Anything related to nanotechnology feels fairly modern, doesn’t it? Although Richard Feynman planted the seeds of the idea in 1959, the word itself didn’t really get formed until the 70s or 80s, depending on who you ask. But there is evidence that nanotechnology could have existed as far back as the 4th century in ancient Rome.
That evidence lies in this, the Lycurgus cup. It’s an example of dichroic glass — that is, glass that takes on a different color depending on the light source. In this case, the opaque green of front lighting gives way to glowing red when light is shining through it. The mythology that explains the scene varies a bit, but the main character is King Lycurgus, king of Edoni in Thrace.
So how does it work? The glass contains extremely small quantities of colloidal gold and silver — nanoparticles of gold to produce the red, and silver particles to make the milky green. The composition of the Lycurgus cup was puzzling until the 1990s, when small pieces of the same type of glass were discovered in ancient Roman ruins and analyzed. The particles in the Lycurgus cup are thought to be the size of one thousandth of a grain of table salt — substantial enough to reflect light without blocking it.
The question is, how much did the Romans know about what they were doing? Did they really have the means to grind these particles into dust and purposely infuse them, or could this dichroic glass have been produced purely by accident? Be sure to check out the videos after the break that discuss this fascinating piece of drinkware.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Ancient people were a lot smarter that we give them credit for. A lot of highly advanced techniques have been lost to history. Any student of history can tell you of technologies that are discovered, lost and then rediscovered. Sometimes multiples times over and over again. Masters pass techniques along to their apprentices who pass it along to their apprentices and so on until someone dies without passing the technique along.
Yes, but apart from nanotechnology, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Provided our culture with history’s greatest set of mascots for weird fashy dudes on that website named after a letter, who talk about “defending western culture” and like birth rates? Can’t think of anything else.
You probably should go watch “Life of Brian”, because it seems you missed the reference.
I think they built a road
… The Aqueduct ?
They made gigantic ones, but aqueducts had existed for over 2000 years before them. Outside of a few improvements to some things, their main achievement was probably wiping out progress in most conquered regions.
You know we still cant replicate the durability of Roman concrete. Modern concrete is much weaker. Greek fire is still composition unknown, to name just two.
The britons were basically copper age tribesman that walked around half naked in the woods with blue paint all over their bodies, before the Romans got there. They may have despised the Romans for occupying their land but they certainly were happy to adopt some of their culture. I’m sure Roman architecture was a step up from that grass covered hobbit holes.
@DJ Really not true, there is plenty of archaeological evidence that pre-Roman Briton’s are advanced cultures with impressive craft and construction skills. Yes in some areas the Roman empire was clearly more advanced, but its far from the locals being really backwards peoples. Really you are being swayed by the fact that some Roman records survive or at least Chinese whisper style survive through time, while the more contemporary accounts from the other side do not. As always when you don’t quickly win a war and drive the ‘barbarians’ to kneel the propaganda machine has to start spinning. Explaining that these peoples are just too stupid to be a danger or be worth having in the empire etc..
Also ‘Roman’ architecture as found in Britain isn’t always ‘Roman’ anyway – its African (etc) designs and construction methods from some other part of their empire.
Plus your ‘hobbit hut’ has to be good enough – if your homes suck you don’t put in the hours to create masterfully crafted jewellery/broach etc, you find a way to be ‘comfortable’ before your society as a whole starts to have room for real artisanship at scale.
For Romans, their aqueducts were adequate.
Concrete, and obscure legal terms.
Surely they can not be concrete and yet obscure at the same time?
Quicklime and sea water.
Well, yes, of course they were insignificant, the barbarians were much more advanced…
Roman civilization contributed enormously to the development of law, institutions and legislation, as well as warfare, art, literature, architecture, technology and languages of the Western world.
But perhaps these are just mental fixations of the majority of scholars of the various disciplines…
Sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, public health, and now nanotehnology. Nothing much really.
Ok, but apart from those, what did they ever do for us?
Gave us descendants.
In this case I’d expect like many discoveries it is at least partially accidental and partly deliberate – ‘Hey Fred no idea what is going to happen, but lets throw x and y together this time.’
‘Oh look how interesting and pretty, wonder why that happens. Still lets see if we can make something using this weird effect…’
(same way so much of modern science is still throw stuff together and document what happens as we don’t really understand the mechanisms yet…)
Not that I disagree, education is the bigger difference between modern humans and ancient ones. I’d actually suggest that the ancient world may have been on average smarter people – now even the stupidest of the stupid tends to survive, where in the past where life was cheaper and less certain anyway I doubt they would to nearly the same extent.
Absolutely not.
The myth of “ancient knowledge” is just that, a myth.
(We don’t have time to go over the timeline of Rome falling, Europe becoming a much worse place to live, and the popularization of stories about ‘ancient’ civilizations with magically advanced tech…)
There is a difference between being unsure of an ancient method, and loosing ancient wisdom.
Technical advancement/knowledge spreads because humans are lazy and greedy. End of argument.
Even the ‘famous’ examples of lost ancient tech are myths.
“Damascus Steel” was good in it’s day, but is worse than the cheap stuff coming out of low-end Chinese smelteries today.
“Roman Concrete” was a marvel…in Roman times. It is far worse than modern concrete.
Your argument is the same one that the ‘alternative medicine’ (which is not medicine, and should not be allowed to borrow the credibility that comes along with that word) quacks use.
‘They have used it for a thousand years, so it must be effective.’
Yeah?
‘They’ also used powdered lead makeup and drank liquid Mercury.
New knowledge can immediately invalidate thousand-year-old ‘wisdom’.
We didn’t “lose” the knowledge.
We found a better way to do it.
(Though “better” can mean many things…)
Just a neat accident as a side effect of other macro-scale processes.
what an odd way to describe yourself.
Jokes aside, you clearly didn’t watch the video. Items like these ARE mass produced, that’s literally the only way we could ever see one today.
Quick example. How many American families related to the initial settlements have dishware that was brought over on one of the three main ships? Near zero. Fragile artifacts, such as pottery or glassware, does not hold up to the test of time. Not only do you have the human element of accidental breakage, the possibility of damage increases exponentially over time from environmental changes. Don’t forget these are manufactured stone or silicate ware that break down slowly over the span of hundreds or thousands of years from hot/cold/hot/cold cycles.
Had these been carved out of something like soapstone or marble, something that’s environmentally stable due to the way it’s formed, they could likely last for millennia.
Something about the manufacturing process of pottery or glass fails to build crystal structures that last longer than a human lifespan or two. But on the rare occasion, the conditions are right, and everything lines up perfectly. Statistically speaking it’s probably a 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 chance that the crystalline structures would allow the artifact to last over 1600 years.
so no, not a “neat accident”. It was purposeful because it was mass produced.
Well, i doubt that, for example, the Antikythera mechanism was mass produced, but we still have found one.
Why do you doubt it? It seems like a quite refined design and needs special tooling, so it doesn’t seem out of question that the workshop that made it would have made dozens or even hundreds.
yes, because a brass instrument that was stored at the bottom of the dead sea is EXACTLY like glassware stored in a monastery. 😑
if anything it’s extremely likely that the Antikythera mechanism was mass produced.
Care to hazard a guess why only one exists today? The answer is a “hot” one, that might just “smelt” your face!
During times of war metal tools and sculptures were melted down in an effort to create swords, shields, and other tools of war. This was especially true after the fall of Rome when bronze statues fell victim to thieves looking to score some quick cash. This is exactly why there are so few surviving bronze statues from ancient times.
So in essence, the event that lost the Antikythera mechanism to time is exactly what saved and preserved it for us to enjoy today.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if there are several more sitting under a few feet of silt at the bottom of our oceans and seas.
Even if it was mass produced (which I doubt, it must have been costly), that still does not imply or prove the optical characteristics were deliberately introduced.
I always love silly thoughts like this. “YOU CANT PROVE A MAJOR FEATURE WAS DELIBERATE so it must not have been.”
Prove that it wasn’t? Prove there is a natural source of sand with the gold/silver particles to produce this when turned into glass. I would wait but you won’t be able to.
Yup. That’s hobby-horse guy!
No, of course. The Romans had knowledge and machinery to devise and build this, it’s just that both have become totally lost in time. You consider that likely?
We aren’t able to reconstruct real Damascus steel either, because we can’t find the ore anymore.
And thanks for calling me silly. The ad hominem is the weapon of people out of real arguments.
Replying to Menno
We haven’t forgotten how to make real Damascus steel. It’s called wootz steel, Al Pendray was making it in Florida up until shortly before his death. There are books written about him. It’s just crucible steel, cooked in certain ways to increase carbon in some areas and decrease it in others. Some batches turn out great, others don’t; ancient smiths would have made cheaper blades or arrowheads out of the lower quality stuff, meaning we only see the small samples of their best work.
And the reason no one else was really interested was because modern engineered steels can have much better properties.
You know I have a funny anecdote that should help shed some light on this.
When I was in college I was so broke I couldn’t afford much in the way of food. I woke up one afternoon and realized I only had enough pancake mix for about one small pancake. I also had enough farina for about a half a bowl. In my desperation, I mixed the two together and ended up having the densest most delicious four stack pancakes for breakfast.
I still make those pancakes to this day because of how delicious they were.
My point is, accidents CAN happen and accidents are discoveries. That does not mean that discoveries cannot be replicated.
Now then, go make some pancakes and think about how ancient Romans used to eat french toast.
https://piped.video/watch?v=02V5dqRjNfw
You are very good at kidding yourself that you have a grasp of things when your appreciation is anything but sophisticated, the issue is not replication, it is an issue of being able to derive abstract, transferable, knowledge, as we do when science informs engineering across multiple fields. Everything else is just happy accidents. Or in the case of most of your attempts at cooking, culinary atrocities. :-)
Don’t act the fool. “it was mass produced” does not imply that the producers knew anything but the record of the accidental steps required to create it, they had no idea how to apply the knowledge to anything else because they never understood the actual process.
Volcanic glass is a thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_glass and even the ancient greeks knew about adding volcanic ash to lime to change its properties, which the Romans refined into pozolan to make “concrete”, also usually volcanic ash based. I wonder if there is any connection.
Several years sgo we visited mt. Saint Helens. On the way up to the site there wss a small craft store where the guy was making blown glass objects and mixing in the wildly abundant volcanic ash to make them slightly iridescent… dont know about gold/silver content
330 parts per million silver and 40 ppm gold at 70nm particle size is the kind of accidental contamination that sounds like it could be plausable. Except for the source of the 70 nm particles is where it fails. And that normal blue glass which has at least 2 ppm cóbalt oxide existed since 2000 BC. Then the accidental addition starts to sound less plausable.
How today using the technology of the period could we produce 70 nm particles of silver and gold either seperately or together in a 33 to 4 ratio.
dissolving it in acid and then draining off the acid and washing the resulting gold/silver dust.
Probably physical vapor deposition by fuming. Can be done by hand. Glass fuming is fascinating.
Don’t forget the salad, Caesar.
It is easy to get caught up in a human lifespan and think that is a long time. But it is a blink of an eye on the grand scheme of things.
Glass like this may have been the byproduct of hundreds of years of “research” along the lines of “throw some stuff in and see what happens” that has refined over generations to phenomenal levels of distinction and sophistication. There is evidence that the antikyrhrya (sp?) mechanism benefited from *hundreds* of years of careful observational data during its construction.
I agree with the poster above. We are no smarter today than we were thousands of years ago in our ability to solve problems. We have electricity and stuff to do things faster and lift heavier objects easily but if time is less of an issue, even over the course of several human lifetimes to accomplish a project, there is no human-based reason to not do so.
While the makers of this may not have understood the optical properties of nano particles they likely could have *easily* refined the recipe along the lines of 44:7 ratio of components, likely to nearly the milligram scale.
Ya I’m guessing it is just one of those things where they got to a point where they understood well enough how to make glass in general, that they just started experimenting with different additives to see what colors it would make and this combination in particular was just a happy accident. I doubt they had any clue why it worked, they probably just learned that if you add fine particles of silver and gold in specific ratios, you get an interesting type of glass.
We aren’t smarter?
“…the makers of this may not have understood…”
We do understand it.
That is literally what “smarter” means.
We haven’t just developed more things.
We have developed new WAYS of developing more things.
There sure are a lot of people here using ‘magical thinking’ to justify theories about ‘ancient wisdom’.
Like most nano-whatevers, this is probably the result of a fairly simple combination of ingredients that just so happens to have some sort of complicated structure if you look closely enough. If we can only manage it by directly grinding metals to a uniform nanometer particle size, that just means the romans were more capable than we are.
Of course they had nano-technology back then. Of course, back then it was a lot bigger.
:)
It’s unlikely this is a result of grinding malleable precious metals to the point that they were made nano. Physical vapor deposition, specifically fuming, is a well known method of introducing metal particles to glass resulting in the dichroic effect. It can be done today by hand without plasma or lasers. Just an intense heat source.
Either that or aliens.
Hope this helps.
What an utter farce of an idea…
Having some effect happen is not the same as “using —tehnology”.
We’re they using “genetic technology” when they combined their DNA to have kids?
We’re they using “electrical technology” when someone took off a hat/sweater and got a static shock?