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" Only One episode remains. As the conclusion of AMC&amp;#039;s Breaking Bad looms this Sunday, what&amp;#039;s left of Walter White&amp;#039;s life is smoldering in ruins. Breaking Bad has always been a tale about decay and change. And so the fact that the series has revolved around chemistry\u2014from Walter White&amp;#039;s botched chemical startup venture Grey Matter to his perfect methamphetamine recipe\u2014couldn&amp;#039;t be more appropriate. &amp;quot;Technically, chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change,&amp;quot; White says to his high school chemistry students in the show&amp;#039;s first episode. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s growth, then decay, then transformation.&amp;quot; That sentiment\u2014chemistry is change\u2014is also helpful for viewers waiting to watch the final chapter. The real chemical processes that have taken a pivotal role throughout the series have something to say about Walter White&amp;#039;s dark transformation. Two in particular. Corrosion Thinking about the word corrosion, in a chemical sense, might make you think of rust. But, &amp;quot;broadly defined, corrosion can be the deconstruction of any material through reactions with its environment,&amp;quot; says analytical chemist and blogger John Preece. Nowhere in Breaking Bad is this process more visible than inside Walter White&amp;#039;s ubiquitous industrial barrels\u2014the ones we&amp;#039;ve seen brimming with cash and overflowing with limbs of the recently deceased. Using a chemical called hydrofluoric acid, Walt has dissolved away all traces of six corpses and a young boy&amp;#039;s motorbike. &amp;quot;That process, the dissolution of body parts or metals in acid, is corrosion,&amp;quot; Preece says, and it works in a pretty interesting way. Although hydrofluoric acid is no more than two atoms stuck together (one hydrogen and one fluorine), it&amp;#039;s wildly dangerous. The acid desperately grabs hold of new atoms, ripping apart whatever it&amp;#039;s around in a violent flurry. Some materials, such as the long chains of molecules that make up plastic barrels, can resist the acid. &amp;quot;It will, however, dissolve metal, rock, glass, and ceramic,&amp;quot; Walter White explains, after using it the first time. And as for a human body, &amp;quot;you&amp;#039;re effectively disassembling a person molecule by molecule,&amp;quot; Preece says. Hydrofluoric acid is an appropriate choice for Walt&amp;#039;s gruesome task but an odd one. On the one hand, it&amp;#039;s certainly effective. Morticians (and soap-making anarchists) will use lye to dissolve corpses\u2014it will do the job but leaves remnants of bones and teeth, because the calcium in them is resistant to deterioration. That&amp;#039;s a problem for criminals. &amp;quot;When you dispose of a body it&amp;#039;s the bones and the teeth that tend to be incriminating,&amp;quot; Preece says. &amp;quot;But hydrofluoric acid has a high affinity to calcium,&amp;quot; Preece says, and leaves nothing but an unidentifiable slurry. &amp;quot;That said, it&amp;#039;s not the method any sane person would choose,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s so horribly toxic,&amp;quot; Preece says, that just pouring hydrofluoric acid incorrectly could kill you, &amp;quot;especially the cavalier way they&amp;#039;re flushing it about in the show.&amp;quot; Dribbling even a tiny bit of the stuff on your clothes, or having the fumes getting into your eyes and lungs, would drop you like a 20-pound bag of methamphetamine. On a more philosophical level, it&amp;#039;s easy to draw the connection between chemistry and Walt&amp;#039;s own moral corrosion. &amp;quot;Power Corrodes,&amp;quot; read the posters for this last season, and perhaps Mr. White is the hydrofluoric acid in his own life, corroding friendships and family bonds. Chirality Chirality is a bit of a tricky concept, so let&amp;#039;s give the chemistry guru himself the honors of explaining it: &amp;quot;Just as your left hand and your right hand are mirror images of one another, identical and yet opposite,&amp;quot; Walt says on the show, &amp;quot;so, too, organic compounds can exist as mirror-image forms of one another all the way down at the molecular level.&amp;quot; These types of molecules, with their mirror-image pairs, are said to be chiral. &amp;quot;But although they may look the same, they don&amp;#039;t always behave the same,&amp;quot; Walt warns. Walt gives the example of the molecule thalidomide, which was prescribed in the 1950s and &amp;#039;60s to alleviate the nausea of morning sickness. In the tumult of the digestive system, thalidomide can make a molecular transformation into its chiral pair. When it becomes its mirror image, it has an entirely different effect\u2014it causes horrid birth defects. But as far as Breaking Bad is concerned, there is another, much more important chiral molecule: methamphetamine. Though meth has two mirror molecules, meth cooks usually only ever have to contend with one\u2014the molecule that gets you high (the other, weirdly enough, is the active ingredient in Vick&amp;#039;s Vapor Inhalers). That&amp;#039;s why Sudafed, a decongestant with almost the exact shape and makeup of the desired meth molecule, can be transformed into the drug through a few relatively simple steps. But when Walt switches to the P2P cook to avoid the bottleneck of collecting Sudafed, he grapples with an entirely different meth making process. Building the drug from the ground up, Walt must create both meth mirror molecules in a 50/50 mix. As we noted in our in-depth look at Walt&amp;#039;s cook, in reality there&amp;#039;s no simple or easy way to correct for this and allow Walt to make his high-purity meth. &amp;quot;But when Walt does this cook, he comes up with a 99 percent pure batch,&amp;quot; Preece says. One theory is that, &amp;quot;what he&amp;#039;s invented here is some type of new chemistry&amp;quot;\u2014one that, incidentally, makes his product blue. So how does this relate back to Walt? As Preece explains, &amp;quot;The thing about chiral molecules is that they&amp;#039;re chemically identical; they have all the same physical properties. The only way you can tell the difference is to put them in something like a living environment.&amp;quot; Oddly enough, Walt&amp;#039;s alter ego, his chiral pair Heisenberg, starts to eke out of his personality at roughly the same time as Walt switched to the P2P cook. Though Heisenberg looks and seems just like Walter White, it&amp;#039;s the way they behave in their respective environments that&amp;#039;s drastically different. One is a sociopath and the other might as well be in a Vick&amp;#039;s Vapor Inhaler. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a9492/how-breaking-bads-chemistry-explains-walter-white-15962254/>