Michael: Most people think chemistry is just about memorizing the periodic table. But what if I told you it’s the secret behind pulling off the perfect heist, hiding priceless treasure from Nazis, and even saving astronauts stranded in deep space? Kevin: A heist? Okay, you have my full attention. I thought chemistry was just about weird smells, lab coats, and those goggles that never fit right. You’re telling me it’s more like an Ocean's Eleven script? Michael: In some ways, yes. It's the invisible tool behind some of the most incredible stories in human history. And that's the whole idea behind the book we're diving into today: The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, by Derek B. Lowe. Kevin: That’s a big title. From gunpowder to graphene sounds like it covers… well, everything. Michael: It pretty much does. And the author, Derek Lowe, isn't just a writer; he's a PhD chemist who has spent decades in the pharmaceutical industry discovering new drugs. He’s been in the trenches, so he writes about this stuff with a real-world edge. The book is widely praised for making these complex milestones feel incredibly accessible and exciting. Kevin: I like that. It’s not just an academic looking back, it's a practitioner telling the stories from his field. So, let's get to it. Where does this heist part come in? I'm picturing chemists in ski masks. Michael: No ski masks needed. For this story, all you need is a beaker, some acid, and a whole lot of nerve.

Michael: The story starts in 1940, in Copenhagen. The Nazis have just invaded Denmark, and their presence is casting a dark shadow over the city, especially over the Niels Bohr Institute, which was a hub for brilliant scientists from all over the world. Kevin: Right, and a lot of those scientists were Jewish or had fled Germany. So this was a particularly dangerous place for them to be. Michael: Exactly. And at the institute were two solid gold Nobel Prize medals. They belonged to two German physicists, Max von Laue and James Franck. They had sent their medals to Bohr's institute for safekeeping because, under Nazi law, it was a capital offense for a German to accept or keep a Nobel Prize after a prominent anti-Nazi activist had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Kevin: Whoa, hold on. So just possessing your own Nobel medal could get you killed? Michael: It could get you sent to a concentration camp, which was often a death sentence. The medals were physical proof of what the regime considered an act of treason. And now, with the Nazis occupying the city, those medals were like ticking time bombs sitting in the lab. Kevin: Okay, so they have to hide them. Why not just bury them in the garden? That seems like the simple solution. Michael: They considered it! But a Hungarian chemist at the institute, a man named George de Hevesy, pointed out that it was too risky. The grounds could be dug up. A simple hiding spot could be found. He knew he needed a better solution, a chemical one. He needed to make two heavy, shiny, solid gold medals completely disappear. Kevin: How is that even possible? You can't just make gold vanish. It's one of the most stable elements there is. Michael: You can, if you know the right recipe. De Hevesy decided to dissolve them. He prepared a mixture called aqua regia. In Latin, that means "royal water." Kevin: Royal water? That sounds like something out of an alchemist's fantasy. What is it? Michael: It's a wickedly corrosive mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid. And it gets its name because it's one of the very few substances that can dissolve the so-called "royal metals"—gold and platinum—which are famously resistant to almost everything else. Kevin: So this stuff is like the ultimate solvent. It just… eats gold? Michael: It doesn't eat it so much as it chemically persuades the gold atoms to let go of each other and float freely in the liquid. So de Hevesy took these priceless, historic medals, dropped them into a beaker of this fuming, orange-colored acid, and just watched. Over the course of a few hours, the solid gold completely dissolved, turning the liquid into a dark, unremarkable solution. Kevin: That must have been an incredibly tense moment. Watching these symbols of incredible human achievement just melt away into some murky liquid. Michael: I can only imagine. He was destroying the very things he was trying to save. When he was done, he had a beaker filled with this orange-ish fluid. He placed it on a high shelf in his lab, right next to dozens of other beakers and bottles filled with various colorful chemicals. It was completely anonymous. Kevin: He hid them in plain sight. That’s genius. The perfect camouflage is to look just like everything else around you. Michael: And it worked. The Nazis searched the institute from top to bottom multiple times during the war. They were looking for anything suspicious, any hidden assets. They walked right past that beaker on the shelf again and again, never once suspecting it contained the dissolved remains of two Nobel Prizes. Kevin: That is unbelievable. So what happened after the war? Is the gold just stuck in that acid forever? Michael: This is where the chemistry gets even more beautiful. After the war ended and Copenhagen was liberated, de Hevesy walked back into his lab, and there it was, the beaker, completely untouched on the shelf where he left it. He then performed another chemical reaction to reverse the process. He added a chemical that caused the gold to precipitate out of the solution. Kevin: Meaning it turned back into a solid? Michael: Exactly. All the tiny, dissolved gold particles clumped back together and settled at the bottom of the beaker as a fine powder. He carefully collected all of it, and the institute sent the recovered gold back to the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm. Kevin: No way. Don't tell me... Michael: They did. The foundation recast the gold into two brand new medals and, in 1949, presented them again to Max von Laue and James Franck. They got their prizes back, all because one chemist knew how to use a little bit of royal water. Kevin: That's one of the best stories I've ever heard. It’s a perfect illustration of what you were saying. Chemistry isn't just formulas on a page; it's a form of power. It's a way of manipulating the physical world to achieve an impossible outcome. Michael: It’s the ultimate problem-solving tool. And that story shows chemistry as this clever, almost defiant art form. But sometimes, the problems aren't about outsmarting an enemy. They're about outsmarting death itself, which takes us from a lab in Copenhagen to the vast emptiness of space.

Kevin: Okay, so we're going from a World War II heist to a space mission. That's quite a leap. Michael: It is, but the underlying principle is the same: using fundamental chemical knowledge to solve an impossible problem. And there's no more famous example than the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Kevin: "Houston, we have a problem." I know the line, but I feel like most people, myself included, don't really know the specifics of what went wrong. Michael: The famous line is actually a bit of a misquote, but the sentiment is right. About 200,000 miles from Earth, an oxygen tank exploded. It crippled their main spacecraft, the Command Module. They lost most of their power and, critically, their primary life support systems. The three astronauts—Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise—had to abandon ship and move into the Lunar Module, the little lander that was supposed to take two of them to the moon's surface. Kevin: So they're using this tiny lunar lander as a lifeboat to get all the way back to Earth. That's already terrifying. Michael: It gets worse. The Lunar Module was designed to keep two astronauts alive for about two days. Now it had to support three men for at least four days. They quickly realized they had a much more immediate problem than running out of oxygen. The real killer was something they were creating themselves: carbon dioxide. Kevin: From breathing, right? We breathe in oxygen, we breathe out carbon dioxide. Michael: Precisely. In a closed environment like a spacecraft, that CO2 builds up fast. And as the book points out, it's a classic example of Paracelsus's famous adage: "The dose makes the poison." A little CO2 is harmless. A lot of it is lethal. It causes headaches, confusion, shortness of breath, and eventually, you just pass out and die from asphyxiation. They were slowly poisoning their own air. Kevin: So how do you get rid of it? There's a filter or something? Michael: Yes, they're called carbon dioxide scrubbers. They're basically canisters filled with a chemical, lithium hydroxide, that reacts with carbon dioxide and pulls it out of the air. The problem was a classic engineering nightmare, a square-peg-in-a-round-hole situation. Kevin: You're kidding me. Literally? Michael: Literally. The Command Module, where they had plenty of spare scrubbers, used square-shaped canisters. The Lunar Module, their lifeboat, used round canisters. They had all these life-saving square filters, but no way to connect them to the life support system that was keeping them alive. The CO2 levels in the cabin were rising to dangerous levels. Kevin: That is an absurdly simple, yet deadly, design flaw. So what did they do? They can't just 3D-print an adapter in space. Michael: They couldn't. The solution had to come from the ground, from Mission Control in Houston. A group of engineers was tasked with solving the problem using only the materials they knew were on board the spacecraft. They dumped a replica of everything available to the astronauts onto a table: the cover of a flight manual, plastic bags, duct tape—lots of duct tape—and even a sock. Kevin: They were going to build a life-saving medical device out of cardboard and a sock? This sounds like a challenge from a reality TV show, not a NASA mission. Michael: It was the ultimate DIY project. For hours, the engineers on the ground worked frantically, building and testing a makeshift adapter. They had to create something that could take a square canister and channel the cabin's air through it and into the round port of the Lunar Module's system. They eventually built a device that looked like a bizarre, lumpy mailbox. Kevin: The "mailbox." I love it. Michael: Once they had a working design, they had to talk the astronauts through building it, step-by-step, over the radio, 200,000 miles away. Imagine the tension. You're cold, you're exhausted, you're running out of breathable air, and someone is telling you to tape a piece of cardboard to a plastic bag in a very specific way. Kevin: The margin for error is zero. If the tape doesn't hold, if there's a leak, they're done for. Michael: But they did it. They built the "mailbox," hooked it up, and it worked. They heard the air flowing through it, and soon after, the warning light for high carbon dioxide levels went off. The CO2 in the cabin started to drop. That makeshift contraption, built from scraps and held together with duct tape, saved their lives. Kevin: Wow. It's incredible. In both stories, the hero isn't a person, it's a piece of knowledge. In the first, it's knowing that aqua regia dissolves gold. In the second, it's knowing that lithium hydroxide absorbs carbon dioxide, and then having the ingenuity to make it work. Michael: Exactly. It's the practical application of chemical principles under the most extreme pressure imaginable. It’s the story of humanity learning to write, as Lowe puts it, "the missing instruction manuals for the physical world."

Kevin: Listening to these two stories back-to-back, it really reframes what chemistry is. It’s not this distant, complicated thing. It’s this fundamental language that governs everything, and the people who can speak it can do extraordinary things. Michael: That's the thread that runs through Lowe's entire book. Chemistry is the central science, bridging the physics of fundamental particles and the biology of complex life. And the history of chemistry is the history of us figuring out how to use that language. Sometimes it's for something clever and defiant, like hiding gold. Sometimes it's for something heroic, like saving a mission. Kevin: And sometimes, as the book also points out, that knowledge has been used for destructive things, like leaded gasoline or chemical weapons. It’s a powerful tool, and that power cuts both ways. Michael: It does. And it highlights the responsibility that comes with knowledge. There's a famous quote from the mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange after the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier was executed during the French Revolution. He said, "It took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it." Kevin: That gives me chills. It underscores the value of that kind of mind, the kind of mind that can see the world in terms of its chemical components and figure out how to rearrange them. Michael: These stories show what that kind of mind can achieve. It’s about human ingenuity under pressure, whether the pressure is an invading army or the vacuum of space. It really makes you look at the world differently. Kevin: It does. I'm already thinking about the lithium-ion battery in my phone, the polymer in my jacket, the alloy in my watch. It's all just applied chemistry that we take for granted. Michael: The next time you see any object, really, think about the chain of discoveries that had to happen for it to exist. It's a fun exercise. Kevin: I like that. We'd love to hear what our listeners think. What's a piece of 'hidden chemistry' in your daily life that you never really noticed before? Let us know on our social channels. We're always curious to hear your stories and what you take away from these discussions. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.