Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride (2010)

Enduring Appeal and Writing Style

• Commenters treat this post and the broader “things I won’t work with” series as a recurring classic they happily reread.
• The tone is praised as darkly comic, vivid, and reminiscent of humorous fantasy authors, making extreme chemistry approachable and memorable.
• Several say the series helped them enjoy chemistry despite disliking it in school and may even have inspired careers.

Fluorine, FOOF, and Rocket Fuels

• Many connect the article to the book Ignition! and its stories about fluorine-based oxidizers and terrifying exhaust products (e.g., hot hydrofluoric acid).
• Past rocket experiments with exotic fluorine oxidizers are discussed as technically impressive but practically disastrous, e.g., engines and test stands being aggressively eaten or coated in dangerous residues.
• There’s mention of tripropellant engines and proposals involving dioxygen difluoride or related mixtures, with skepticism about their practicality and survivability.

Other Nasty Chemistry: H₂O₂ and ClF₃

• Hydrogen peroxide is cited as an example where the name sounds tame but high-purity forms are dangerous, used as monopropellant and implicated in accidents.
• Another notorious oxidizer, chlorine trifluoride, comes up with anecdotes about it burning “impossible” materials; some note overlap between the blog’s stories and those in Ignition! and elsewhere.

Questionable Chemical Commerce and “Argon Powder”

• Commenters joke about suppliers advertising kilogram quantities of dioxygen difluoride, doubting such amounts have ever existed.
• Some suspect auto-generated or speculative catalog entries where vendors list anything and hope to synthesize on demand.
• A linked “argon powder” product is mocked; one commenter notes that solid argon is physically possible at very low temperatures but not in the form advertised.
• Google’s AI-generated search summaries are criticized for confidently hallucinating a meaning for “argon powder” that no real sources support.

Reposts, Bit Rot, and Culture

• The thread collects links to related classics (SR-71 stories, “Mel,” “500 miles” bug, xkcd “what if”) as similar “type 2” reposts people enjoy repeatedly.
• Some lament link rot: pages originally referenced in the article have become gambling spam, with others providing archive.org snapshots.
• A few reflect on how extreme-chemistry work is often done “because we can,” analogous to performance-obsessed engineering with little direct practical payoff.