“What fascinates me as well is that so often we almost came to a technology and then we abandoned it. One of the great examples is there is a steam engine that was created in Alexandria. Just a toy. It was a novelty. If someone had realized that you could actually use that, we would have had the Industrial Revolution 2,000 years earlier.”

…And second, it was a cultural problem because Sri Lanka was later invaded from the Indian subcontinent. And there were more priorities than making high-quality steel that you could then sell as a trinket or something to a king that eventually ended up in the hands of Persian royalty, for example.

…crabs in the ocean will make their burrows so that there's a bit of a lip on them. And that way, when the water flows over them, it accelerates, which draws water out of their burrows and promotes water flow. So it's very similar to the structure you're talking about with these Sri Lankan furnaces.

That's very interesting. In the third part of your book, you traced how alchemy evolved into modern chemistry. So to understand that history, let's go back to Europe and perhaps start with the question, what role did swindlers play in this story?

I love this little fact. And so I didn't know the etymology of the words charlatan, mountbank, and quack. And as I was researching the book, I stumbled. There is some fantastic research that's been done in this area. Julian Martins is a classic example, fantastic researcher, about the origins of…

yeah that's right i'm actually an environmental toxicologist and and one of the categories in that field are looking at at personal care products including makeup and things like that which often have all kinds of endocrine disrupting compounds in them so i think this this trend still does continue…