I have no idea which book to recommend to you, because books like teachers, some people get on really well with one teacher.

Some people prefer a different teacher, so it's which author you relate to.

I very much like the book by Primo Levi called The Periodic Table.

It may not suit everybody.

I don't read very much fiction.

And if I do read fix and I usually only read it once.

What's the last fiction book you read?

The last fiction book I read was by Oh, in Matthew's I've for Gotten its Title.

It's a murder mystery set in a Russian town in the 19 early 19 fifties, when the H bomb was being constructed there.

In your videos, we often see experiments fail, but in a factory, the same chemical reaction will be flawlessly executed with perfect predictability.

Why, when we do experiments were doing them for the first time, at least for us.

So there lots of things we don't know they were meant to put it off.

If you're building a chemical factory, you will put in a lot of chemical engineering.

You will know all of the aspect of the reaction on dhe.

You've calculated the rates of reactions and so on.

So you've done the experience hundreds of times and you've got it really to work, working with so many different chemicals through the years.

I'm sure you've had a few scares.

But was there ever an incident when you were genuinely fearful for your life?

No.

I think chemists have to work safely.

I suppose the scariest incident they had was when I was a student.

It's doing my doctorate, and I put £500 per square inch.

Pressure of hydrogen gas by mistake into a glass bulb on the bulb, exploded on bits of glass, were found all over my hair.

But fortunately I wasn't injured at all.

We were in safety specs in those days.

People who wore glasses were not given safety glasses, so I actually glued some stayed pieces onto one of my pairs of glasses.

After that, what is your best advice in teaching chemistry that will help me become an even better teacher?

First of all, let me say that when I talked to professional chemists and ask them Why did you become a chemist?

They nearly always say, because I had an inspirational chemistry teacher and I had a great teacher called Tony Roberts.

I'm Tony Roberts.

I talked Martin chemistry 50 years ago.

I behaved badly in his class, but he still inspired me.

So I think the most important thing for any sort of teaching is enthusiasm.

If you find the subject boring, heaven help the pupils.

So I think you've got to convey the idea that you think the work is interesting and you like it.

I was once lecturing to students about something I thought was really boring substitution in octahedron Coble complexes.

The whole class was silent, and I suddenly thought, Gosh, they think it's interesting And I worked myself up into such a state of excitement that I couldn't do anything for the rest of the morning.

Dear Professor Polyakov, what is your favorite cheese?

I don't like blue cheese very much, but I like most other cheeses.

I once published the paper with my colleague George Davidson, analyzing cheese, in fact, analyzing low fat cheese and comparing with normal cheese.

I was so embarrassed that I published the paper with the word cheese in the title that I didn't put it in my CV for many, many years.

What's wrong with having chasing the time?

Well, I thought it was not very didn't sound very scientific.

What will you do when you retire?

One can never foresee the future, but I'm not planning to retire immediately.

But who knows what's going to happen to one in the future?

How many periodic table ties do you have?

I'm not sure, because I have two collections, one at home and one here at the university in the US There's the university one on the ties sometimes travel between the two.

I think it's more than a dozen.

I rarely wear a tie without the period table on it.

I've now even gone really dark, one that is suitable for funerals.

You can't really see the elements very well, but I know they're there.

I have a theory which might, um, amuse some of you that wearing a tie may help mitigate global warming because, you see, when you have a tie, it constrains your collar around your neck so hot air gets trapped in your shirt, so you feel warmer so you can turn the heating down.

So if you wear a tie, let's see Oh too, it's discharged in the atmosphere.

So save the planet and wear a tie.

How do you relax in your free time?

Sleep?

You go to the movies a lot, don't you?

So I goto Well, my wife is very clean on cinema.

So we go quite a bit to the cinema and you probably know that my brother is a movie director and writer.

You can buy his TV days on Amazon, so I do enjoy going to cinema.

And my mother was an actor, though she didn't perform very much.

But there is a big tradition of performing in our family.

Is it true that you sometimes leave when you're bored and go and work out in the corridor?

Don't leave your wife for watch on her own.

Yes, the cinema has very good Wei fei on DSO.

If the film bores me or frightens me, I go out and work on my computer.

A lot of people asked about this.

What advances in chemistry will be most important for preventing or mitigating climate change.

Besides wearing ties.

I think the important thing is to find ways of providing energy without generating Theo to or large amounts of CO two.

It is not just a question of chemistry because it involves a lot of engineering, the chemistry, maybe the underlying principle.

But getting it to work on a large scale is definitely engineering, So engineers and chemists have to work together.

The really important things that need to be done is to learn how to harness the energy from the sun really efficiently, for example, new catalysts to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight.

Then you can burn the hydrogen to fuel cars and other sorts of transport.

Then there is the question of batteries so you can store electrical energy that you have generated with photo cells making cheaper photo cells that last longer that use all of the spectrum of the light from the sun.

May hope.

Is that canister going to succeed?

If they don't?

Well, it'll fry as the temperature just goes up and up in the earth's atmosphere.

We had so many questions about this, I guess I better ask.

How do you maintain your majestic hair?

How do you prepare it.

What's your hair regime?

So my hair is what I was born with, and I don't do very much apart from occasionally brushing it.

I haven't bean to a barber since 1967.

My wife cuts my hair occasionally when she's persuaded made that it looks totally ridiculous.