The Chemistry Set in SF

The American Chemical Society is meeting in San Francisco this week. A billboard on a bus alerted me to it. I wish I had known about it earlier. I wonder if they are talking about why kids don't have real chemistry sets anymore or why chemistry is taught so poorly in high school.

One of my favorite articles in the current issue of Make is written by George Dyson. He profiles the physicist Theodore B. Taylor. He quotes Taylor as saying: "I was given a chemistry set when I was seven or eight and that rapidly turned into a laboratory for making explosives." He went to work building nuclear explosives in the 1950s and had first-hand experience of those enormous explosions. Later in life, Taylor said: "I was fascinated by explosions. I still am." Dyson concludes his article:

Taylor had the time of his life designing bombs and spent the remainder of it trying to get the madness of threatening to use them to stop. ... There are no more Ted Taylors. The new generation of nuclear weaponeers grew up with video games but was not allowed to have chemistry sets. Are we any safer as a result?