One of the fun parts of chemistry is that most chemicals that ordinarily exist are quite far from having the most extreme possible properties that you can ascri

One of the fun parts of chemistry is that most chemicals that ordinarily exist are quite far from having the most extreme possible properties that you can ascribe to a chemical. It doesn’t really matter what the property is. This is almost by definition, as “extreme properties” is roughly a synonym for “extremely unfavorable thermodynamics”. Nonetheless, chemists are obsessed with these because in theory you can engineer chemicals with completely implausible, or at the very least counter-intuitive, properties in a lab if you can figure out how to do it. It is the equivalent of extreme performance-engineering geekery in software. You do it because you can, not necessarily because you have a use case. Topics like “theoretical limits of high explosive power” [0] and a lot of other things that will put you on a government list are something chemists definitely geek out on. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octanitrocubane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octanitrocubane