Is it true that if chemists were placed in a lab where none of the chemicals were labeled they would be able to figure...

It's important that you used chemists plural here as the act of figuring out what some of the chemicals were would probably cost you a few chemists. Cheap price to pay though for identifying all those chemicals.

I already know what the containers are. Waste. Not my job to figure that shit out. Lab pack it. I have other things to do.

what if it's dimethylmercury?

by taste

been differentiating by smell

What if the chemical is labeled wrongly?

And why would that be? Just use very small quantities so even if molar reaction energies are large or produce much gases, the reaction energies and volatility itself will be low.

Not really. First you'd divide them to liquids and solids (gases would already be in containers of course).

Then youd take all the liquids through some spectroscopy until you identified all of them.

Solids would be pretty difficult. Your best bet would probably be to melt them to check melting point. Then youd either try to dissolve them, burn them, or weigh them.

>I have other things to do

Literally worst excuse ever. Because of people like you most of the laboratories on Earth run unoptimally.

>mass spectroscopy doesn't work on solids
learn science retard

Choose the least expensive method first, brainlet

You don't need mass spectroscopy to identify solids other than organic compounds

Idk about everyone, and I’m definitely no chemist, but I do have interests in the chemistry field and I definitely think that chemists with balls could do it.

It's not dangerous at all. Only radioactivity and microbiology are dangerous things.

In my AP chemistry class in high school my teacher let us go into the back rooms and I would mix random shit together all the time

They were labeled but it didn’t matter bc I wouldn’t always read it

You taste each liquid and solid. So you could dell the acidity by the sourness, for example.

Failors are dependant on tools, they are all loosers, no way to chimestry without simple way you are master, the sodium benzoate and a food can is everything for anything.
>cool.

Or maybe you can properly assign tasks and lead a lab like an adult and not leave unlabeled bottles everywhere like a child? I'm not doing anything beyond my job description unless it's made apart of it and paid commensurately.

Probably be a lot of casualties along the way, but how do you think chemistry was developed?
At some point in the past, EVERYTHING was unlabeled!

I think the first half-a-dozen or so of the chemists who tried studying elemental Fluorine all died.

Most of them are clear colorless liquids and I’m not sniffing random bottles

you sound like a high-schooler/first year student with neither brains nor experience

what if one of the unlabeled chemicals was worth a fortune, but it looked like at least 10 others that were highly corrsive or volatile?

it would make a good tv show.

I remember when I was a kid a label came off from a coke bottle. My mother had to call the police.

Should be doable with a nmr machine and some IR spec.

The memes are strong with this one.

Isn't it called mass spectrometry for masses, UV spectroscopy for bonds, and NMR for protons?

>Hey let me just get a milligram of this liqui-
>It was anthrax

We've gotten better at chemistry now, most fluorine chemists today only lose a couple fingers or an eye

> whoops an unlabelled bottle of VX, a lot of people died
At least they got to the unlabelled bottle of LSD first.

lol nothing I use in the lab is labeled

>You sound like a little bitch rn, everyone who cares about science at all let alone chemists would be mixing random containers for hell raise and then calling it science, see the history of chemistry.
Have you even started your undergrad yet? Chemistry as a field is way past the point of trying to react unidentified substances with other unidentified substances to produce unidentifiable substances. The deliberate choice of reactants and reaction conditions is key to any sort of synthetic research because it allows you to make reasonable hypotheses about what might happen or how something works.

Mixing unlabelled substances could produce unwanted effects that are extremely hazardous to your health. In some cases some containers might explode upon opening due to degradation into dangerous products or sensitivity to air.

I could think of a handful of chemicals that would fuck your shit up if you tried to combine them or just use them (see: acetone and hydrogen peroxide, n-butyl lithium, an old as fuck container of ether with crystals around the cap, an unlabelled tank of hydrogen).

amazing technique to disrupt laboratories: leave unlabeled shit everywhere

your lab must be tremendously unimportant

>Hey let's open this
>It was Sarin gas
>hrghrehgh
>....

>every agency
What a fag. Cant even clean up a few chemicals. Illicit drug chemists have more skills than the fairy fags running around pharmaceuticals and universities these days.

yes, and they also get killed/deformed/horribly injured a lot

>hey lets open this
>it was ClF3
>all other chemicals are now gone

I think that'd be funny.

Don't need practical skills for it. If you have the knowledge of what they are, you can slowly deduce what each unlabeled containers contains. It would be quite dangerous though.

If an actual inventory of ordered and received chemicals was kept up to date, this process would become significantly easier and likely a whole lot safer.

Stop posting.

Ph.D. in O-Chem here. This wouldn't really be that difficult... For safety I would just wear a respirator and load everything into a glovebox for testing. Any organic solids/liquids would be easy enough with mass spec and NMR. Everything else is just gen chem level.

We do this shit all the time by the way, labels wear off or peel away sometimes. The worst is fucking ether or THF because you could literally blow your hand of just opening the bottle, and they're very common in organic labs.

Thank You, user.
I"m glad someone stepped up as the voice of reason.

>they would be able to figure out what all of them were eventually?

Depends what sort of equipment, PPE, and safety cabinets they had in this 'lab' to do the necessary testing.