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Chemistry Is Magic

IT IS IMPORTANT to stand in awe of nature, and to be no less dazzled by the energies and forces of the world just because we have learned to understand and control them.

Push two strong magnets against each other and feel the invisible force that repels one from the other. Go on—do it now if you can. Come back when you are filled with a sense of miracle and wonder that such things exist and that you have the supreme privilege of holding not one, but two of them.

Do not be misled by the fact that magnets are dirt common, or that we know exactly how they work and how to make more of them. A magnet is an object from another world, like a moon rock or meteor that fell from another star. It is a visitor to our human world that carries with it the knowledge and power of its home world.

That home is not another planet, but another scale. It is the vanishingly small world whose native inhabitants are the quantum forces that control the nature of matter and energy.

Quantum magnetic forces exist in all matter, all the time, but normally they work in opposite directions, cancelling each other out. They are hiding in plain sight. But when we create a strong magnet, we align a vast number of individual quantum forces in the same direction, coaxing this astonishing force up into our world where we can feel it push and pull on our hands.

The quantum world of the very small is also the home world of chemistry. When we see a fire burn or a leaf change color, this is the action of atoms in numbers beyond imagination, all working together to create an effect visible on the human scale.

This is the world we will explore in the chapters to come.

Consider the humble glow stick. You break an inner capsule to mix two solutions together, and suddenly the whole thing starts to glow! How on earth is that even possible? I insist that you be amazed by this object, even though it is available at gas stations for less than the price of a bottle of water.

Where does the light come from?

Light is made of countless individual photons—packets of energy that travel through space at the speed of light. There are many different ways of making photons. The way it’s done in a glow stick is one of the most complicated: each photon is lovingly handcrafted by its own single-use chemical machine.

We designed and built these machines from scratch, so we know exactly how they work, and I can explain them to you. (Don’t worry if many of the words in this explanation are not familiar: we’ll come back to them one at a time later in the book.)

To get light from a chemical mechanism, you need a molecule that is able to absorb and emit photons of light with the right amount of energy to be visible (too little energy and the photons are invisible infrared light, too much energy and they are invisible ultraviolet light).

The dye molecule in this reaction can be reused indefinitely, but the other molecules can only be used once: Their destruction supplies the energy needed to create the photon. All the work of this elaborate machine goes into creating one single photon of light. If you want another photon you have to use up another set of molecules.

A typical glow stick activates and destroys about 10,000,000,000,000,000 (ten thousand million million) of these machines every second to produce the light we see coming from it.

Is That Really Magic?

THE TITLE OF this chapter is “Chemistry Is Magic,” yet I just told you exactly how one particular bit of chemical “magic” works. Doesn’t that mean it’s not magic?

I like to use the word magic the way it’s used by stage magicians. A magic trick is “magic” because it seems to be supernatural, until you understand how the trick is done. Some people enjoy the mystery of not knowing, but I always find it far more satisfying to learn the trick. The cleverness and skill involved are much more interesting than the end result.

Professional magicians, and ancient conjurers, carefully guarded their secrets as a matter of commercial necessity: if everyone knew how they did their tricks, they’d be out of a job. Scientists are the opposite. When they discover a particularly clever trick, something that makes the seemingly impossible suddenly possible, they want to tell the whole world about it.

I am definitely in the science camp: I am eager to tell you about all the clever but invisible chemical magic going on all around you. This doesn’t make it any less magical. It just means you will have the opportunity to tell someone else how the trick is done—next time you see someone with a glow stick, you can tell them about the tiny machines inside making the light one photon at a time.

Machines from a hundred years ago are wonderfully understandable: All the moving parts actually move, and they really are separate parts that you can see and dismantle. These machines are marvelous, but you can plainly see that they are not magical.

But imagine if you showed someone from the Steam Age a modern phone. It would seem like magic, right?

The thing that makes phones seem magical, even today, is that you can’t see how they work at all. There’s no part of their mechanism that is visible. If you take one apart, all you see is some little plastic blocks with tiny metal pins coming out. If you take those chips apart, there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting inside. All the action is happening in circuits that are literally smaller than the wavelength of visible light—they are not just microscopic, they are smaller than light itself.

“Magic” machines whose parts are too small to see are a modern invention, but chemistry has always been this way, with its mechanisms of action completely invisible. Today, chemistry only seems magical: we know it actually isn’t. But in ancient times no one had the slightest idea how it worked, which left a lot of room for both mystical nonsense and serious study.

Ancient Magic Was Mostly Chemistry

SOME PEOPLE MAKE a big deal about ancient “secret knowledge,” the supposed keys to unlocking great powers, lost in the crass modern world of fast food and stupid television. The fact is that most of this secret knowledge was either pretty simple by modern standards, or plain wrong. There’s more interesting new knowledge discovered in an average week today than in all the secret books of the ancients.

What I find interesting is that much of what passed for magic and secret knowledge in the ancient world was actually chemistry, or at least attempted chemistry. And all of the ancient magic that actually works is chemistry. Exactly none of the spells and incantations work, but a few of the potions do.

The potions that worked became modern chemistry. The potions that didn’t work live on in the quack medical products, homeopathic remedies, and bogus “age defying” creams that remain as popular as ever.

It’s easy to mix together a bunch of ingredients that sound exotic, boil them for a while, say some silly words from a book of spells, and hope that the result is a powerful potion. But potions made with eye of newt do not work, no matter how bad they smell, and no matter how passionately you ask the forces of darkness to make them work for you.

Fortunately not everyone in the ancient world based their potion-making on wishful thinking. Some of them knew that nature is very picky and really doesn’t care about your pleadings. These people knew that in order to make a functional potion, they were going to have to work hard, study the world, follow up on lucky breaks, and try a lot of variations before homing in on a combination that gave them something interesting. In other words, they were scientists long before that word had been invented.

If you pick three powders at random and mix them together, it’s very unlikely that the result will have any special properties. But if you pick these three specific powders—this particular white one, this particular black one, and this particular yellow one—and if you mix them in just the right proportions, you get a powder that vanquishes your enemies, consumes them in the fire of damnation, or blows them to bits on your command.

In other words, these are the ingredients for gunpowder.

Gunpowder is like a magic potion—a really strong one—in that it does amazing things and unleashes great power in the world. But it’s not like a magic potion in that you don’t have to say any silly words while mixing it, and if you get the mixture right, it works every time.

This is the key: we don’t usually call gunpowder “magic” only because it actually works. And because it works, you can use it. It leads to new inventions, like fireworks and guns. It is an invention that carries true power, unlike the non-functional dead ends you find in witches’ brews (both ancient and modern). We’re going to learn how gunpowder can be arranged in beautiful ways (see here), about a better substitute (see here), and finally, here, we will learn the details of the chemical reaction that makes it work.

Ancient alchemists are sometimes made fun of because of their obsession with trying to do things that we now know are impossible, like turn lead into gold or find a potion for eternal life. But this criticism is unfair, and confuses alchemists with the mystics and charlatans of their age.

The alchemists worked diligently to identify and understand powerful substances—chemicals—that they could experiment with and combine with each other in an attempt to advance toward their goals. They got a long way toward unraveling the nature of chemical change, including the notion of immutable elements (which they were interested in studying precisely because they wanted to find an exception that allowed them to make gold from base metals).

They were wrong about a lot of things, but they were also right about a lot of other things. More importantly, they based their work on reality. They believed in testing their ideas through experiment—a thoroughly modern, scientific way of doing things. They believed in evidence, study, and confirmation. When the modern field of chemistry emerged as a solid science in the 1700s, it was built on a platform of alchemy.

Glowing chemicals endlessly fascinated the alchemists. When Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus in 1669, he was absolutely convinced that it must be the key to making gold, because he derived it from pee (which is yellow like gold) and because it glows in the dark (which he thought proves that it must have inherited some kind of life force from its origins). He was correct that white phosphorus is powerful stuff, just not in quite the way he hoped it would be.