Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to start off today by thinking about containers. Um,
Speaker 1: if you ever look around a chemistry lab, you will
Speaker 1: notice that there are a lot of containers made out
Speaker 1: of glass. Glass is often thought of as the chemist's friend, right,
Speaker 1: And this is because silica, the stuff that glass is
Speaker 1: made out of, is generally chemically inert, not much reacts
Speaker 1: with it, and glass is insoluble in in most solvents,
Speaker 1: so it's not going to be leeching off and contaminating
Speaker 1: your sample. But this is not true in all cases.
Speaker 1: For instance, there's a chemical we've talked about on the
Speaker 1: show before called hydrofluoric acid, the solution of hydrogen fluoride
Speaker 1: or HF in water. Hydrogen fluoride is known to actually
Speaker 1: corrode even glass, and there's some pretty good videos of
Speaker 1: this that you can look up, like the YouTube channel
Speaker 1: called Periodic Videos has one you can find where they
Speaker 1: dissolve a glass light bulb in hydrofluoric acid. I think
Speaker 1: while it's plugged in by the way, at least when
Speaker 1: when the glass finally does dissolve and break off in
Speaker 1: the liquid, the the filament inside the light bulb, I
Speaker 1: recall is like sparking in the solution in a in
Speaker 1: a very weak and creepy and cursed way. But it's
Speaker 1: kind of disturbing to see even glass, the ultimate non reactor,
Speaker 1: just getting sort of cleanly sheared off of the top
Speaker 1: of a bulb when it's dipped into this this stuff
Speaker 1: and then falling away and eventually just dissolving into it
Speaker 1: and becoming a liquid itself. Regular glass, of course, is
Speaker 1: made of silica sand, which is made of silicon dioxide
Speaker 1: or s I O two. And when you put glass
Speaker 1: into hydrogen fluoride into hydrofluoric acid, the hydrogen fluoride breaks
Speaker 1: the bonds between silicon and oxygen in silica to form
Speaker 1: silicon fluorine molecules, and the result is the hydrofluoric acid
Speaker 1: eats right through the solid glass. So here you've got
Speaker 1: this material, this hydrofluoric acid, that cannot be stored in
Speaker 1: regular glass containers, asked to be stored in special plastic
Speaker 1: containers or it might eat right through the bottle and
Speaker 1: spill everywhere. And this is a jumping off point for
Speaker 1: today's episode, because we're gonna be looking at the question
Speaker 1: of what if you were to imagine a material that
Speaker 1: push the boundaries even farther, if there was a solvent
Speaker 1: that that could dissolve everything it touched, a sort of
Speaker 1: universal solvent. Yeah, this reminds me a lot of our
Speaker 1: discussions in the episode on Hollywood Acid, the the way
Speaker 1: that acids are sometimes presented in science fiction, especially where
Speaker 1: you know, you you wound a xenomorph and it's so
Speaker 1: it's it's acidic blood seems to just burn its way
Speaker 1: through every floor, you know, all the way through the
Speaker 1: hull of the ship. Yeah, precisely. So this will be
Speaker 1: kind of a follow up episode to that, but but
Speaker 1: going more into the history of alchemy and getting into
Speaker 1: some of the metaphorical realms of these these high powered solvents. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing this immediately relates to for me is a
Speaker 1: thought experiment that I remember encountering from reading some of
Speaker 1: the American philosopher Daniel Dennett's books, where um Dennett often
Speaker 1: talks about a metaphor that he uses called universal acid.
Speaker 1: It's basically exactly what we're describing here, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: mean it in the pure material sense. Dinn It uses
Speaker 1: the metaphor of universal acid to describe evolution. Uh And
Speaker 1: and what he means there is that evolution is a
Speaker 1: concept that is not just a theory in biology. It's
Speaker 1: not just that when we discovered evolution by natural selection,
Speaker 1: we could suddenly explain the diversity of species on Earth.
Speaker 1: That was true, but it's also a sort of revolutionizing
Speaker 1: world view that changes everything it touches. And so, to
Speaker 1: quote from his summary of this idea from his book Intuition,
Speaker 1: Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, then it writes, universal
Speaker 1: acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat
Speaker 1: through anything. But what do you keep it in? It
Speaker 1: dissolves glass bottles and stainless steel canisters as readily as
Speaker 1: paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon
Speaker 1: or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole
Speaker 1: planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake,
Speaker 1: after everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid?
Speaker 1: What would the world look like? Little did I realize
Speaker 1: that in a few years I would encounter an idea,
Speaker 1: Darwin's idea bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid. It
Speaker 1: eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves and
Speaker 1: it's ake a revolutionized worldview with most of the old
Speaker 1: landmarks still recognizable but transformed in fundamental ways. Now there's
Speaker 1: a thing here where the metaphor I think might not
Speaker 1: be the best one because we get Hollywood acid in
Speaker 1: our brains, and when we think about Hollywood acid, Hollywood
Speaker 1: acid doesn't just change, it destroys. Right. You put the
Speaker 1: Batman in the Hollywood acid, and then the Batman is
Speaker 1: no more. Yeah, I mean a lot of this though,
Speaker 1: comes down to what we I mean when you talk
Speaker 1: about things being destroyed. This is a very human viewpoint.
Speaker 1: This is a very um, you know, organism based view
Speaker 1: of things. That the Batman is destroyed in the acid,
Speaker 1: that the the car is destroyed in the crash, that
Speaker 1: or that even something is destroyed when it is um
Speaker 1: you know, when it's just you know, a metal or
Speaker 1: something and it's melted or it's uh or it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's put into some sort of an acid or
Speaker 1: a base. But you know, it comes back to the
Speaker 1: basic principle that matter can neither be uh, you know,
Speaker 1: ultimately created or destroyed. Everything can only be transferred into
Speaker 1: different states or broken down into different components. That's a
Speaker 1: very good point. Yeah, from the sort of like chemical
Speaker 1: view of the universe, nothing has been destroyed. But I
Speaker 1: think it'd be fair to say that if you put
Speaker 1: a batman in a bunch of sulfuric acid and then
Speaker 1: you liberate all the possible water molecules from him and
Speaker 1: just leave a bunch of elemental carbon, you could say,
Speaker 1: in some sense the Batman has been destroyed conceptually at least, yes,
Speaker 1: But I mean part of that is the difficulty of
Speaker 1: then recreating a Batman, right because I mean we would
Speaker 1: have to recreate not only the batman's body, but the
Speaker 1: batman's psyche, and and you know, they're huge hurdles, not
Speaker 1: only in terms of of science and our understanding of psychology,
Speaker 1: but also time. It's a huge time investment to try
Speaker 1: and reproduce another Batman. Right. So, so I don't know
Speaker 1: if maybe he could have used a slightly better metaphor
Speaker 1: for what he means, because what I think he means
Speaker 1: is not that the concept of evolution destroys everything it
Speaker 1: touches in culture, but rather it reacts with everything it touches,
Speaker 1: so it leaves the world we knew before populated with
Speaker 1: the same questions and beauties and wonders, but each of
Speaker 1: them sort of now upgraded by a chemical reaction, each
Speaker 1: one sort of changed somewhat by our new perspective. You
Speaker 1: have a new scientific way of thinking about everything that
Speaker 1: you knew before. Yeah, you know, I think this this
Speaker 1: argument it certainly applies to evolution very strongly, uh, but
Speaker 1: you know, into evolutionary theory. But it also can apply
Speaker 1: to even um hypotheses that we've discussed in the show before.
Speaker 1: You know that take for instance, the bi cameral mind
Speaker 1: hypothesis by Julian Jaynes. That's an example of of of
Speaker 1: a very infectious idea that once you have, if you've
Speaker 1: really gotten into it, you it kind of can change
Speaker 1: the way you think about so many other things. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there are even less you know, controversial ideas
Speaker 1: you can think of where once you have, once you
Speaker 1: were alert to say a oh, just you know, certain
Speaker 1: sort of psychological ideas about how, uh you know, how
Speaker 1: things like trauma work. You know, uh, it changes the
Speaker 1: way you think about reality because you have a different
Speaker 1: way of processing what is going on or maybe going
Speaker 1: on with other people and other groups and throughout history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the metaphorical sense, I mean, all kinds of ideas
Speaker 1: I guess can become a mental universal solvent. I would say,
Speaker 1: in some cases with with more use than in other cases,
Speaker 1: Like sometimes we just start applying an idea to everything
Speaker 1: because it's really fun. And in other cases we start
Speaker 1: applying idea an idea to everything because we get we
Speaker 1: we at least believe we're getting some kind of analytical
Speaker 1: use out of it, like it's explaining more than, uh
Speaker 1: than than other ideas that we had previously. Though, I
Speaker 1: would say, be cautious of any lens that seems to
Speaker 1: explain everything, because you know, I've been through phases in
Speaker 1: my life where I sort of like learned a new
Speaker 1: analytical lens and then it explained literally everything in the world,
Speaker 1: and you like, you gotta be careful about those that
Speaker 1: usually you're probably over applying it at that point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like if you if you just apply aliens to everything
Speaker 1: and then it works, uh, you know, you're probably over
Speaker 1: applying aliens. That There was actually a sample I hear
Speaker 1: every now and then in a in a track where
Speaker 1: someone saying, you know, listing off all these different things
Speaker 1: and then saying you drop aliens in the middle of
Speaker 1: this and everything makes sense. It's always true, it's always true.
Speaker 1: So if there's anything like that, yeah, you could. You
Speaker 1: can sub anything for aliens if if it feels like
Speaker 1: it's a perfect fit, that it explains everything that it
Speaker 1: that it absolutely dissolves all the mysteries of life. I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's it's probably not the universal solvent you're
Speaker 1: you're really looking for, but it can seem like that.
Speaker 1: But before we get back into the fully metaphorical space,
Speaker 1: but what it means to to think about the world
Speaker 1: in terms of universal solvents. I want to actually consider
Speaker 1: the the real material possibility of a universal solvent, especially
Speaker 1: as it has figured into the history of alchemy, because
Speaker 1: you probably know, even if you only have passing familiarity
Speaker 1: with alchemy, that one of the endeavors of of alchemy
Speaker 1: was this search for these sort of dream materials, these
Speaker 1: holy Grail materials. What an author I'm going to be
Speaker 1: quoting extensively in this episode, Lawrence Prince you pa calls
Speaker 1: chemical arcana or I guess singular chemical arcanum. Uh, these
Speaker 1: objects that are sort of the mcguffin's of alchemy, that
Speaker 1: alchemists were requesting after. So one of these things might
Speaker 1: be like the Philosopher's stone that could allow you to
Speaker 1: transmute base metals into gold in the process known as chrysopoeia,
Speaker 1: or other ones might be Actually I talked about one
Speaker 1: in an artifact episode and it did not too long ago. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's an idea that you can find going all the
Speaker 1: way back to ancient Roman times, and that's the concept
Speaker 1: of bindable glass. The vitrum flexile or vitram malley abel
Speaker 1: that you could have glass that could be soft like
Speaker 1: dough and shaped into into different you know, in whatever
Speaker 1: form you needed. But another similar arcanum in alchemy was
Speaker 1: the concept of alcahest a, a substance that would act
Speaker 1: as a universal solvent that could break down anything. Now,
Speaker 1: discussing alchemy is always a little bit difficult because alchemy
Speaker 1: is somewhat controversially defined, like different people try to insist
Speaker 1: on different historical understandings of exactly what alchemy was. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can't say it's a it's the general output of
Speaker 1: a group of certain scholars who, you know, we're kind
Speaker 1: of secretive about their beliefs, and we're working with materials
Speaker 1: in some way. I mean, it's a kind of slippery concept.
Speaker 1: In English, the term has been used to refer to
Speaker 1: a huge range of beliefs and behaviors, with special emphasis
Speaker 1: on things done that that sound in some way related
Speaker 1: to sorcery, the hermetic, and the occult, and these associations
Speaker 1: are absolutely not without foundation. Like that they much of
Speaker 1: alchemy does have a cult and and and supernatural connections.
Speaker 1: But another way to understand alchemy, for the purpose of
Speaker 1: today's discussion at least, is that it is sort of
Speaker 1: the proto scientific study of the dynamics of matter, particularly
Speaker 1: concerned with transforming one type of matter into another, or
Speaker 1: of isolating the constituents of a material, refining that material,
Speaker 1: or enhancing its alleged properties, many of which were perceived
Speaker 1: to be medicinal properties. I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: in the modern era when they think of alchemy, they
Speaker 1: think about people trying to turn lead into gold, and
Speaker 1: and then that was a preoccupation of some people in
Speaker 1: the world of alchemy. But also a huge part of
Speaker 1: alchemy was a quest for medicine. Yeah. I guess to
Speaker 1: two points to make here. One is that we do
Speaker 1: often think of that when we think of alchemy, we
Speaker 1: may think of a very Western context and we think
Speaker 1: of people who look like wizards, you know, or even
Speaker 1: specifically someone who looks like John d or Merlin, Uh,
Speaker 1: toying around with science stuff. You know. Alchemy is science
Speaker 1: stuff what wizards do. Uh. But it is also important
Speaker 1: to note that that alchemy and things that we think
Speaker 1: of in English and in the end in the Western
Speaker 1: world as alchemy, you also find that in the in
Speaker 1: the Arabic world, you find it in in ancient India,
Speaker 1: you find it in ancient China. Uh. You know. So
Speaker 1: alchemy can very broadly speaking, be seen as kind of
Speaker 1: a global effort of learned individuals trying to learn more
Speaker 1: about the world. UM. I think one way to think
Speaker 1: of it too is think about geographic discovery. You know,
Speaker 1: people setting out on on voyages trying to find distant
Speaker 1: lands that they know to exist or that they have
Speaker 1: heard to exist. Sometimes those lands do not exist at all.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they are you know, islands of the imagination. But
Speaker 1: in the quest to find those play pass, they find
Speaker 1: real places, and ultimately this leads up to a a
Speaker 1: more accurate and more refined understanding of the world. Own
Speaker 1: interesting parallel between alchemy and your geography example, during ages
Speaker 1: of exploration, where people were trying to get away from
Speaker 1: their home country and figure out what else was out
Speaker 1: there that they could find. They're going to be different
Speaker 1: levels of perspicacity and reporting, you know, because like whatever
Speaker 1: you've discovered, you may think of this as, oh, this
Speaker 1: is knowledge I want to share with the world, but
Speaker 1: you may also very much think of it as like
Speaker 1: kind of a trade secret or a personal you know,
Speaker 1: this is something I've discovered for me and my my,
Speaker 1: my buddies, and we need to keep this secret and
Speaker 1: not let everybody else get in there before we've had
Speaker 1: a good go at it. Yeah, and then you have
Speaker 1: the pesky situation of discovering the real but keeping it
Speaker 1: secret or only holding on to it because of your
Speaker 1: quest for the unreal. And we've touched on this before
Speaker 1: on the show before um when we were talking about
Speaker 1: urine at point Urine's role in alchemy, and uh, I
Speaker 1: forget that the exact chemical episode who were discussing this,
Speaker 1: But the history of alchemy is full of such scenarios,
Speaker 1: you know. I was reading actually a Washington Post article
Speaker 1: from January eighteen by Ben Guarino that interviews Lawrence Princeipe,
Speaker 1: one of the one of the authors who's an expert
Speaker 1: on alchemy that we're gonna be talking about in this episode.
Speaker 1: And this article ends up talking a lot about p
Speaker 1: And there was one part I found very funny. It's
Speaker 1: talking about how in Prince ships lab he will try
Speaker 1: to recreate some some old alchemy experiments as they are
Speaker 1: described from these these texts, and so the artifacts of
Speaker 1: these experiments are all all around his lab. And and
Speaker 1: the article here describes on the counter sits a large
Speaker 1: jar labeled flim of acidified urine. More than one alchemical
Speaker 1: recipe calls for human p. Prince Ship said. An old
Speaker 1: Arabic text used the phrase the secret is within you,
Speaker 1: probably meaning well, reader, you go figure it out, and
Speaker 1: then it quotes Prince Bay saying, but some people took
Speaker 1: that more literally, so they ended up using vast amounts
Speaker 1: of urine. Oh that's wonderful. Yeah, and and that now
Speaker 1: that they've had a second to reflect. It was our
Speaker 1: our invention episode or episodes on the match stick. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: we're we're talking. I can't read. So we talked about
Speaker 1: multiple people who used urine. At least one of the
Speaker 1: main people who was big into two urine experiments. Was
Speaker 1: was the seventeenth century alchemist Hinnig Brund who who really
Speaker 1: specifically wanted urine from beer drinkers. So it was like,
Speaker 1: go to the bars, get the drunks to p in
Speaker 1: a bucket, and I will create a huge, a gigantic
Speaker 1: vat of beer drinker p. Yes, yes it was brand
Speaker 1: He was in search of the philosopher's stone um, but
Speaker 1: in doing so made these discoveries that ultimately tied into
Speaker 1: our understanding of a phosphorus and matches and you know,
Speaker 1: or matches being the one of the the actual real
Speaker 1: world and world inventions to come out of this quest
Speaker 1: for the fantastic. But it's so funny also about like
Speaker 1: misinterpreting the line the secret is within you two mean
Speaker 1: like literally in your bladder, because that that seems just
Speaker 1: just perfect for the world of alchemy, because there was
Speaker 1: a lot of sort of metaphors and secret keeping, kind
Speaker 1: of coded language. A Prince Pay talks in in one
Speaker 1: interview I was watching about how you know, in some
Speaker 1: alchemical texts, the author will not say the conventional names
Speaker 1: of the chemicals that he's talking about. He might instead
Speaker 1: of saying nitric acid. He will say the red dragon,
Speaker 1: and instead of saying, um, you know, like add nitric
Speaker 1: acid to this solution, he would say something like allow
Speaker 1: the red dragon to consume the white eagle or something. So,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of you have to like dig
Speaker 1: through and figure out what all of these code words
Speaker 1: refer to, not in every case, but in many. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it it makes looking back on some of these
Speaker 1: recipes and ideas oftentimes confusing because like I'm reminded of
Speaker 1: of the recipe that I looked at once for the
Speaker 1: creation of a homunculous and it has this kind of
Speaker 1: coded language in it. So sometimes it's hard to determine,
Speaker 1: you know, how much of what you're looking at is
Speaker 1: just abject occultism and in sorcery, and how much is
Speaker 1: coded material referring to something more closely related to to
Speaker 1: the world of chemistry and reality. Oh right, So like
Speaker 1: is it actually asking for like a bat swing or
Speaker 1: is it or is that a code for like saltpeter
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah, And I guess you can you can
Speaker 1: look at similar situations throughout our you know, the world
Speaker 1: of language and spirituality and all. But um, I guess
Speaker 1: one of the things to drive home with with alchemy
Speaker 1: is that, yes, we're talking about ultimately a proto scientific sphere. Uh. One.
Speaker 1: You know, this is one though, in which scientific considerations
Speaker 1: are either inherently mingled with philosophic and supernatural ideas, or
Speaker 1: at the very least are heavily susceptible to flowing into
Speaker 1: those subjects. And as the author um Mercia Eliade put
Speaker 1: it in the Forge and the Crucible quote, alchemy posed
Speaker 1: as a sacred science, whereas chemistry came into its own
Speaker 1: when substances had shed their sacred attributes. Oh that's interesting,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, One thing I do want to talk
Speaker 1: about as we go on is the ways that different
Speaker 1: uh practitioners of the alchemy period didn't They weren't just
Speaker 1: looking for chemical formulas, but they really thought chemicals meant something. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you you can imagine too where this gets. You know,
Speaker 1: we can't look at something without working without you know,
Speaker 1: without our brain beginning to ponder over the possible metaphors there.
Speaker 1: You know, how does this relate to me? Um? And
Speaker 1: maybe we're we get we're a little further from that now,
Speaker 1: but you know, we have to sort of put ourselves
Speaker 1: in the mindset of of older Uh, you know, experimentors.
Speaker 1: And uh, this is where I want to bring up
Speaker 1: some of the some of the thoughts that Terence McKenna
Speaker 1: brought to the table concerning alchemy. Um and and I
Speaker 1: think he I think he made he made some good,
Speaker 1: good points on the topic. He gave a series of
Speaker 1: lectures on alchemy in the late nineties um and touched
Speaker 1: on this. And I want to read a quote from
Speaker 1: it from a transcription. In this he is citing Iliade,
Speaker 1: but also putting his own spin on things. Quote. The
Speaker 1: shaman is the brother of the smith. The smith is
Speaker 1: the metallurgist, the worker in metals. And this is where
Speaker 1: alchemy has its roots. We who take this for granted,
Speaker 1: have no idea how mysterious and powerful this seemed to
Speaker 1: ancient people, and in fact, it would seem so to
Speaker 1: us if we had anything to do with it. I mean,
Speaker 1: how many of us are welders or casters of metal.
Speaker 1: It's a magical process to take, for instance, cinnabar, a
Speaker 1: red soft ore, and by the mere act of heating
Speaker 1: it in a furnace, it will sweat liquid mercury onto
Speaker 1: its surface. We have unconsciously imbibed the ontology of science,
Speaker 1: where we have mind firmly separated it out from the world.
Speaker 1: We take this for granted. It's effortless because it is
Speaker 1: the ambiance of the civilization that we've been born into.
Speaker 1: But in an earlier age, some writers would say, a
Speaker 1: more naive age. But I wonder about that mind and
Speaker 1: matter were seen to be alloyed together throughout nature, so
Speaker 1: that the sweating of mercury out of cinnabar is not
Speaker 1: a material process. It is a process in which the
Speaker 1: mind and the observations of the metal worker maintain an
Speaker 1: important role. Well, I don't know what to think about
Speaker 1: that claim about the idea the role of the mind
Speaker 1: in the transformations, but I think he's absolutely right that,
Speaker 1: Like you know, it's one of the frustrations of the
Speaker 1: modern world is that we rely so on so much
Speaker 1: um science and technology in the background of our lives
Speaker 1: that we can lose sight of the sheer wonder that
Speaker 1: that is on, you know, visible if you're actually watching
Speaker 1: these processes unfold in firsthand. Yeah, I mean, we talked
Speaker 1: about technological metaphors all the time on the show. How
Speaker 1: how often we think about our own cognition in terms
Speaker 1: of computers and cameras and digital recordings and so forth,
Speaker 1: uh and photoshop, etcetera. You know, and and these can
Speaker 1: all be useful, but they can also distort and create
Speaker 1: a a distorted version of of what's actually going on
Speaker 1: inside the mind or outside of it. And yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you know, if you were to put yourself in
Speaker 1: someone who day in and day out, was not using
Speaker 1: an iPhone, was not using a PC or a GO
Speaker 1: or a Mac or whatever, but was instead, uh working
Speaker 1: with the base materials and with metals and chemicals and
Speaker 1: trying to figure out their properties. Like this would be
Speaker 1: the primary way that they would also think about the mind.
Speaker 1: I mean it, it makes perfect sense to me, Like
Speaker 1: these would be there, This would be their telephone, their television,
Speaker 1: their computer. These would be the ways that they might
Speaker 1: then self reflect. Well, yeah, I mean it's it's apparent
Speaker 1: that witnessing chemical reactions suggested to people some kind of deep,
Speaker 1: underlying spiritual reality that was like more than just an
Speaker 1: idea about like different types of atoms and how they
Speaker 1: can fit together, but suggested like like big truth so
Speaker 1: that applied to everything. You know, that that alchemy could
Speaker 1: in its own way become a one of these metaphorical
Speaker 1: universal solvents, that it explains everything about about God and
Speaker 1: the universe and humankind in our minds. Now, since I
Speaker 1: did mention McKenna, one might easily say, well, for Terence McKenna,
Speaker 1: surely mushrooms, psychedelics were kind of the universal solvent. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I can certainly that can you can certainly
Speaker 1: make a case for that, especially within certain works of
Speaker 1: his you know, the Food of the Gods, etcetera. Um,
Speaker 1: that's kind of a case where you can say, oh,
Speaker 1: you drop mushrooms in the middle of this and everything
Speaker 1: makes sense. Um. Oh, did he suggest that Paracelsus took mushrooms? Uh? No,
Speaker 1: Actually he in these lectures, he he really took quite
Speaker 1: the opposite approach. And that's why I want to share
Speaker 1: one more, uh snippet from from this lengthy lecture series,
Speaker 1: which by the way, you can find online um in
Speaker 1: several places, either in you know, audio form or transcribed.
Speaker 1: But this is what he had to say. Quote. I
Speaker 1: will not claim and do not in fact think it
Speaker 1: is so that there was anything overtly psychedelic in the
Speaker 1: sense of pharmacologically based about alchemy. When we look back
Speaker 1: through the alchemical literature, there's very little evidence that it
Speaker 1: was far pharmacologically driven. Only when you get to the
Speaker 1: very last adamirations of the out of the alchemical impulse
Speaker 1: in someone like Paracelsus, do you get use of opium.
Speaker 1: It is interesting that the great drugs of modern society
Speaker 1: were accidentally discovered by alchemist in their research distilled alcohol
Speaker 1: as a product of alchemical work, and as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: opium was very heavily used. Um of the Paracelsian school.
Speaker 1: But what they possessed was an ability to liquefy their
Speaker 1: mental categories and then to project the contents of the
Speaker 1: mind onto these processes and read them back. Now, um,
Speaker 1: real quick, uh, Paracelsus. We'll we'll get back to Paracelsus
Speaker 1: in a bit. But this was an individual of four
Speaker 1: or four through fifteen forty one, a Swiss physician and
Speaker 1: alchemist of the German Renaissance, and he made a number
Speaker 1: of contributions to modern medical science. And he's come up
Speaker 1: before on the show, I think in our episodes on
Speaker 1: the Trident, on dangerous foods, on Frankenstein, and on blood drinking,
Speaker 1: which I guess are all areas where you might well
Speaker 1: imagine that the realms of chemistry and UH and alchemy
Speaker 1: might come together to some degree. Yeah, Paracelsus is considered
Speaker 1: one of the sort of granddaddy's of alchemy. Um. Paracelsis
Speaker 1: is his nickname. By the way, it's worth mentioning his
Speaker 1: real name, which was Philippus Areolas, the Ephrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.
Speaker 1: I like that Bombastus. Yeah, I think there's some question
Speaker 1: about whether the word bombastic comes from his name because
Speaker 1: he he would throw down like Paracelsis would get into it.
Speaker 1: In fact, I want to read a a a passage
Speaker 1: from a book that that I'm going to be referring
Speaker 1: to for the rest of the episode. That is by
Speaker 1: Lawrence in Prince Shop called The Secrets of Alchemy that
Speaker 1: was published in by the University of Chicago Press. Prince
Speaker 1: HP is professor at Johns Hopkins University, specializing in the
Speaker 1: history of science and technology, and he's written a ton
Speaker 1: about alchemy and and its role in the development of science.
Speaker 1: But um, there's a passage from his book where he
Speaker 1: briefly introduces the figure of Paracelsus, and he does it
Speaker 1: like this. He says Paracelsis spent much of his life,
Speaker 1: wandering from town to town, generally stirring up trouble wherever
Speaker 1: he went with his iconoclastic and quick tempered ways. It
Speaker 1: has been claimed erroneously that the word bombastic in the
Speaker 1: sense of pompous beach derives from his name. Okay, so
Speaker 1: that was he's saying. No, that is not where it
Speaker 1: comes from. But I have encountered that erroneous claim. Bridge
Speaker 1: Bay goes On. Paracelsis is best known as a vociferous
Speaker 1: critic of traditional medicine. His writings, frequently imitated in style
Speaker 1: by later followers, are filled with vitriolic and sarcastic condemnations
Speaker 1: of physicians, apothecaries in the entire medical establishment. It is
Speaker 1: reported that he publicly burned the medical writings of Ibben Sinah,
Speaker 1: standard texts for medical education at the time, as a
Speaker 1: sign of his contempt. Paracelsis's other provocative habits included lecturing
Speaker 1: for the short time he gave medical lectures in Basle
Speaker 1: and writing in his native Swiss German rather than Latin,
Speaker 1: and promoting the use of German medicinal plants over more
Speaker 1: established classical Mediterranean ones. He was a strong advocate of
Speaker 1: alchimia but only as one of the pillars of medicine,
Speaker 1: that is to say, for its ability to prepare pharmaceuticals
Speaker 1: and to explain body the functions. He showed no interest
Speaker 1: in chrisopoeia and occasionally wrote contemptuously of it. And again,
Speaker 1: chrisopoeia is the is the attempt to transmute base metals
Speaker 1: into gold. It's interesting, all these are our attributes of
Speaker 1: someone who very much wanted to dissolve the rigidity of
Speaker 1: the of of the establishment. You know, you could you
Speaker 1: could look at them acting as a kind of trying
Speaker 1: to act as a kind of universal solvent within their
Speaker 1: own culture. Yeah, And I guess that should bring us
Speaker 1: to the concept of the universal solvent itself, because Paracelsus
Speaker 1: wrote of something called alcohest, but Paracelsis meant something different
Speaker 1: by it. Paracelsis wrote of alcohest as a type of
Speaker 1: medicine for treating a bad liver. But in the wake
Speaker 1: of Paracelsis, some later alchemists would take the idea of
Speaker 1: alcohest as a universal solvent and really run with it.
Speaker 1: I remember, again, as I said earlier, alchemy is often
Speaker 1: concerned with the search for these particular chemical arcana in
Speaker 1: princeps terms. So again, this might be a method for
Speaker 1: transmuting base metals into gold doing the process of chrysopoeia. Uh.
Speaker 1: It turns out that this is despite the fact that
Speaker 1: some people are still trying to do this today. This
Speaker 1: is not really possible by conventional chemical means. Like gold
Speaker 1: as as we have it here on Earth is forged.
Speaker 1: It's it's a product of nucleosynthesis that occurs in some
Speaker 1: of the most violent phenomena in the universe, like neutron
Speaker 1: star collisions or exploding you know, stars at the end
Speaker 1: of their lifespan. Uh. Like, you can't turn lead into gold.
Speaker 1: That is just not a human power, I guess, unless
Speaker 1: you're talking maybe about I don't know, like like tiny
Speaker 1: amounts of it in particle colliders or something, you know,
Speaker 1: atomic experiments that accelerate protons to extremely high speeds and
Speaker 1: collide with things. And even in that case, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I just can't rule it out there by conventional chemical means,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about significant amounts of matter, you cannot
Speaker 1: turn base metals into gold. That would require rearranging the
Speaker 1: nucleus of an atom, which we just don't have the
Speaker 1: power to do right, and maybe if you were John
Speaker 1: d and you could actually um, you know, if you
Speaker 1: were actually going to capture or utilize an angel and
Speaker 1: you could somehow tap into their powers. Uh, they're they're
Speaker 1: just like base energy level. Then okay, maybe maybe it
Speaker 1: would be possible, but but not without any like additional
Speaker 1: supernatural add ons to the chemical understanding that we have. Right,
Speaker 1: and so, while the transmutation of base metals like lead
Speaker 1: into gold is probably the best known quest of alchemy,
Speaker 1: Prince Bay writes a lot about how alchemy is so
Speaker 1: much bigger than that it. Alchemy was not just the
Speaker 1: greedy gold slog of people who had you know, Mida's brain,
Speaker 1: uh like, it was generally the study of chemical change.
Speaker 1: And the study of chemical change is a really important
Speaker 1: and fascinating subject that you understand, sort of unlocks all
Speaker 1: of the other physical sciences. I already mentioned the idea
Speaker 1: of of recipes for bendable glass. I think this is
Speaker 1: a much more obscure one, but I just bring it
Speaker 1: up because I did an episode on it. A big
Speaker 1: part of alchemy, as we've already mentioned, was concerned with
Speaker 1: refining and improving medicines. But of course another holy grail
Speaker 1: of alchemy was the universal solvent alcohest. And so the
Speaker 1: place where alcohest really comes into the picture is in
Speaker 1: the work of the influential Flemish chemist and physician Jean
Speaker 1: Baptista van Helmont, who lived fifteen seventy nine to sixteen
Speaker 1: forty four uh, and of van Helmont is responsible for
Speaker 1: has more of a legacy than you might expect. Van
Speaker 1: Helmont is responsible for coining the English word gas. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was one of the first people, maybe the first
Speaker 1: to identify a gas other than general air, when he
Speaker 1: differentiated carbon dioxide as a distinct form of matt from
Speaker 1: the rest of the gas in the atmosphere. Apparently the
Speaker 1: word gas that he coined comes from the Greek word chaos. Now,
Speaker 1: Prince Bay writes that Van Helmont is the is the
Speaker 1: origin of this search for alcohest as the as the
Speaker 1: universal solvent, but notes that Paracelsus, as I already said,
Speaker 1: had used the word alcohest previously, and this was again
Speaker 1: for a very special medicine for the liver. But Van
Speaker 1: Helmont would take that word alcohest and start using it
Speaker 1: to describe a hypothetical substance that would be able to
Speaker 1: dissolve any other substance the universal solvent, and apparently a
Speaker 1: Paracelsus had a similar idea for a universal solvent that
Speaker 1: would have been a material called circulated salt or cell
Speaker 1: circulatum um. But but for van Helmont, alcohest became not
Speaker 1: just something that you wanted to be able to make,
Speaker 1: but something that was fundamental in understanding the very nature
Speaker 1: of matter. Because Van Helmont held a fascinating and mostly
Speaker 1: wrong but maybe not entirely wrong, at least sort of
Speaker 1: in the direction of being right in some interesting ways
Speaker 1: a view of matter that had these qualities, and it
Speaker 1: brought in ideas from medicine and theology and previous studies
Speaker 1: of chemicals. But the idea was that Van Helmont believed,
Speaker 1: basically everything is made of water, that water is quote
Speaker 1: the basic material substratum of all substances. You drop water
Speaker 1: in the middle of this and everything makes sense very good. Um.
Speaker 1: So this was a departure from previous ideas about the
Speaker 1: the constituents of matter. Again, Paracelsus had written about something
Speaker 1: called the Tria prima, which means the three primary things,
Speaker 1: and Paracelsus he did not originate this idea fully either,
Speaker 1: he was building upon the pre existing chemical knowledge, mostly
Speaker 1: passed down from Arabic scholars who had written that some
Speaker 1: metals and minerals could really be reduced to fundamental constituents,
Speaker 1: which were mercury and sulfur. Uh. This was not correct,
Speaker 1: but it did show a tendency of thinking that was
Speaker 1: scientifically useful, which was the idea that matter could be
Speaker 1: decomposed into its constituent parts, different chemical parts that would
Speaker 1: come together to make molecules of familiar substances, which is
Speaker 1: very true and the basis of what would become the
Speaker 1: real science of chemistry. And so Paracelsus is picking up
Speaker 1: on this idea. Uh. And he concluded that it was
Speaker 1: not just that some metals and minerals were could be
Speaker 1: broken down into mercury and sulfur. He concluded that basically
Speaker 1: all material could be broken down into three things mercury, sulfur,
Speaker 1: and salt. Again factually wrong, but a a but trending
Speaker 1: in a useful direction in terms of ways of thinking
Speaker 1: about matter. Yeah, kind of coming back into what we're
Speaker 1: talking about with destruction, Like, if you were to destroy anything,
Speaker 1: what would remain? What are the things that make up
Speaker 1: the whole? Sure? Uh, and I actually wanted to go
Speaker 1: into a brief digression on paracelsus is mingling of theological, metaphysical,
Speaker 1: and protoscientific thinking from a paragraph in prince Ship base
Speaker 1: book that that I found really interesting. So in writing
Speaker 1: about Paracelsus is idea of the Tria prima, prince ship
Speaker 1: A writes quote. These three chemical principles provided a terrestrial
Speaker 1: material trinity that reflected the celestial immaterial trinity as well
Speaker 1: as the human triune nature of body, soul, and spirit. Further,
Speaker 1: Paracelsus endeavored to generate an entire world system embracing the
Speaker 1: whole of theology and natural philosophy as an alternative to
Speaker 1: and he no doubt hoped ultimately a substitute for prevailing
Speaker 1: contemporaneous systems. For him, chemical processes provided the fundamental model
Speaker 1: for explaining natural processes in the physical universe as well
Speaker 1: as with the human body. For example, the cycle of
Speaker 1: rain through sea, air, and land was for Paracelsis a
Speaker 1: great cosmic distillation. The formation of minerals underground, the growth
Speaker 1: of plants, the generation of life forms, as well as
Speaker 1: the bodily functions of digestion, nutrition, respiration, and excretion, where
Speaker 1: for him inherently chemical processes, God himself is the master chemist.
Speaker 1: His creation of an ordered world out of primordial chaos
Speaker 1: was akin to the chemist's extraction, purification, and elaboration of
Speaker 1: common materials into chemical products, and his final judgment of
Speaker 1: the world by fire, like a chemist using fire to
Speaker 1: purge impurities from precious metals. Paracelsis system has been called
Speaker 1: a chemical world view, and it proved remarkably influential in
Speaker 1: succeeding generations. So for Paracelsis, not only did he inspire
Speaker 1: the later search for a literal universal solvent that we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about, but it seems very much again
Speaker 1: in the metaphorical, in the mind space, alchemy was his
Speaker 1: universal solvent. It it explained everything. I remember. Van Helmont
Speaker 1: would go on to break with Paracelsus in believing that
Speaker 1: matter could be reduced beyond the tria prima ultimately always
Speaker 1: down to what it was made of at bottom, which
Speaker 1: was water. So why would van Helmont think that ultimately
Speaker 1: everything was made of water? Well, his reasoning was partly theological.
Speaker 1: Part of it was the primacy of water in the
Speaker 1: genesis account of creation. Uh and this also calls to
Speaker 1: mind how in the recent Nile episode we discussed the
Speaker 1: prominence of water not just in the Biblical creation story,
Speaker 1: but as probably at least in the estimation of the
Speaker 1: scholar David Leming, the single most common theme in creation
Speaker 1: narratives around the world, if you like, compare all of
Speaker 1: the world's religions creation myths. He says, the thing that
Speaker 1: is in the most of them is water. You know,
Speaker 1: primordial cosmic oceans. Yeah. Yeah. And then oftentimes, like we
Speaker 1: discussed in that episode, we even would think of the
Speaker 1: cosmos as ocean. Uh so, I mean you would if
Speaker 1: it's not in the beginning there's some void or some
Speaker 1: just empty space of darkness, which I guess to a
Speaker 1: large point, you could be a large part point you
Speaker 1: could say is derived from our modern popular understanding of
Speaker 1: of what outer space is. They've never been to space,
Speaker 1: they didn't know what space was. Yeah, the the vast
Speaker 1: emptiness was the ocean. That was the that was the
Speaker 1: vast mystery, the vast primordial body. But it wasn't just
Speaker 1: these theological influences. Van Helmont also based this belief in
Speaker 1: the material primacy of water on physical experiments that he
Speaker 1: conducted in the lab. So here's an example, as described
Speaker 1: by Prince you Pay. In Van Helmont's most famous experiment,
Speaker 1: he planted a willow tree sapling that he had weighed beforehand.
Speaker 1: The willow tree was five pounds, and he planted it
Speaker 1: a container with two hundred pounds of soil. Then he
Speaker 1: watered the tree for five years, and at the end
Speaker 1: of five years the tree had grown from five pounds
Speaker 1: two hundred and sixty nine pounds. It had gained about
Speaker 1: thirty three or thirty four times its original weight. But
Speaker 1: he also measured the soil that the tree had been
Speaker 1: planted in, and he discovered that the soil weighed almost
Speaker 1: exactly the same as it did when he planted it. Thus,
Speaker 1: Van Helmont concluded that water alone had been transformed into
Speaker 1: all of the substances that make up the tree, the wood,
Speaker 1: the leaves. This is all just water that has been
Speaker 1: somehow transformed into higher forms of water, more solid forms
Speaker 1: of water. And in a way he was he was
Speaker 1: partially correct. I mean, much of the bodies of living
Speaker 1: organisms is made of water. Uh. But also without understanding
Speaker 1: the science of photosynthesis, Van Helmont didn't realize that the
Speaker 1: car been content of the tree which is the bulk
Speaker 1: of its non water weight, was actually from carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: from the air, which is absorbed from the atmosphere by
Speaker 1: the leaves, and then a chemical reaction powered by energy
Speaker 1: from the sunlight breaks apart the CEO two so that
Speaker 1: it can be used to make these carbon molecules that
Speaker 1: the tree needs to make its body. Again, We've talked
Speaker 1: about this on the show a million times, but it's
Speaker 1: one of the most astounding facts that you know, trees
Speaker 1: are made out of air. But without this knowledge of
Speaker 1: photochemistry and botany, it was somewhat reasonable for for Van
Speaker 1: Helmont to believe that what had gone into the tree
Speaker 1: was simply what he had put into it, which was water.
Speaker 1: That's the only thing he'd added to it. So how
Speaker 1: did this system of this this protean water based matter
Speaker 1: work well to read a section from from Prince Pay
Speaker 1: describing Van Helmont's thinking quote, The various transformations of water,
Speaker 1: he argued, are managed by semina or seeds capable of
Speaker 1: organizing water into other substances. Most materials can be turned
Speaker 1: back into primordial water through heating and cold, thus establishing
Speaker 1: a continuous cycle of creation and destruction. Fire destroys substances
Speaker 1: by turning them into gas again, a word Van Helmont
Speaker 1: coined from chaos. A non condensable substance more subtle than
Speaker 1: any vapor. Gas rises to the upper parts of the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: where exposed to extreme cold, it returns to elemental water
Speaker 1: that falls with the rain. The alcohest performs this return
Speaker 1: to water more quickly and usefully, so it base everything
Speaker 1: is made of water, and we're just seeing different forms
Speaker 1: of water. And if you get something really hot in
Speaker 1: a fire, it will transform. It will transform not only
Speaker 1: into liquid water, but sort of beyond this point into
Speaker 1: a gas that floats up into the atmosphere. Then when
Speaker 1: it's up in the atmosphere, it cools down, turns back
Speaker 1: into liquid water falls as rain. So it's sort of
Speaker 1: water to water, wet to wet worldview. And then the
Speaker 1: alcohest comes in as a universal solvent because it seems
Speaker 1: to serve the function of reducing all matter back down
Speaker 1: to the state of liquid water without degrading it in
Speaker 1: the process. So, according to Van Helmont, if you were
Speaker 1: to heat a substance mingled with alcohest, it will first
Speaker 1: be reduced to its proximate ingredients. These would be sort
Speaker 1: of the middle constituents. Right before you get all the
Speaker 1: way to water, it will break down into some other
Speaker 1: things first, and these would be comparable to Paracelsis idea
Speaker 1: of the Tria prima. But then further heating with alcohest
Speaker 1: will reduce even these proximate ingredients to the ultimate base material,
Speaker 1: which is water. So from Van Helmont's point of view,
Speaker 1: the alcohest was was not a chemical arcanum because it
Speaker 1: would turn your lead into gold and make you rich.
Speaker 1: It was actually desirable as the ultimate research tool. Alcohest
Speaker 1: would have been the ultimate implement for studying what every
Speaker 1: type of matter is made of. And there's a there's
Speaker 1: a sentence from Van Helmont that's quoted in print based
Speaker 1: book where he writes, there is no more certain genus
Speaker 1: of acquiring knowledge than when one knows what is contained
Speaker 1: in a thing and how much of it there is.
Speaker 1: So how would you do this? Well? Van Helmont thought
Speaker 1: that if you could stop the reaction between alcohest and
Speaker 1: the material in question at just the right time, and
Speaker 1: then distill the alcohest to remove it, you would be
Speaker 1: left with what was called the first essence or the
Speaker 1: ends prem um. And this ends primum would be there
Speaker 1: in the container left behind as a kind of crystalline salt.
Speaker 1: And so you could make better medicines this way, for instance,
Speaker 1: because the this ins prem um would have the medicinal
Speaker 1: powers of whatever substance that you had been working on,
Speaker 1: but it would remove all of the toxic or noxious
Speaker 1: uh sort of side effects and impure at ease that
Speaker 1: could be caused by the original medicinal thing. And thus,
Speaker 1: in Van Helmont's view, the alcohest was a tool for research.
Speaker 1: It was a tool for what was called kimi atria,
Speaker 1: or the development of medicines through chemistry. Now Van Helmont
Speaker 1: claimed that he had been able to make alcahest. He's like,
Speaker 1: I figured it out, I know how to do it.
Speaker 1: I can prepare it. But he never revealed his secret recipe,
Speaker 1: and many other scholars struggled in vain to discover Van
Speaker 1: Helmont's formula for the universal solvent. Some at various points
Speaker 1: believed they had found it. For example, Princepa sites a
Speaker 1: laboratory notebook entry by the seventeenth century Colonial American alchemist
Speaker 1: George Starkey, who wrote quote at Bristol on twentieth March
Speaker 1: sixteen fifty six. God revealed to me the whole secret
Speaker 1: of the liquor alcohest let. Eternal blessing, honor and glory
Speaker 1: be to him. So I'm not sure exactly what he discovered,
Speaker 1: but I do not think it was a real universal solvent.
Speaker 1: I like that it's described as the liquor alcohest I
Speaker 1: imagine if alcohoest was a liquor, would it be impossible
Speaker 1: to make a cocktail with it? Would it always like
Speaker 1: break the cocktail back down into its uh it's primary ingredients.
Speaker 1: I mean you probably wouldn't want to drink it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you would just melt, you just become water. Right,
Speaker 1: I always wanted to be water. It's the ultimate in
Speaker 1: refreshment though. Right, that's good marketing. Now. I was looking
Speaker 1: at another book by Lawrence prince pay about alchemy called
Speaker 1: The Transmutations of Chemistry, And this is chemistry spelled with
Speaker 1: a an intentionally archaic spelling c h y M I
Speaker 1: S t r y, which is uh to distinguish it
Speaker 1: from the modern science of chemistry. Uh. This was published
Speaker 1: in by University of Chicago Press, and in this case
Speaker 1: Prince pa is discussing the efforts of alchemists like Jan
Speaker 1: von Helmont to perform chemical analysis of materials such as
Speaker 1: the bodies of plants, where the idea was, yeah, you
Speaker 1: can use fire to break materials down into their constituent parts.
Speaker 1: But the problem is that fire, while it will decompose
Speaker 1: the materials into the approximate constituents, fire was deceitful as
Speaker 1: it would corrupt to those constituents in the process. And
Speaker 1: of course the solution was alcahost, which could break things
Speaker 1: down without corrupting them in the process. And there's a
Speaker 1: part here where alcohost is referred to as better than fire.
Speaker 1: It is the fire of Gehenna, which that's a Biblical metaphor.
Speaker 1: It's a metaphor for ignominious destruction that is used in
Speaker 1: the Bible. That is often a little little Bible interpretation note,
Speaker 1: often translated into English Bibles as hell. Uh. The previous
Speaker 1: show guest bart Erman, who's a secular Bible historian. He
Speaker 1: explains that this translation is actually really misleading. It's actually
Speaker 1: reading later theology about the afterlife into the original text. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he argues that Gehenna in the original text is
Speaker 1: not supposed to refer to a place of eternal suffering
Speaker 1: after life. But in fact it was a real place.
Speaker 1: It is basically a desolate valley that was um It
Speaker 1: was historically associated with human sacrifice. And so, according to Irman,
Speaker 1: being sent to Gehenna, as is often discussed in the
Speaker 1: New Testament, has nothing to do with an afterlife of
Speaker 1: eternal suffering, but rather as a sort of it's a
Speaker 1: squalid and unceremonious annihilation. It's sort of equivalent to telling
Speaker 1: somebody that they're going to die and be thrown into
Speaker 1: a garbage dumpy. Not nice either way, but but somewhat
Speaker 1: different than the idea of everlasting suffering in Hell. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So ultimately, if you're putting a garbage dump, and I
Speaker 1: guess in the right conditions, you are going to break
Speaker 1: down and become a part of the natural world again,
Speaker 1: get to become your tria prima and then and then water,
Speaker 1: I guess. Yeah. But in Gehenna it sounds like it
Speaker 1: would have been It wouldn't be like a modern garbage dump.
Speaker 1: That would be a place where you break down or
Speaker 1: probably partially consumed by scavenging beasts that you know, ultimately
Speaker 1: you know pretty could anyway that that was just a
Speaker 1: Bible nerd side note. So it probably doesn't figure in
Speaker 1: here because I would guess Van Helmont is is referring
Speaker 1: to the supernatural hell interpretation. So alcahest is much better
Speaker 1: than earthly fire. It's like a holy supernatural fire. But
Speaker 1: again Van Helmont writes about how the alcahest could decompose
Speaker 1: matter into its tria prima, or its constituent parts, and
Speaker 1: then eventually back into water with no compromise or destruction
Speaker 1: of the properties along the way. And uh, and Principe
Speaker 1: writes about how, again we mentioned earlier, this could be
Speaker 1: used to make better medicines, and in this section he
Speaker 1: actually mentions what a couple of these medicines would have
Speaker 1: been quote. Van Helmont describes several pharmaceuticals he claims to
Speaker 1: have prepared using the alcohest, most notably a cure for
Speaker 1: kidney and bladder stones made from a mineral he calls lutus,
Speaker 1: and an elixir of life prepared from Lebanon cedar wood.
Speaker 1: The only obstacle in this glorious royal road for chemistry
Speaker 1: was that no one knew how to prepare Van helmonts alcohestan.
Speaker 1: I guess the obvious is is that is the truth
Speaker 1: that if the Alcohest was possible. If there was a
Speaker 1: universal solvent to be found, then surely modern chemistry would
Speaker 1: have found it in the wake of alchemy. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so here we revealed that there are several flaws to
Speaker 1: the fundamental assumptions on which the the Alcohest was based.
Speaker 1: I mean, one thing is that Van Helmont's conception of
Speaker 1: all material ultimately being based on water is not true.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that modern chemistry is is without
Speaker 1: some really exceptional, exquisite dissolvers that will, maybe while maybe
Speaker 1: not being universal solvents, will break down lots of stuff,
Speaker 1: a shocking amount of stuff. Uh So, a couple that
Speaker 1: are worth mentioning. One I wanted to talk about is
Speaker 1: the chemical known as aqua regia, which the name literally
Speaker 1: means royal water in Latin. It's made with one part
Speaker 1: nitric acid and three parts hydrochloric acid. It is extremely corrosive.
Speaker 1: It's a liquid with a reddish orange color that can
Speaker 1: not only cause severe burns if you touch it, it
Speaker 1: can literally dissolve otherwise nonreactive metals like gold and platinum.
Speaker 1: Aqua Regia briefly came up in our episode on heavy Water.
Speaker 1: I think because we were talking about the historical anecdote
Speaker 1: where the chemist George to Heavish, she had to had
Speaker 1: had to quickly find a way to hide the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize medals which I think we're made of gold in
Speaker 1: the laboratory of nils Bore when the laboratory was being
Speaker 1: captured and searched by the Nazis, and he ended up
Speaker 1: dissolving the metals in Aqua Regia to prevent them from
Speaker 1: being found out. So Aqua Regia sounds refreshing. Is not refreshing, though,
Speaker 1: do not buy a bottle of it at your local
Speaker 1: convenience store. Not a good lacroix flavor, maybe better than coconut. Oh,
Speaker 1: I love coconut. Coconut coconut is a good lacroise you
Speaker 1: do for me at least at the beach, and as
Speaker 1: long as it's cold. But if it warms up and
Speaker 1: I'm not at the beach, then uh yeah, it's certainly
Speaker 1: both of those are true. Then yeah, I don't want
Speaker 1: any part of it. I'm a picky so I do
Speaker 1: love the soda waters, I like the lacroise, I like
Speaker 1: most flavors, uh and and I like real coconut stuff,
Speaker 1: but the coconut lacroise something about it. It's like, for me,
Speaker 1: it's like drinking sunscreen. It's something's wrong. I think maybe
Speaker 1: that's why I like it, because it kind of tastes
Speaker 1: like what sunscreen historically smelled like. And so it's like
Speaker 1: it's like drinking the the you know, the alchemical truth
Speaker 1: of the beach um while at the beach. So I
Speaker 1: can go on even better on these uh, these dissolvers.
Speaker 1: There's one thing I've been reading about called Piranha solution.
Speaker 1: This is this is a class of industrial and laboratory
Speaker 1: grade cleaning solutions colloquially known as per Ranna solutions, and
Speaker 1: you can guess how they got their name. They are
Speaker 1: typically used as a ruthless and very dangerous way to
Speaker 1: strip all residue of organic molecules from a container, surface,
Speaker 1: or substrate. Now, it's interesting that it has it is
Speaker 1: it is getting closer. It sounds like to what we
Speaker 1: think of as as Hollywood acid, but in doing so,
Speaker 1: it invokes Hollywood piranhas. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah yeah. So
Speaker 1: it's making you think of what's the James Bond movie
Speaker 1: where you only live twice? Right with the bridge that
Speaker 1: goes over the piranhas and if you like, that's your
Speaker 1: bad performance review means that your fish food. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the one with Donald pleasants is blowfeld. Oh yeah. So
Speaker 1: a common formulation of Piranha solutions extremely dangerous material would
Speaker 1: be three parts sulfuric acid or H two S O
Speaker 1: four and one part hydrogen peroxide, which is H two
Speaker 1: O two. Piranha solution is, from everything I read, extremely temperamental.
Speaker 1: Seeing the elements in the wrong order, or in the
Speaker 1: wrong ratio, or in the presence of the wrong contaminants
Speaker 1: can immediately lead to explosions. It seems like there are
Speaker 1: just lots of ways that using it can lead to explosions.
Speaker 1: More on that in a bit. So I was trying
Speaker 1: to figure out, Okay, how exactly does this stuff work? Um,
Speaker 1: there was a helpful podcast episode I found. The Royal
Speaker 1: Society of Chemistry has a podcast called Chemistry and Its Element,
Speaker 1: though sometimes I see it referred to just as the
Speaker 1: Chemistry World podcast. Chemistry World is their magazine, their publication.
Speaker 1: But this podcast episode was hosted by Sam Tracy and
Speaker 1: it's about Piranha solution and I appreciated the way Tracy
Speaker 1: explained what the solution does at the molecular level. First
Speaker 1: of all, I wanted to point out Tracy notes that
Speaker 1: it's not just named Paranha solution for its ability to
Speaker 1: to dissolve all organic matter that it comes into contact with,
Speaker 1: but perhaps also for its tendency to boil vigorously when
Speaker 1: it's in the presence of organic matter. So like in
Speaker 1: that scene and you only live twice, where the piranhas
Speaker 1: started attacking somebody, it looks like the water has been
Speaker 1: put on the boilers, bubbles everywhere. Yeah, almost as if
Speaker 1: um a bubbling mechanism was placed underwater to create the
Speaker 1: illusion of a horde of piranhas um, you know, tearing
Speaker 1: something apart in movie fashion. Actually, here's something I want
Speaker 1: to see, Uh, answer this question if you were actually
Speaker 1: attacked by a school of piranhas. I don't know if
Speaker 1: they even swarm like that in reality, I kind of
Speaker 1: doubt it. But if you were, would it would it
Speaker 1: would the water boil like that? Or would it look
Speaker 1: very calm on the surface. Well, I think we should
Speaker 1: answer this question into an episode on piranhas. I don't
Speaker 1: know that I've i've ever we've ever devoted an episode
Speaker 1: to piranhas. So let's let's come back to it. They're
Speaker 1: they're beautiful fish. Okay, So how does it work well?
Speaker 1: Piranha solution again, as I mentioned as two main ingredients
Speaker 1: as sulfuric acid H two S O four and hydrogen
Speaker 1: peroxide H two O two. So if you imagine a
Speaker 1: glass container with organic residue of glucose and sugar stuck
Speaker 1: to the inside, uh, and imagine this is exposed to
Speaker 1: a Piranha solution for cleaning. Each of the two ingredients
Speaker 1: plays a different role in cleaning the sugar away. So sugar,
Speaker 1: of course, is an organic molecule. It's a carbohydrate molecule
Speaker 1: with the formulas C six H twelve O six. At
Speaker 1: least that's glucose. Different types of sugar have different chemical compositions,
Speaker 1: but it's got carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and when exposed
Speaker 1: to concentrated sulfuric acid, this acid acts as an aggressive
Speaker 1: dehydrating agent, so it will chemically react to remove water
Speaker 1: molecules as much as it can, so the sugar molecules
Speaker 1: will get broken apart and the sugar will lose hydrogen
Speaker 1: and oxygen atoms in the form of water vapor. H
Speaker 1: two O and so if you have a molecule like
Speaker 1: sugar that's based on carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and you're
Speaker 1: rapidly pulling hydrogen and oxygen off of it, what are
Speaker 1: you going to have left over a lot of carbon? So,
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen this experiment where you douse sugar
Speaker 1: and sulfuric acid, there there are a lot of videos
Speaker 1: you can look up online. Um usually you will have
Speaker 1: like a beaker with a bunch of sugar in it.
Speaker 1: Somebody douses it and sulfuric acid and then stirs it
Speaker 1: up with a glass pipette. Uh, the sugar will first
Speaker 1: turn brown and then black and then give off all
Speaker 1: of these fumes. I think it's giving off both water,
Speaker 1: vapor and noxious fumes of sulfur dioxide. So you shouldn't
Speaker 1: do this experiment without you know, supervision of somebody who
Speaker 1: knows what they're doing, because it gets very hot and
Speaker 1: it puts off these fumes. It can be dangerous potentially.
Speaker 1: But but what eventually ends up happening is that the
Speaker 1: carbon residue that's left over from the reaction of the
Speaker 1: acid with the sugar, This carbon residue will start to
Speaker 1: climb out of the beaker in a looming column like
Speaker 1: a giant tube worm or snake that is made out
Speaker 1: of charred sit uh. And you can find a whole
Speaker 1: genre of carbon snake pictures online from demonstrations of this reaction.
Speaker 1: They're pretty great. Yeah, they can be quite impressive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all praise be to the carbon snakes. But Sam Tracy
Speaker 1: in in this podcast, I was talking about mentions that
Speaker 1: the role of sulfuric acid is twofold quote. It's acidity
Speaker 1: catalyzes the reaction and being a hygroscopic substance, it combines
Speaker 1: with the water, releasing a great quantity of heat, meaning
Speaker 1: the reaction cannot go in the reverse direction and can
Speaker 1: only proceed to completion. But of course this alone would
Speaker 1: not make a cleaning agent, because sulfuric acid alone would
Speaker 1: tend to simply eat up organic molecules, strip them of
Speaker 1: what water can be pulled out of them, and leave
Speaker 1: a ton of black elemental carbon in its wake. And
Speaker 1: that is not clean. Like, you don't want black elemental
Speaker 1: carbon stuck to your glass surfaces or your electronics or
Speaker 1: your you know, your wafer chips, whatever whatever it is
Speaker 1: you're trying to clean. So this is where the hydrogen
Speaker 1: peroxide comes in. Hydrogen peroxide serves to eat away the
Speaker 1: remaining carbon byproduct that would have been left over from
Speaker 1: the acids attack on the carbohydrate. Uh So, hydrogen oxide
Speaker 1: H two O two will react with the elemental carbon
Speaker 1: by donating oxygen atoms to the carbon, which combined to
Speaker 1: produce carbon dioxide gas, which floats away in the air,
Speaker 1: eventually leaving your substrate clean of all organic material. So hypothetically,
Speaker 1: you you have and again I'm not advising to do this,
Speaker 1: it's extremely dangerous, but what would happen is you have
Speaker 1: a glass container or an electronics part, whatever it is
Speaker 1: you're trying to clean off. It's got a little bit
Speaker 1: of organic material on it, maybe some sugar or some
Speaker 1: other kind of carbohydrates something like that, and you add
Speaker 1: this solution to it. It is uh the organic materials
Speaker 1: are ripped apart by the acid and then the remaining
Speaker 1: carbon is just removed and evaporated by the hydrogen peroxide.
Speaker 1: I was reading about many ways that the Piranha solution is,
Speaker 1: as I've said several times now, extremely dangerous. This is
Speaker 1: not one to try it with a home chemistry set,
Speaker 1: as it can easily explode and cause severe injuries and burns.
Speaker 1: I was reading a story that was sent to UH
Speaker 1: in a letter to Chemical Engineering News by a couple
Speaker 1: of researchers in the year nineteen nine. That was about
Speaker 1: multiple accidents that had occurred in university labs with Piranha solutions.
Speaker 1: One where a container of Paranha solution was sitting stored
Speaker 1: in a fume hood and about a week after it
Speaker 1: was mixed, it just spontaneously exploded. Another one they talked
Speaker 1: about is UH it occurred at Cornell University where I
Speaker 1: think what happened is that some Piranha solution was accidentally
Speaker 1: and very unfortunately mixed with ascet tone and this caused
Speaker 1: a violent explosion that like ripped apart the hood that
Speaker 1: it was under, severely injured the person who was working
Speaker 1: on it. They ended up, you know, covered in this
Speaker 1: corrosive liquid with a bunch of glass embedded in them.
Speaker 1: So it is not something to screw around with. So
Speaker 1: not literal alcohost, not a literal universal solvent, but but
Speaker 1: Paranha solution will get you a lot of the way there.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, you know, at this point we're reaching
Speaker 1: the end of the podcast, and I think the only
Speaker 1: only way to really go at this point is to
Speaker 1: at least briefly discuss New Age occult thinking and um
Speaker 1: also uh tech doz lingo. Okay, let's let's start with
Speaker 1: with the with the New Age, New age and occult
Speaker 1: psych and psychedelic thinking, basically discussing universal solvent as a metaphor. Now.
Speaker 1: Earlier in our discussion, I brought up Terrence McKinnon his
Speaker 1: lectures on alchemy, and again McKenna said that he didn't
Speaker 1: see much of a connection between alchemy and psychedelics. Uh.
Speaker 1: Those certain important pharmacological discoveries would come out of alchemy.
Speaker 1: For the most part, psychedelics were the domain of the shaman.
Speaker 1: But of course other schools of thought would later on
Speaker 1: in human history come back to alchemy uh, and it's
Speaker 1: sacred and obscure dimensions and find new meanings there. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, we see that with the unions, and we
Speaker 1: also see that with psychedelic and New Age thinking as well. Again,
Speaker 1: you know, you're dealing with with recipes that are dealing
Speaker 1: you know, talking about the red dragon and using code words,
Speaker 1: but all so dealing in philosophical and magical ideas. It's
Speaker 1: irresistible to come back and sort of um, you know,
Speaker 1: and view your own meaning into it and uh and
Speaker 1: and perhaps even rediscover aspects of your your your current
Speaker 1: your contemporary system by breathing it into this archaic apparatus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, I think alchemy. Concepts from alchemy
Speaker 1: were very popular to be played around with by like
Speaker 1: a lot of the uh, the sort of new religious
Speaker 1: movements of the late nineteenth century. Yeah. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: really this ultimately fits the basic format of alchemy throughout history.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of alchemy even you know, you know,
Speaker 1: in the old days, revolved around looking back at old texts,
Speaker 1: piecing together bits from old texts, and trying to to
Speaker 1: break new ground, understand what these these other authors were
Speaker 1: talking about and uh and creating some new frame of
Speaker 1: meaning around it. You know. Something that alchemy also has
Speaker 1: in common with religious texts is pseudonymous writings. Uh so
Speaker 1: in in for example, in the early centuries of Christianity,
Speaker 1: a huge thing that would often go on is like
Speaker 1: you would write a new book that you know, you
Speaker 1: would want to be taken as scripture that would advance
Speaker 1: your view of the correct theological interpretation of Christ. But
Speaker 1: you'd be like well, and nobody knows who I am,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to say that this was written by St. Peter,
Speaker 1: and so you know, this is the Gospel of Peter. Like,
Speaker 1: this is definitely not written by Peter. Um. The people
Speaker 1: were doing this kind of thing all the time. The
Speaker 1: same thing happened with alchemy. People would write pseudonymously as like,
Speaker 1: you know, as one of the great masters of alchemy. Yes,
Speaker 1: this was by Paracelsus, but it actually wasn't. It was
Speaker 1: just some somebody well, you know, in in in dealing
Speaker 1: specifically with it with alcohoest and the idea of a
Speaker 1: universal solvent. You know, I looked through some of the
Speaker 1: writings of uh and and lectures of McKinnon. I looked
Speaker 1: through uh iLiad's work, and uh, you know, it's possible
Speaker 1: I miss something, but I didn't find any case where
Speaker 1: either of them specifically spoke or wrote about the algohoest um. However,
Speaker 1: you do see the alcohoes pop up in New Age
Speaker 1: and psychedelic literature as a metaphor in some cases for
Speaker 1: psychedelic compounds. Um, you know, a way of thinking about
Speaker 1: what something like the psilocybin can do in the mind.
Speaker 1: But it reminds me a little bit of McKenna's arguments
Speaker 1: of the argument that psychedelics in the West may have
Speaker 1: enabled Buddhism to spread more thoroughly through Western thought. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I agree with them completely on that, but
Speaker 1: I think it's a it's a valid point that as
Speaker 1: a culture's understanding of consciousness changes, it does open them
Speaker 1: up to the discovery and rediscovery of various spiritual concepts. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: in if you're thinking in the Terence McKenna type vein,
Speaker 1: the idea is that, uh is that the use of
Speaker 1: psychedelics would have broadly enabled sort of reduced the mind
Speaker 1: to its trie a prima or to its more proximate
Speaker 1: constituents without degradation, allowing uh more different types of states
Speaker 1: of mind to be accessed, as opposed to the narrower
Speaker 1: window of different ways you can think based on your
Speaker 1: cultural upbringing. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And and yeah,
Speaker 1: I like this idea. I like the idea of using
Speaker 1: alcoholst as a as a kind of metaphor for anything
Speaker 1: that like breaks down unuseful rigidity and thought or culture. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and I also like the idea of of
Speaker 1: of psychedelics being seen as some sort of universal solvent potentially,
Speaker 1: and and and again you know you then the breaking
Speaker 1: down of things that I think it also drives home
Speaker 1: that it's a delicate process and you know what you're doing,
Speaker 1: and you don't want to you know, to to go
Speaker 1: too far and dissolve too much. Uh but uh, you know,
Speaker 1: breaking down the mind that's too rigid to melt right. Um.
Speaker 1: The one point mckinna does point out that there's this, um,
Speaker 1: this alchemical aphamism that in in in Latin is dissolutio
Speaker 1: at coagulato, which we were just discussing this off mic. Uh,
Speaker 1: like this basically break down to the dissolving and m
Speaker 1: and the coagulation of things to break things down and
Speaker 1: then things build back up. Um, and that that ultimately
Speaker 1: this is all one needs to know about like the
Speaker 1: nature of reality. Uh, you know, the the alchemical truth
Speaker 1: of things. And uh, I think this is you know,
Speaker 1: this is this is a basic idea that you can
Speaker 1: apply to the physical world. But also too you can
Speaker 1: you can see how readily one could take to this
Speaker 1: as a as as a psychological concept as well, and
Speaker 1: certainly a psychedelic concept. You know, the idea of breaking
Speaker 1: things down. But then but then that rigidity is going
Speaker 1: to is going to return. There's gonna be some coagulation
Speaker 1: that's going to take place again, you know, I do.
Speaker 1: Before we end, though, I want to come back to
Speaker 1: something that I think we touched on earlier, which is
Speaker 1: the potential dangers of of seeing the world in terms
Speaker 1: of universal solvents. I mean, one thing we learned as
Speaker 1: alchemy passed away and gave way to modern chemistry is
Speaker 1: that there is in fact no such thing as a
Speaker 1: as a universe solvent in chemistry. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: solvents that will dissolve lots of things, but but there
Speaker 1: is no universal acid in the Daniel Dennett sense. And
Speaker 1: I wonder if that is also a lesson that should
Speaker 1: be applied in in the metaphorical way, sort of coming
Speaker 1: back against everything we've talked about in this episode, because I,
Speaker 1: I mean, I really do believe that a huge amount
Speaker 1: of trouble and confusion in the world comes from people
Speaker 1: getting overly attached to a certain lens of viewing the
Speaker 1: world or or analytical tool or new strategy and thinking
Speaker 1: that it will solve everything, uh, that it will answer
Speaker 1: all questions that it will solve all your problems, you know,
Speaker 1: like I feel like that that that is something that
Speaker 1: we all have a tendency for, but it's it's very
Speaker 1: dangerous and something to watch out for in yourself. And
Speaker 1: one of the weird ways I was thinking about this
Speaker 1: is actually pulling us away from the the mysterious worlds
Speaker 1: at the intersection of you know, theology and metaphysics and
Speaker 1: science in chemistry. I was thinking about this in terms
Speaker 1: of tech business because I was just thinking about all
Speaker 1: of the different universal solvents that we have witnessed come
Speaker 1: and go over the years working in digital media, and
Speaker 1: they come and they go, and they come and they go,
Speaker 1: and so I'm thinking about the universal solvents of search
Speaker 1: engine optimization. You remember when like everything on the Internet
Speaker 1: suddenly had to change to be search engine optimized, and
Speaker 1: it kind of ruined a huge amount of content that
Speaker 1: was good previously and then was just destroyed by optimization
Speaker 1: for Google search results. And then that kind of and
Speaker 1: then you know, they change how their search results are
Speaker 1: calculated anyway, so it becomes obsolete later on. And then
Speaker 1: I remember the the u GC revolution. At some point
Speaker 1: it was like, well, everything's got to be user generated content,
Speaker 1: you know, and everything is Wikipedia now, yeah, and so
Speaker 1: and that sort of destroyed everything in its path, and
Speaker 1: then that kind of went away, and you know, the
Speaker 1: various pivot to videos and the optimization for the Facebook
Speaker 1: news eat and then that, and then the pivot to
Speaker 1: blockchain and everything. You know. It's like every every few
Speaker 1: years in our business space, we we see a universal
Speaker 1: solvent come along that maybe changes some things, maybe destroys
Speaker 1: some things, and maybe maybe hopefully there are some things
Speaker 1: that are relatively unscathed by it. But then it just
Speaker 1: goes along on its own way. And and usually h
Speaker 1: these things do not actually solve all the problems and
Speaker 1: do not will not last forever. Well, I guess it
Speaker 1: ultimately comes down to who is applying a supposed universal solving, right,
Speaker 1: and it generally comes down to these these businesses of disruption.
Speaker 1: It is about dissolving the rigidity of the of some
Speaker 1: aspect of the industry. But it comes back to that
Speaker 1: that that alchemical truth that we just laid out right,
Speaker 1: the dissolution and coagulation there, And it's not so much
Speaker 1: the dissolution that they're into. It is the eventual coagulation
Speaker 1: because they wish to be the masters of that coagulation.
Speaker 1: You know, I want I don't want to make everything
Speaker 1: free so that it remains free. I want to make
Speaker 1: everything free because I have a new model of how
Speaker 1: to charge for it, you know. Uh. And that's what
Speaker 1: we see time and time again with these different disruption
Speaker 1: strategies you want to disrupt, they take uh, you know,
Speaker 1: cable television, right, I mean, it's just it's it's it's classic.
Speaker 1: You know, all these uh, these services that came along
Speaker 1: to cut our costs and cut our chords, and you know,
Speaker 1: and we're at the point now where, yeah, if you
Speaker 1: want to watch everything that everyone's talking about, you're spending
Speaker 1: as much money as you were as you were probably
Speaker 1: spending in previous decades on your your cable and your
Speaker 1: satellite and so forth. So it's just but just the
Speaker 1: structure of it and the masters of it having some
Speaker 1: cases changed. Yeah, I mean, I guess it is often
Speaker 1: that you're just finding that you go through destruction and
Speaker 1: then there's some kind of return to a new equilibrium.
Speaker 1: But um, but along the way, I would just say,
Speaker 1: be careful not to be led astray or to lose
Speaker 1: too much to something that seems like it. I guess
Speaker 1: anything that seems like it does anything the universal solve
Speaker 1: and where the panacea, I mean, nothing actually works in
Speaker 1: every case. And even if something is good, it's something
Speaker 1: it's it's not good at everything, right, It just might
Speaker 1: just reduce your product um to a to a carbon husk. Right,
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close the
Speaker 1: alchemical books on this one. But I'm sure we will
Speaker 1: return to alchemy in the future when we deal so
Speaker 1: much with the history of of science and uh, and
Speaker 1: you know in the history of religion and spiritual concepts
Speaker 1: as well, that inevitably, uh, alchemical topics will arise once more,
Speaker 1: and and I look forward to it. And hey, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe we'll do an episode in Piranhas in the near
Speaker 1: future as well. I love a good a good biology
Speaker 1: exploration as well. In the meantime, if you like to
Speaker 1: check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
Speaker 1: you know where to find them. There in the Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind podcast feed, where you can get
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. You'll find Core episodes on
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Thursdays, you'll find Artifact episo. It's on Wednesdays.
Speaker 1: Listener mails. On Monday's Fridays, you'll find episodes of Weird
Speaker 1: House Cinema. That's where we just talk about a weird
Speaker 1: movie with little or no concern for science or alchemy,
Speaker 1: uh either. And then on the weekends we air a
Speaker 1: little bit of a repeated form of a Vault episode.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. First The Town
Speaker 1: by a Father