One of the best things is that, though Fritz Haber designed the process intending to use it to create chemical weapons to harm people, the Haber process is now indispensable to producing fertilizer, and without it the world would not be able to support anywhere near the current world population
I like taking things designed for awful purposes and repurposing them for good
@Motodrachen is google spying on you outside of google websites now or is this just a coincidence
@Motodrachen can't fault you for that, chemistry is fascinating
Did you see that nurdrage got that sodium thing working with easily obtainable chemicals?
@Motodrachen he spent months trying all sorts of increasingly exotic tertiary alcohol catalysts, and then eventually it turned out that menthol worked perfectly fine
(the reason tertiary alcohols seemed to be necessary was because of how bulky they are around the alcohol, which hinders side reactions that decompose them. Menthol happens to be a particularly bulky secondary alcohol, so it worked as well, and you could probably even make it work with a primary alcohol with weird steric effects)
