An all-important factor, underpinning much of the research, turned out to be none at all.
At the end of January 2018, the journal Chemical Communications published a very strange and equally interesting study. Accordingly, research has turned a chemical that has been used a lot for decades into an anonymous little thing.
More precisely, the chemical never existed , and that means a lot of the research that was done on that “ghost chemical” has become worthless.
The seemingly important chemical turned out to never exist.
Specifically, the study was conducted by experts from the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University (Australia), and it came to them by chance. At that time, two groups of experts were working on a project on treating mercury from oil refineries with sulfide solution (S2-) .
Sounds too reasonable right? But this is not a simple question, as the refining industry has been trying to answer it for years. Overall, this is a project that requires very deep expertise in chemistry, as well as the use of many variations of sulfur.
During their research, they had to focus on the S2- ion . This ion seems to be found in many forms, and experts have had to find experimental evidence of its existence in solution.
They used complex mixtures involving sulfur, dissolved them in a super-concentrated solution, and then placed them in a spectrometer. This is a device that uses a laser to excite molecules, and then uses scattered light to identify specific molecules that are present in the solution.
Symbol for sulfide.
But strangely, no matter how hard they tried, they could not find any trace of S2- ions in that solution.
“There is not any experimental evidence that this ion exists in solution,” said study author Professor Peter May from Murdoch University.
According to May, he said that although he could not prove that S2- did not exist, there was no proof that it existed either. It’s like a “ghost” ion.
More importantly, sulfide is a very important chemical element, appearing in every textbook a, every chemical foundation known to man. According to May, this is the time when science needs to be more serious, not to continue doing research with a foundation based on the existence of sulfides. Even a negative way can erase all previous studies, because they are wrong.