Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Frequent listeners to the

Ask Me Anything episodes here at Mindscape will know that I am a fan of a good cocktail. It's not

something I bring up very often, but it does happen. In fact, I think I did a holiday message one year

about cocktails, and certainly we've had plenty of AMA questions thinking about

cocktails, one way or another. And there's something fascinating about the idea of a cocktail. I mean,

if you like wine, which I also do, what do you do? You look for a good wine. And then you

open it and you drink it. There's not a lot that you do to the glass of wine. Maybe

you decant it or something like that. You make sure to serve it at the right temperature, but mostly

it's just about finding the wine, unless you're the one who's actually making it. Whereas a cocktail,

there's a certain amount of effort and even perhaps ingenuity that goes into it. You can make good cocktails and bad cocktails out of the same ingredients.

There's something you need to know.

In fact, one might even say that it would be good to be educated in the theory of cocktails

if there ever were such a thing.

So imagine my delight when I came across a book called Cocktail Theory,

a sensory approach to transcendent cocktails by Kevin Peterson, who is today's guest on the Mindscape podcast.

Now, Kevin, I didn't even know this when I bought the book, but you won't be surprised to

learn, has a physics background. He got an undergraduate degree in physics and then got a PhD

in mechanical

engineering, but now works at a couple of places, Svumato and Castalia. I'm going to try to explain

this correctly if I understand what's going on. Fumato is a fragrance store. They sell perfumes.

They make their own perfumes, and then they sell them. It's in

Detroit, Michigan, and Kevin is part of the designing of different fragrances and so forth. But then

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