The Science of Spirits: The Booze That Binds

Gabrielle Birchak/ October 31, 2025/ Ancient History, Archive, Modern History

TRANSCRIPTS

Pull up a chair. Now imag­ine this, it’s late, the pub­’s near­ly emp­ty, out­side the fog curls around the lamp­post and the bar­tender’s wip­ing down the counter with that same slow cir­cu­lar rhythm he’s used for decades. There’s an old cop­per still in the corner.

It’s more for dec­o­ra­tion than func­tion and it gives off a faint metal­lic glow under the low amber light. You lift your drink and the scent of oak and smoke ris­es to meet you. It’s warm, alive, like the past itself try­ing to whis­per through the glass.

Fun­ny, it says. How we call this stuff spir­its. And that’s when the sto­ry begins.

Okay, so let’s talk about the alchemist’s ghosts. Here’s an inter­est­ing fact. The Arab cul­ture pro­vid­ed invalu­able preser­va­tions of teach­ings, espe­cial­ly in the bio­med­ical sci­ences. And dur­ing the year 700, long before the word chemist exist­ed, an alchemist named Jabir Ibn Hayyan worked by lamp­light in a small work­shop in Kufa, Iraq. He heat­ed liq­uids over fire, watched the vapors rise and van­ish, and fas­ci­nat­ed by these reac­tions, he built an Alem­bic still and dis­tilled them.

The Alem­bic still was already in exis­tence, but when he start­ed work­ing with dis­til­la­tions, he mod­i­fied the still, which became foun­da­tion­al to bio­med­i­cine and chem­istry today. He was fas­ci­nat­ed with the ris­ing of the vapors, and though he did­n’t believe that these vapors were hid­den souls like AI tells us, he called these volatile reac­tions spir­its. Dur­ing this time in Arab, they referred to these dis­tilled spir­its as al-kuhl.

Hence, this is why we refer to our whiskey as alco­hol. So here’s where the sci­ence turns poet­ic. When you heat a liq­uid, say whiskey mash, you give its mol­e­cules energy.

Those mol­e­cules get rest­less, they vibrate, they col­lide, and even­tu­al­ly they escape as vapor. That’s evap­o­ra­tion. Then, when the vapor cools, it releas­es that ener­gy and col­laps­es back into the liquid.

That is con­den­sa­tion. You’ve seen this dance before. In the clouds, in the morn­ing dew, in the fog that curls around your glass on a cold night.

It is nature’s lit­tle res­ur­rec­tion act. Dis­ap­pear­ance and return. And sit­ting in a dim pub, it is hard not to see a reflec­tion of our­selves in that cycle of all things ris­ing, chang­ing, and return­ing in anoth­er form.

Also, there’s some­thing else hap­pen­ing beneath that trans­for­ma­tion. Some­thing invis­i­ble. It’s called latent heat.

It’s the ener­gy absorbed or released when mat­ter changes state. So when alco­hol evap­o­rates, it steals warmth with­out rais­ing its tem­per­a­ture. That’s why a splash of whiskey on your skin feels cold.

That stolen warmth, that hid­den ener­gy, is what dri­ves the change. You can’t see it, but you can feel it. Ghost sto­ries are a lot like that.

They feed on hid­den ener­gy we leave behind. Our mem­o­ries, our griefs, the warmth of a place that’s been lived in. Every haunt­ing, every sto­ry told over a drink car­ries a kind of latent heat.

Emo­tion­al ener­gy refus­ing to fade. Now lean clos­er. You smell that sweet­ness? That hint of vanil­la? Maybe smoke? That’s chem­istry whis­per­ing to your senses.

I love it. Dis­til­la­tion does­n’t just sep­a­rate alco­hol from water. It teas­es out volatile compounds.

Mol­e­cules that can’t sit still. They leap, kind of like me, they leap into the air, eager to be noticed. They’re esters, alde­hy­des, long car­bon chains that make up whiskey’s aroma.

And with­out them, your drink would taste flat. With them, it haunts the air. Love it.

These mol­e­cules are rest­less, always mov­ing, always escap­ing. They are the ghosts of the dis­til­la­tion process. And you can smell their pres­ence long before you take a sip.

Sci­ence calls it volatil­i­ty. I call it per­son­al­i­ty. If you’ve ever toured a whiskey dis­tillery in Scot­land, you’ve prob­a­bly heard the term angel share.

Every year as the bar­rels age, a small por­tion of whiskey seeps through the wood and evap­o­rates. That’s just physics. Ethanol mol­e­cules escaping.

But dis­tillers have long said that por­tion belongs to the angels. In some of the old­est ware­hous­es, the air is thick with that sweet, ghost­ly scent. It seeps into the wood, the brick, and even your clothes.

You can almost taste it. There’s no bet­ter exam­ple of sci­ence blend­ing with super­sti­tion. Mol­e­cules obey­ing ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, while our imag­i­na­tions turn them into myth.

And maybe that’s not wrong, because sci­ence gives us the mech­a­nism, but sto­ries give us mean­ing. Final­ly, sci­ence tells us that mat­ter has four states. Sol­id, liq­uid, gas, and plasma.

But if you spend enough time think­ing about how every­thing changes, how noth­ing tru­ly dis­ap­pears, like mem­o­ries of loved ones, you start to won­der if there’s a fifth one. Not some­thing you can mea­sure, but some­thing you can feel. We call it spirit.

Because whether it’s ethanol vapor in a cop­per steel, or the mem­o­ry of some­one you miss, both prove the same thing. Ener­gy nev­er dies. It just changes form.

Here’s to my dad. That warmth in your glass, the laugh­ter in this pub, the flick­er of the fire, all of it is ener­gy in tran­si­tion. You can’t see it go, but you know it lingers.

So the bar­tender sets down anoth­er glass. Out­side, the fog thick­ens. Some­one laughs near the juke­box, and for a sec­ond, the air seems alive with echoes.

Heat, sound, vapor, laugh­ter, mem­o­ry, all swirling togeth­er. You take one last sip, and the drink just burns enough to remind you that you are made of the same stuff. Atoms chang­ing state, ener­gy trans­form­ing, sto­ries fer­ment­ing in your bloodstream.

So maybe when we talk about spir­its, we’re not being poet­ic at all. We’re just describ­ing the physics, the old-fash­ioned way, by fire­light, with a good drink in hand, and some­one we love by our side. So what are our three take­aways? Dis­til­la­tion trans­for­ma­tion is mat­ter changes form, and that process mir­rors how we turn expe­ri­ence into a story.

Latent heat is life’s hid­den ener­gy. Every change, phys­i­cal or emo­tion­al, requires ener­gy that you can’t see. And volatil­i­ty keeps the world alive.

Whether it is aro­ma or mem­o­ry, what escapes is what lingers the longest. So this Hal­loween, here is your chal­lenge. When you raise a glass, don’t just toast the spirits.

Notice them. Think about how sim­ple reac­tion, fire, vapor, trans­for­ma­tion links us all back to those first alchemists. Reflect on the spir­its you choose to keep com­pa­ny with.

Curios­i­ty, won­der, and maybe just enough imag­i­na­tion to see the extra­or­di­nary in the ordi­nary. Because every spir­it, chem­i­cal or spec­tral, begins with trans­for­ma­tion. And trans­for­ma­tion is what keeps sci­ence and Hal­loween sto­ries for­ev­er alive.

Thank you for lis­ten­ing to Math Sci­ence His­to­ry, and until next time, Carpe Diem.