Universal Acid

This is one of my favorite concepts in Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking: Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything! But what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed? Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, by Daniel C. Dennett, page 203. I encountered his discussion in that book, but his wider exploration of it is in his larger work Darwin’s Dangerous Idea – Evolution and the Meanings of Life. He likened the theory of evolution by natural selection to such an acid, as it “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview.” I think the mental image of a substance that will literally eat through anything is an intriguing one. So far, it clearly only exists in our imagination and…