The Most Badass Uses of Science on "Breaking Bad"

In case you missed it, the central character in AMC's Breaking Bad is a high school chemistry teacher. And yet the show is packed with brutal moments of violence and emotional devastation. Go figure.

But every now and then, when Walter White acccomplishes something truly ridiculous with his scientist's brain, you're made to wonder: "Could a person actually do that?" Well, scientists and the Mythbusters are here to explain those chin-rubbing moments and help prevent the boneheads that high-five their way past the implicit "Don't try this at home" warnings present in these insane (awesome) stunts.

Frankly, good luck on getting your hands on half of the supplies needed to execute some of these action set pieces, unless you work in a building that requires a thumb print for access. Now that that's out of the way, we can giddily revisit, with a sober touch of reality, The Most Badass Uses of Science in Breaking Bad.

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Episode: "Dead Freight" (Season 5, Episode 5)
Accuracy: Siphoning liquids only requires a tube, a source, a bucket, and gravity. Siphoning gas from your own car is handy but siphoning gas from someone else's car is illegal (also called stealing). It's so simple that the Wiki How step-by-step guide is 11 steps—and the last step is remove the tubing.

Walt, Mike, and Jesse have just discovered that the DEA has tagged a train load of methlyamine barrels sent over from Madrigal. With the advice from Lydia, the three decide that their best bet is to stop the train and pump the methylamine from the train into buried tanks and replace it with water while the tanks are still aboard the train. There's a lot of set-up (steam shovels, truck drivers, and all that), but the plan goes off without a hitch (sorta...). It's a simple but smart moment of science. Walt knows that the weight of methlyamine is different than the weight of water, and has to work out the conversion rate. This is real science, people.

As for the realities of siphoning, it's mostly a question of equipment. The longer the tubing, or if the tube isn't positioned straight up and down, the more likely it is that air bubbles will form. If that happens, you have to start over.

Is it plausible that Walt and the crew pulled off a siphoning heist? Why not? They had the basic materials: a source, a tank, a hose, gravity, Walt's genius, etc. The surrounding circumstances are unlikely (in real life nobody will offer to help you push your car), but it's not like there's a textbook procedure of methylamine siphoning operations for comparison.

Episode: "4 Days Out" (Season 2, Episode 9)
Accuracy: The coins, nuts, and bolts provide the zinc. The zinc serves as the anode where the loss of electrons happens. Leftover potassium hydroxide solution from the pair's meth-making serves as an electrolyte to conduct a charge. The sponge separates the anode and cathode. When the two sides are connected via the copper wire, the brake pads make a negative charge and the zinc from the coins makes a positive charge.

After a two-day cook in the desert, Walt, Jesse and their 42 pounds of meth are ready to head home. But Jesse left the keys in the ignition and now battery is dead. Walt then attempts to jumpstart the battery by rigging the generator, but an accidental gas spill sets the whole thing ablaze. Jesse extinguishes the flames with their only remaining drinking water. No water, no phone signal, no car battery—thank goodness for science. In epic DIY fashion, Walt combines cupric oxide and graphite from the brake pads, sponges saturated with potassium hydroxide and galvanized metals to build an effective alkaline battery.

Would the battery have been able to produce enough current to jumpstart the RV? It's highly unlikely, but potassium hydroxide, often used in batteries, is also a component of meth production, so at least they came prepared.

Episode: "Cancer Man" (Season 1, Episode 4)
Accuracy: Overcharging a lead battery will force hyrdogen and oxygen to be ventilated when reacting with water (the sponge) and because hydrogen is highly reactive in air, there will be an explosion.

Mr. White, disrespected by the obnoxious douche yapping away on his Bluetooth who took his parking spot, returns wtih a large sponge and lodges it under the hood of the dbag's car, right between the battery terminals. The car explodes as Walt gets back inside of his car. How realistic is that?

Not very. The overcharging of the battery with electrolytes in the water from the sponge would ignite a fire, but not the huge (much cooler) blaze seen in the episode. In fact, it would be a very small fire that most likely would not last for very long. Unless it pierced a tube of fuel. So it's not impossible, and that's enough for us.

Episode: "Seven Thirty-Seven" (Season 2, Episode 1)
Accuracy: Ricin is highly toxic and naturally produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant. Doses bigger than a few grains of table salt can kill an adult human. So sprinkling it all over a burrito would suffice.

Paranoid that Tuco is stalking him, Jesse buys a gun and urges Walt to do the same. Not one to pack (yet, at least), Walt suggests they poison Tuco by cooking ricin, produced by castor beans and slip it into their next meth sample. According to the CDC, even digesting a small amount of castor beans is enough to cause injury. The poison seeps inside of human cells and prevent the cells from producing necessary proteins and inhalation, as Jesse and Walt plan to have Tuco unknowingly snort the ricin, could lead to respiratory failure, low blood pressure, and even death.

While it is possible to distill enough ricin to kill a human, it is a complicated process. It's unlikely that Walt would have the sophisticated equipment in his kitchen to isolate the protein without denaturalizing it. Coincidentally, ricin has been used experimentally to kill cancer cells, so if he coud distill ricin at home, he probably should have skipped started experimenting with ricin from the start and skipped the whole meth business all together.

Episode: "Buyout" (Season 5, Episode 6)
Accuracy: Electricity is a dynamic current that runs through conductors like wires and other metals. It cannot exist on an unbroken path, though it can jump through air over short distances to complete the circuit. Surge protectors safely divert excess current, called surges or spikes, to a grounding wire.

Caught trying to steal a tank of methlyamine at Vamonos, Walt is held at gunpoint by Mike, who wants out of the meth business. He's got a plan to sell his shares for a sizeable $5 million if, and only if, Walt stops producing completely. In the morning, Mike zip-cuffs Walt to a radiator and leaves to go take care of errands. Using his teeth, Walt strips down a coffee maker's power cord to the wire and, using the power from the surge protector and the exposed wires to make a mini blow torch, burns through the plastic cuffs to freedom and $15 million of meth.

We have to thank Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and all those other people who helped humans harness the power of electricity, because we don't know shit about currents, routers, or surges. Without them, or the Internet, we wouldn't have known that plastic is an insulator so Walt would have needed to get the current to flow to generate enough heat melting power. Conducting electrical charges across exposed wires is also unreliable and dangerous. As The Telegraph's expert Dr. Vincent points out, Walt could do that, but he would definitely risk death by electrocution.

Episode: "Pilot" (Season 1, Episode 1)
Accuracy: White phosphorus is more reactive than red phosphorus. Heated red phosphorus and hydrogen can make phosphine, but Walter only has steam. The sparks could've been the phosphorus burning, but it wouldn't produce the phosphine gas clouds.

Once again, Mr. White's chemistry was a bit off. Emilio, thinking Walt and Jesse has sold him out to the police, takes them out to the desert to get rid of them. Walter negotiates their survival in exchange for some meth-cooking lessons. However, after Emilio throws a cigarette outside the window, causing some brush to catch fire, Walt gets to cooking up the red phosporous on the stove. Earlier in the ep, Walt had told Jesse that just one whiff of this would be fatal.

Wrong. Walt would have needed to combine red phospherous with hydrogen to produce the phosphine gas that would indeed asphyxiate a human being. But Walt only added steam from boiling water. That would not produce the clouds of phosphine gas that you see in the scene.

Episode: "A No Rough Stuff Type Deal" (Season 1, Episode 7)
Accuracy: The mixing of Etch A Sketch aluminum powder and iron oxide creates thermite. Once it ignites, the reaction begins and releases heat that would raise the temperature in the immediate vicinity to over 2,000 degrees Celsius. The amount of heat causes the formation of molten iron.

In order to cope with Tuco's heavy order, Walt and Jesse upgrade their operation to a P2P cook. The issue? Finding enough methylamine to produce four pounds of meth. As luck would have it, Jesse is tipped off that there's a nearby warehouse full of the chemical and Walt suggests—taking a page out of Marie's book (because shoplifting is her side story in this episode)—that they steal it. Walt quickly devises a plan to blast off the warehouse lock using a thermite bomb composed of iron oxide and aluminum from an Etch A Sketches Jesse happens to have lying around.

While a true thermite-heat reaction could melt iron, the filings of an Etch A Sketch would not contain all of the necessary reactive metals. Also, Walt and Jesse use about a pint of thermite in their reaction, which would require about 184 Etch A Sketches.

Episode: "Cat's in the Bag..." (Season 1, Episode 2)
Accuracy: Because Hydroflouric Acid (HF) is an extremely toxic, corosive acid usually reactive with most metals and alloys, it is mostly kept inside plastic jugs or other containers. It's rough stuff.

No offense, Heisenberg, but the Mythbusters take issue with the ShamWow of body disposing products, Hydroflouric Acid (HF). In the second episode of the show, Jesse pours two gallons of HF on Emilio's corpse, which is stored in a second-floor bathtub. Not only does the body turn to soup, the acidic liquified Emilio burns through the bottom of the tub and the floor underneath.

Mythbusters put that premise to the test: They grabbed a pig carcass (sans head), placed it in a tub, and added six gallons of the even more toxic sulfuric acid. The results? Pig puddle. But the bottom of the tub and the floor underneath suffered no damage.

Episode: "Live Free or Die" (Season 5, Episode 1)
Accuracy: A poweful magnetic force could indeed eliminate the contents of a hard-drive, but it would take a bit more time and have broader energy consequences.

Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, with the help of Mike Ehrmantraut, attempt to recover the laptop that contains footage of the superlab. The laptop, however, is in the Albuquerque Police Department's evidence locker. The plan, which they execute, is to hook dozens of car batteries to a magnet they bought from a junkyard, ride down to the station, and then use that magnet to erase the laptop's hard drive throught he wall of the evidence room. It works in the show, but is that really possible? Experts say the chances of wiping out a hard drive from that distance is highly unlikely. Research says that would be hard to accomplish such an electric field with even a hundred car batteries.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407192,00.asp

Episode: "Crazy Handful of Nothing" (Season 1, Episode 6)
Accuracy: Mercury fulminate, used since the 1800s in firearms, is a highly sensitive compound that triggers explosions. Its creation mostly results in a fine powder, like salt, but a crystallized version is possible.

Remember that Breaking Bad scene that first gave you goosebumps, made you grab the person next to you, and scream "OH SHIT"? You know the one. Walter White walks into Tuco Salamanca's office in khakis and a fasionable hat, tosses down a rock of crystallized mercury fulminate and the whole room explodes. Walter walks away.

Mythbusters would like to step in to ruin it you with a thing they call science. The fellas on that show built a structure the size of Tuco's office, and used a robot to throw down some mercury fulminate. However, the robot had to throw more than 250 grams of fulminate (five times more than Walt's 50 grams), at an arm speed of greater than 60 miles an hour for the room to disintegrate into a fiery explosion. Still an awesome scene, Mr. Heisenberg, sir.