Science and magic are rather different, but some of the changes you see in chemistry do look like magic. Magic and science can sometimes be perceived as indistinguishable… In one of your videos you say that you used to do “chemical conjuring” at your children’s birthday parties, which is a lovely thought. I had an exceptionally good memory when I was young – it isn’t bad now but it’s not as good as it used to be – so I found remembering the facts in chemistry very easy. I thought I’d become a physicist too, but my maths wasn’t good enough. My father and grandfather were physicists, and my father decided when I was very young that I was going to be a scientist, so I didn’t really have any choice. How old were you when it struck that chemistry was what you wanted to dedicate yourself to? I think I might be the most recognisable chemist in the world. I’ve probably become better known for my videos than I have for my contributions to science because of my funny hair. Have you had a good response to the videos from the scientific community? In the original video I was recorded without my knowledge in what is known in the trade as a pre-credit sequence saying, “I know nothing about Hassium, should we make something up?” We then visited the institute in Hesse, Germany, where it’s made. My all-time favourite is Hassium, which is a synthetic chemical element, number 108. We do try and make them go to plan, obviously.ĭo you have any particular favourites from the series? I like that you still show the ones that haven’t quite gone to plan… My colleagues take part too, and we don’t have any scripts if I say something boring, Brady cuts it out. How do you go about structuring the ideas for each video? There were messages such as, “I don’t care what you do, but keep making the videos.” How could we refuse? We’ve got over a million subscribers, our most popular video has more than 19 million views, and we have about eighteen videos that have over a million views each. Did you anticipate the response that you’ve received, and is that what’s driven you to continue for so long?
#University of nottingham periodic table series#
You’ll have been making the series for ten years this summer and you’ve covered all 118 elements, some a few times over, and branched out into molecules. Not that I would want to do that every year. It was more stressful for Brady than me because he was working all hours of the day and night.
After that, our fans wanted us to keep going. It was the summer Brady was still working at BBC East Midlands at the time and there isn’t much news in the summer, so we packed it all in. But he persuaded me, and we made 120 videos in five weeks. It’s easy to make videos about sodium and hydrogen, which explode, but what do you do about element 117, of which in 2008 – when we started – not even an atom had been discovered. The filmmaker, Brady Haran, was making a series of videos for the University of Nottingham called Test Tube, and he had the idea of making a YouTube series of each element of the periodic table. How did The Periodic Table of Videos first come about? After ten years of educating and entertaining the masses, we thought it was high time to chat to the man with an unrivalled passion for chemistry and periodic table-themed ties… With his distinctive shock of white hair and calm manner, Martyn Poliakoff isn’t your typical YouTube star, but he and his team have won over audiences around the globe. Science experiment videos are all over YouTube, which is great, but what a lot of them lack is a decent explanation that a layman can understand. Most popular video: Cheeseburger in Hydrochloric Acid
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