younger than school age, if you think that's different from unschooling) prove you don't need to "make" kids do _anything._

@NEY Industries what country is that??

The RI Christmas lectures, very happy memories... As English kids we didnt know how lucky we were as regards educational tv in the Christmas holidays, what better gift could our country give us than knowledge... These have run for nearly 200 years, obviously not on tv though :)

@Witcher Joker Add me to the list of British kids enthralled at the xmas lectures every year. After the chemistry sets and electronics kits from under the tree the Royal Institution xmas Lectures were what made my xmas. Thank you RI 😃🎄🔬⚛️

Very late response but yes indeed. These are amazing and a wonderful tradition.

I experienced a physics lecture where there was some liquid nitrogen in an old school thermos bottle. One of the students absent mindlessly screwed the lid onto the thermos. The physics teacher saw this, went OMG and tried to unscrew the lid, which neatly unscrewed the mercury glass bottle from the metal base, but didn't budge the lid. He pelted to his tiny, crammed office next door to the classroom and left at speed, closing the door after him. Shortly there was a "poof" noise. The glass container and its mercury disintegrated into an incredibly fine dust over every surface of his office. It was a heck of a mess to clean up.  Today it would have required hazmat suits, but back then we just used rubber gloves and shop towels.

@Robert Heal Absolutely incorrect. Old thermos bottles were, indeed mercury glass.

@David Spector Oh really? So how do we know if a thermos bottle is not too old then?

@Robert Heal Thermos brand bottles used to be coated with mercury to reflect infrared light and thus keep heat out or in. I remember accidentally breaking one and actually seeing a drop of mercury. This was in the 1950s. I'm sure they are safer now.

Jesse Meyer 😂

Fake story ! "thermos bottles", including those used in labs, are not made with mercury.

A wonderful demo on how interesting chemistry can be! Outstanding work by the Professor and Ri.

One of my favourite videos on YouTube. Wonderfully presented and wonderfully informative. And you know, it also serves to remind me just how fortunate I am, throughout all of history, to be alive and aware in a reality where we can explore these incredible components of the universe, and teach the next generation about them. Thank you Prof. Bishop, Chris Braxton, and the Royal Institution!

Watched this demonstration so many times. I can't imagine children not being obsessed with science after veiwing this. Explinations were very simple and clear.

Of course I knew all of this but it was presented in a way that was entertaining that made me feel like a student again. We desperately need more of this for kids, its wonderfully educational!

I'm ten years late to this party but thank you RI. This was amazing, entertaining, and insightful.

One of the best public demoinstrations of science I have ever watched. Extremely well-prepared and well-presented. Nicely involved audience members in a safe manner. You can tell how engaged the in-person audience was: nervous giggles, exclamations of surprise, lots of oo's and ah's.

What a wonderful series of chemistry lectures. Would be so wonderful if they were available and used when I was in high school an undergraduate school late 1950s to the middle 1960s.

This video lecture is so good that you stayed up with it for more than one hour and still feels like it’s been just 15 minutes.

This lecture is extremely effective at explaining the happenings behind these physical effects. This really deserves more views, it's simply brilliant in it's helpfulness.

What a fine teacher and superb lesson. Every subject should be taught in this manner. I can't understand why anyone would give a thumbs down.

I am learning about explosives and this video showed me 60 or maybe 70% of what Ive read in the last 2 weeks. What a great lecture! Practical and very interesting! Two thumbs up!

Fantastic job. I've used some of that stuff as a sapper while I was at uni and still learned something from this lecture. I know how hard and costly that lecture was so you can't do it all the time, excellent to see it recorded on video so over 1.6 Million people could view it and learn something from it (at the time I wright this).

very solid video, very rare on youtube, all my admiration. i just wish professor Bishop had more such public educative videos, keep on going!

Those kids will go away with a wonderful new love of science. Thank you Chris Bishop, we need more teachers like you.

Fascinating, wish I had a chemistry teacher like him.

Wonderfully done. Thank you for posting this.

This is the way to get people interested in chemistry, by demonstrating it right on stage

I loved when he was doing the round the theatre demo of the shock tubing when he said "I hope your happy, your surrounded by 800m of tubing that contains an explosive 70 times more powerful than TNT" haha :)

There RI lectures are always top notch :) I remember first seeing the Richard Dawkins one on evolution and it made me get some of the concepts and got me interested. This one did the same.

If I had this guy as science teacher I would have enjoyed my chemistry lessons for sure!😊

This reminds me of how much I enjoyed physical chemistry. I miss it now, although it's easy enough to re-learn it (which is fortunate,because I only dropped Chemistry a year and a bit ago and I've already half-forgotten most of this stuff)

Amazing and so interesting... wish our teachers at the school were so creative to connect theories with practical experiments

These are the types of lessons we should have in our schools. Easy to understand, dynamic and leave a student wanting to learn more about the subject!

This was absolutely brilliant. Amazing lecture, so much information and it all makes sense now. Thank you so much and I'll be looking into more material.

I really enjoyed the scope of this lecture. I will be visiting the Royal Institution to see what other informative lectures I can find! Thanks for sharing :)

after 55yrs of watching these this man is bye FAR the best most entertaining and informative speaker iv ever seen, BRILLIANT SERIES,.

What a great professor! Had me engaged the entire time and wanted to learn more. Thank you Chris Bishop and Chris Braxton .

Thanks professor you made chemistry very interesting 💯 Your presentation was awesome thanks

Brilliant demo...no better way to recruit future scientists than this...

Just great: the speech is amazingly simple, the experiments are unbelievably effective. Enjoyed this hour a lot :]

That was fabulous! Thank you Professor Bishop for making such an engaging presentation of this interesting topic.

Chris Bishop rocks. Saw his rocket lecture which was just as splendid. Nice job!

Back in graduate school, I was part of a team of chemistry grad students giving presentations on "chemical magic", and we did the range of reactions from color changes to to combustion to synthesis to phase changes to explosive reactions. These were presented to college students in chemistry, engineering and physics classes, so we included a nice amount of very technical detail during the demos. Naturally, the explosive demos effectively reduced very intelligent science students to children in awe - these demos, when well done, are always fun to watch...

This is the most beautiful chemistry lecture I've ever seen, and it's not like my chem teachers at school didn't try.

Definitely want to share this video with my students. What wonderful explanations, pacing, and transitions. Not to mention the nifty explosions. :-)

I've watched 2 of these hour long lectures, start to finish, and they are quite interesting and full of fun.

These are brilliant. I hope I can learn chemistry just from watching

Well worth an hour of anyone’s time - what an excellent lecture - thank you for sharing on Youtube - I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation and even learned a bit into the bargain - thanks to Chris Bishop and the people who made it happen.

One of the best presented lectures and presentations I've ever seen!

Nice to see a class taught by a real expert with an enthusiasm for what he is teaching, rather than the clueless teaching assistants (aka mums who took the job because it fits in with the hours they need, and got the job because they are cheaper than time served qualified teachers) that have infested my childs school.

Always loved the Ri lectures ever since I was a kid. Now I’m in my 60s so these educational lectures have exciting my love of science for years.

We did some of this on a minor scale in 1960, can you imagine a science teacher blowing things up in a ninth-grade class today? His class was so good, I used a free period the next year to take it again. This time I sat at the back of the classroom to dodge the dust and such. We had such amazing instruments then. A teacher one never forgets.

Great fun. Viewing experiments such as these as a child are the reason I became a chemist.

Gary Bouwman , I know what you mean Gary , its the reason I became a binman !🤣

This guy is one of the best science teachers I've ever seen, he's one of the teachers you could really really listen to in school, and even as an adult. Really brilliant.

Thank you for getting the kids involved in this! They are our future, teach them well.

I never knew light can be used to detonate stuff. Well, you learn something new every day.

@dale116dot7 Almost only x-rays concentrated through the implosion sphere and therefore enough "hard" radiation pressure is generated on the deuterium sphere in the middle. Light is a bit confusing on the fusion example in the h-bomb's 2nd stage. The Light is more a byproduct of the fission in this case.

Light (and x-rays) is used to transfer energy from the primary fission weapon to the secondary fusion stage. That ends up being a very large explosion.

It’s all about the energy per photon. If you don’t have enough, then no number of lower-energy photons can produce the same effect. Unless, of course, you have such an intense beam that a given molecule in the target can get hit by two photons at precisely the same time so their energies can add together.. Some high-powered lasers can do that with very short pulses but your laser pointer almost certainly can’t. Sorry.

@Franz Meier I wonder if a high powered red or green laser would set off the chlorine and hydrogen mixture - they used a slide projector. Lasers pack more photons into the same beam profile. I've used mine (stupidly) to set off flash powder at a reasonable distance from the laser.

I think that that experiment was a bit misleading actually, since it wasn't a demonstration of just "using enough energy" to go past the activation energy. If it's enough energy you need, why not simply increase the intensity of the red light? If you took a red light bulb with a high enough wattage (the brightness would increase, but the colour is the same) it should go off as well, shouldn't it? It's more energy after all. A concentrated beam of read light should do the trick as well (so just a red laser pointer for example). But it wouldn't. What's the deciding factor is the wavelenght. The shorter the wavelenght, the higher the energy of the photons. The higher the intensity of the light (bulb with higher wattage, or more concentrated beam of light), the higher the overall energy of the macroscopic beam. The detonation that's dependent on a short enough wavelenght and conversely photons with high enough energy, is an example of quantum physics. It doesn't matter how strong the intensity of the light is, the energy of the macroscopic beam. What matters is the the energy of the microscopic light particles, the photons.

Mr. Bishop for the win! A flawless and exciting presentation!

This is easily the best lecture on explosives I have seen on YouTube 👍 excellent work and thank you

That's the way chemistry and physics should be taught. I love this channel and how Mr. Bishop keeps the heritage of Mr. Szydlo alive. I know, I know, way to expensive for the modern system of education.

This was actually an awesome video. Definitely well done!

Ah, nitrogen tri-iodide, I remember it well, sprinkled on the laboratory floor and crackling and banging as you walked. The chemistry teacher kept the iodine under lock and key, but someone always managed to get some and mix up some tri-iodide. Excellent lecture, very well explained and demonstrated, thanks.

Very good teacher. I enjoyed watching the demonstration.

Literally the first chemistry lecture I actually understand!

This is the chemistry lession I wish I had in school back then..!

When I first saw this come up I thought 1 hour, hmm I wonder what this will be like. Have to say it was very good, very interesting, educational and worth every minute of the 60. This professor is the kind you would probably would want get along with as a Good Nieghbour. Lol

Takes me right back to junior school, about 50 years ago. We actually attended one of the RI lectures, I seem to remember it was called 'Stranger than Friction'. Later, in senior school, our regular chemistry teacher was off sick for a few months. His replacement was a young 'hippie' character, who actually showed us how to make Nitrogen Triiodide. We had great fun causing havoc with it around the school, until we were caught...

Fantastico! I was fully engaged and had I seen this presentation in my early days at primary school I would have perhaps followed a path leading to the sciences. Instead I became a Attorney which is really not quite as exciting or as engaging. Thank you....well done.

If lectures like this happened when I was a student, maybe I could actually get interested in science. Well done!

Where were these professors when I was in school. This was a great lecture, very well done!

Entertaining and informative, great lecture!

What a Fantastic lecture! Maybe there is a kid in the audience being inspired and becoming a Nobel price winner in the future. You never know!👍😀

Great demonstrations and so well presented. I've never seen nitroglycerine explode in practice.

One of the best lectures I've watched. Great video 😊👍😊

You had me at "explosive".

Absolutely great. Very fun and educational!

This is a great chemistry lesson that should really excite young people.

My dad was a "Dynamite Doc" (JMC Thompson) working in R&D for ICI Nobel division in the 1950s, 60s and retired in 1972. I fondly remember helping him to make fireworks for bonfire night every November... The chemistry practical demonstrations at the local secondary school (Adrossan Academy) could be a challenge for the chemistry teachers of the top sets since more than half the class were the sons and daughters of high explosive chemists...

This was brilliant, what a great lecturer!!

OMG this channel is pure gold. A true vein of precious knowledge.

Thank you for the lectures it was amazing actually I do like chemistry

55:11 just speechless! very easy, understandable and of course beautiful experiments. keep on doing this good work!

Also have to appreciate your safety protocols while performing this bit of education.

this reminds me of first year secondary school science lab where the teacher had us all standing in a line, touching fingers with the kid at one end tipping a van de graaf generator and the kid at the other end reaching for a balloon full of hydrogen at the other. What he didn't tell us was that he'd filled the balloon with two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. We all ended up with temporary tinnitus.

Great teachers hook you from the jump. I fast forward skip ahead through 98% of YouTube suggestions. You're the 2. Great teacher. Great video. Great sunny Wednesday afternoon. Thank you.

Brilliant lecture. Good demonstrations. I got intertained and educated at the same time. Who can ask for more?

Absolutely brilliant lecture! I particularly loved the demo of shock tubing and the adroit use of an antique DuPont blasting machine by the brave young volunteers. Showing things as they really are defuses the ridiculous notions which swirl about us.

This is very cool and inspiring science. Great job!

The best lecture I have ever seen. I took college Chemistry many years ago and they never had these good of demonstrations.

I liked the chrismass lectures where they showed the hexagon form at the end of a steel pole when the pole reached its harmonic after tapping it with a hammer. The hexagon was formed in the iron filings placed on the top of it

Wonderful video I learned a lot at the age of 65. I also know it was done 10 years ago. If you were to do an updated one, in the age of YouTube, I would like to see what happens when you atomized certain powders. The one I'm thinking of is the powdered coffee creamer. You can take a little pile and light it with a match and not much happens. When you launch it with an air cannon and ignite simultaneously it does produce quite an explosion. An explanation of what happens would be quite informative.

Outstanding presentation professor thank you!

This is the kind of stuff I would've loved to go to as a kid.

Loved every second of this presentation

one of the best lectures i have ever attended. fabulous!! the original Demolition man. kudos!!

Fantastic lecture, I learned a lot and at almost 70, who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks?That gentleman certainly teach my old science teacher how to deliver a lecture. Well done. One of the first news stories I reported on was a young boy, about 13 years old decided to use a box of Railway detonators to make a bomb. He lost one hand and badly disfigured the other.

This was a very good review; even for a Marine EOD technician. I even learned a thing or two more!

George Puryear I never noticed the air from the shock tube, probably because the other end is wide open by the detonation and most of it scapes over there, I will pay attention the next time.

One of the best lectures I've ever seen before.

Once, when I was working as a substitute teacher, I mentioned to the class that I had a degree in chemical engineering. One of the students asked me if I could make him a bomb. I replied that "I could," but "I won't!" By the way, there are many other substances, like organophosphorus compounds, that one can make...;)

Awesome video! Making science fun!

Prof Chris Bishop's demo's rock!

Brilliant! I hope Dr. Bishop spends some of his very valuable time teaching teachers.