Adam Rogers

Ethanol is a particularly cool molecule. It’s a solvent, which means lots of different molecules that don’t dissolve in water will dissolve in a solution of ethanol. It’s odorless, colorless, and it burns really well—a sign of a good fuel. It’s also a potent microbicide. When yeasts squirt it into their environment, it kills off local bacterial and fungal competition.

Adam Rogers in Proof

Heat—thermal energy—is actually mechanical movement, and in a solid with springy interatomic attachments like copper, that energy creates tiny whorls called phonons that move through the medium like a wave of sound does through air. When someone says that a metal like gold, silver, or copper is a good conductor of heat, what they’re really saying is that the metal is good at propagating phonons. And copper’s crystal structure, the way its atoms line up in bulk, is really good for working into new shapes—its atomic crystals are smoother on their faces than in other metals, so they slide across each other, metallurgically speaking.

Adam Rogers in Proof

(Women respond to ethanol almost twice as strongly as men, in general.)

Adam Rogers in Proof

a lovely riff from, he says, a Mississippi state senator, asked in 1958 how he felt about whisky:   If, when you say whiskey, you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacles of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degredation and despair, shame and helplessness and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it with all my power. But if, when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the stuff that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty morning; if you mean the drink that enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrows, if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm, to build highways, hospitals, and schools, then certainly I am in favor of it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it; I will not compromise.

Adam Rogers in Proof

The best theory going today about what really causes hangovers is that they are an inflammatory response, like what happens when we get an infection. Hangovers are accompanied by elevated levels of molecules called cytokines, molecules used as communications signals by the immune system. One research team in Korea found elevated levels of interleukin-10, interleukin-12, and interferon gamma in their hung-over subjects. If you inject those into a healthy subject, that person will start to have all kinds of familiar-sounding symptoms, including nausea, gastrointestinal distress, headache, chills, and fatigue. Potentially even more interesting, higher-than-normal cytokine levels also mess up memory formation, which might account for ethanol-related lapses in recall as well.

Adam Rogers in Proof

In short, our state of mind affects what alcohol does to us, just as alcohol affects our state of mind.

Adam Rogers in Proof