1,600 Year Old Goblet Shows Romans Used Nanotechnology.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/This-1600-Year-Old-Goblet-Shows-that-the-Romans-Were-Nanotechnology-Pioneers-220563661.html

by abolishme • 13 years ago

120 80 13 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

chrisfarms• 13 years ago

Are they suggesting we can make Nano Crystals/Quantum Dots simply by grinding? .... wouldn't a mill have to be impossibly flat for this method to work?

quasque• 13 years ago

No, the gold/silver colloids would have been made chemically. I suspect the use of "ground down" in the article was either a metaphor or the author taking a wild guess as to the technique.

Cowen• 13 years ago

This isn't the first time nanotechnology has been connected with an ancient civilization.[1]

It's always interesting to find out which areas ancient civilizations were truly advanced in. We're still not 100% sure how Greek fire was made.

---

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel

papa_bear• 13 years ago

To be fair to us modern humans, napalm is probably way better than greek fire was.

gngeal• 13 years ago

I'm sure that compared to modern napalm, the original manufacturing process must have been pretty Byzantine.

balabaster2• 13 years ago

I will stand by my theory that the ancients knew a whole lot more about a whole lot more than we currently give them credit for. I'd wager given the lack of understanding we have about things like Stonehenge, how the pyramids were actually built, megalithic structures found under the sea, the Easter Island statues etc. that they knew a whole lot more than we think.

DanInTokyo5• 13 years ago

It's all about documentation. Documents destroyed in a "dark age" of some sort? Start from scratch, hope the branches of discovery lead to the same conclusion at some point.

vijayr• 13 years ago

Totally. Every time I see tall, beautiful churches I wonder how they built those, without cranes and such. Bhaskara supposedly calculated length of year etc, fairly accurately (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhaskaracharya). Then there is the wonder of pyramids, non rusting tower in Delhi etc. They were a knowledgeable bunch.

mhb• 13 years ago

Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction: http://amzn.com/0395316685

Pyramid: http://amzn.com/0395321212

saalweachter• 13 years ago

Well, there's also good old "trial and error".

A lot of impressive feats from way back when were accomplished more by experienced extrapolation than by deep understanding. In the case of those churches, they built a lot of churches, with a lot of different designs. Each new architect would try to build something a little bit taller, a little bit thinner and more ambitious than his predecessors, without really understanding the mechanics of the structures. Sometimes they pushed too far, and buildings collapsed and people died. Sometimes they were too cautious -- I've heard the Brooklyn Bridge is hilariously over-engineered, because of the lack of computer modeling. What we see today are the best of the best, the most ambitious ones that didn't fall down. The ones that were too unambitious or which were too ambitious to succeed have been forgotten.

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

Most of those can be explained by oceans of time and cheap (slave) labour.

balabaster2• 13 years ago

Actually, while they can be, the latest theories are that they weren't built using slave labour at all... though, everything we think we know about these subjects from all the TV shows and literature I've come across appears to be based almost entirely on speculation... it would be nice if someone could actually base some of them on hard facts... except all the hard facts are lost, so we're pretty much left with our own imaginations.

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

We don't have that much mystery about Stone Henge. An old physics teacher of mine was an expert on Stone Henge, back in the 80s and did a lot of original research. It's pretty clear what Stone Henge does, why it does it and how it was built. Mystery is for pop science papers.

mrtron• 13 years ago

I believe the mystery is around the lost technology to build such things.

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

I do think great thinkers in previous eras had probably profound ideas about "nature".[1] But for buildings, it's probably a good trick + hundreds of human lives dedicated at implementing the process.

[1] Even the average person had a different interaction with the world than we do, most things were first hand diy, and often very critical to your life, and thus induce focused brain perception. We're a lot more passive at many levels, even though we're "educated", I'd bet it has a smaller effect on critical part of your brain.

mratzloff• 13 years ago

What lack of understanding? We know how those things were built or have a very good idea. Although most of the techniques are clever, they're not particularly advanced.

For example,

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/06/120622-easte...

bonemachine2• 13 years ago

OK, so they understood correlation and causality as applied to a particular use case. "Hey, we ground up the pigments real fine one day, and this nifty effect popped out."

But to imply that they had any understanding of "nanotechnology", or even modern optics is well -- typical sloppy minded, modern science journalism.

Someone• 13 years ago

OK, so they understood correlation and causality as applied to a particular use case. "Hey, we ground up the pigments real fine one day, and this nifty effect popped out."

We don't even know that. It is not as if we found a factory that produced these things, so it might just be "Dionysus thanked me for making this goblet in his honor".

falcolas2• 13 years ago

What is nanotechnology, or modern optics, if not a collection of observations, leading to correlation and causality?

Sure, we have a few more observations to add to theirs, but the fields of study have advanced from that point, not from some completely different point.

Also, as stated, some fields of study today have sprung from this very piece of art.

lincolnq• 13 years ago

I think the difference is that we have models that actually predict things. Science isn't just "combine stuff and see what happens" - it's "test hypotheses that lead to generalizable, simple models". We can see that apples fall from trees and predict that the future apples will fall, but science allows us to realize that that's the same mechanism which causes the sun to rise and set.

bonemachine2• 13 years ago

What is nanotechnology, or modern optics, if not a collection of observations, leading to correlation and causality?

Specifically: not merely a "collection of observations", but an organic body of reasoning, and understanding of core underlying phenomena (e.g. the mathematics of refraction/reflection; E/M radiation; physics of materials; that kind of stuff) that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

jerf• 13 years ago

For Sufficiently Large Definitions Of Nanotechnology

Pun fully intended.

DanInTokyo5• 13 years ago

Part of me immediately scoffs at the definition of "nanotechnology" assumed by the article, but this plays to something that's been bothering me of late - to what degree does humanity actually innovate/invent, vs. rubbing things together and seeing what happens?

Cooking: I put this plant in and set fire under it and it tastes good.

Chemistry: I put these two substances together and they explode.

Nanotechnology*: I put tiny ground-up bits of gold in this and it turns red.

This may be waaaaay side-tracking, but at what point do we step back and realize that everything we do consists of just... writing down what happens with different combinations of things? And today's nanotechnology is just the result of tons upon tons of writing down things like the linked article's results and then adding whatever the next logical(?) step might be?

(Makes me think the Asheron's Call spell research back in the day captured all of human ingenuity boiled down)

vwinsyee• 13 years ago

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants." -- Isaac Newton (1676)

DanInTokyo5• 13 years ago

Not necessarily even the shoulders of giants (with all due respect to Newton), but on the shoulders of normal, inquisitive men and women who are standing on the shoulders of countless other normal men and women.

It's turtles all the way down.

claudius• 13 years ago

Which is a pretty big feat by itself in a time when most people were afraid of standing up from their crouching positions.

flagnog• 13 years ago

I always say that I'm a midget standing on the shoulders of giants.

swombat• 13 years ago

Hilariously enough, he apparently said that to put down Hooke, who was quite short. It was meant as an insult.

solistice• 13 years ago

Well, innovation means introducing new things or methods. Invention is creating something with ones own ingenuity, as opposed to replicating something.

So I don't quite see how experimenting and observing effects goes counter to that. Predictive science is great, but the theoretical models you use stem from observation as well. The only difference is that you get to experiment virtually, and that you can narrow down things.

So yeah, innovating/inventing requires rubbing things together and seeing what happens. Imagine innovating without eventually rubbing things together (in a wider sense of course). It wouldn't make sense.

DanInTokyo5• 13 years ago

I don't disagree, it's just been a change in my own perspective of late... kind of like when you stop believing in magic and start understanding the reactions of a variety of elements. It starts to seem so... straightforward. Puts discovery into perspective.

beernutz2• 13 years ago

You basically just described part of what we call Science.

e12e• 13 years ago

1: Experiment

2: Observe

3: Think

4: Guess

goto 1

Start at any one of 1..4.

krenoten• 13 years ago

If the artwork depicts a man being punished for crimes against the god of wine, and the contents affect the color, wouldn't it be cool if this was used to detect poisons, similar to what drinksavvy is doing for date rape drugs?

lostlogin2• 13 years ago

No no, terrorism is the key, as the article says. This technology might be useful for detecting the dangerous fluids terrorists carry onto planes. This problem is reaching epidemic proportion, which you can tell as soon as you get to an airport and have your liquids stolen.

gcb0• 13 years ago

quick! somebody think of children and approve enough TSA expenditure to buy one of those globets for each airport checkin line!

...now seriously, the cost/result ratio would still be higher than the one for mm wave scanners...

wry• 13 years ago

You forgot the part where you may buy a replacement bottle of water inside the airport for $3.

mercuryrising2• 13 years ago

I made this comment yesterday in another thread, but it provides some of 'why' for the colors we see in stained glass.

You've seen it before... Stained glass. Stained glass was one of the first use of nanoparticles and plasmonics to become commonplace. The wide range of colors that you can get in stained glass is due to the nano properties of the materials you add to the glass. The effect is due to surface plasmons - electric field waves that travel on the surface of conductors. Much like ocean waves, plasmons are created from light's electric field. They bounce back and forth, and since they are only permitted on the surface of a material, there are limits on what waves can exist. This is what gives them the weird properties - the size and shape determine the optical properties.

On another tangent (this one's pretty cool) - since you can tune the properties of these nanoparticles, you can make them respond in a specific way. Let's say we have a cancer cell that we want to kill, and only that cancer cell should die. We can create nanoparticles that bond with that cancer cell, and only that cancer cell. But how do we kill it? We can tune the absorption spectrum of the nanoparticle to absorb infrared light - light that is transparent to the human body. We create a small heater that absorbs tons of the input energy, while keeping the rest of the area cool. Localized heating destroys the nearby cancer cell.

Plasmonics are really cool - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmonic_Nanoparticles

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

light that is transparent to the human body.

That bit didn't make sense to me.

The rest does, I think what you're saying is that this is a tuned circuit which will absorb certain wavelengths.

mercuryrising2• 13 years ago

Whoops, that should have been translucent. Yeah you tune the gold nanoparticles to absorb radiation that is able to be transmitted into the body (I can't find any graphs of the human body's vis/ir transmittance - although water is a good 'baseline'[1]). Tuning something to green wouldn't work so well, because you can't get the light in. But infrared works great - evidenced by how readily red light passes through fingers with flashlights.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Absorption_spectrum_of_liq...

RexM2• 13 years ago

I just watched this the other day: http://video.pbs.org/video/1754649512/

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

Couldn't see this video due to regional restrictions. Is this the same ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJRZ-OFKbuM

ginko• 13 years ago

Is it just me or has the term "nanotechnology" really inflated in meaning in recent years.

When I think of nanotechnology I think of actual designed automatons at nano scale, not anything just containing nm sized particles.

geuis• 13 years ago

Agreed. This is more along the lines of chemistry.

samatman• 13 years ago

A lot of chemistry was alchemically transformed into nanotechnology under the Clinton administration. It's a follow-the-money sort of thing. Turns out, chemists were working in the nano scale all along. Who knew.

Simple1234• 13 years ago

I think the technology part in this case comes from the fact that it had a real world application, albeit an aesthetic one.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

It is entirely unclear if it was purely aesthetic. The article points out that the color changes are extremely sensitive to small changes in ratios of different elements in the containing fluid. It is entirely possible (although I agree it is a stretch) that the color would change if the drink it contain was contaminated with a poison.

So what was it? Was it a cool glass that changed color? Or a gift from the Gods that showed the true nature of its contents? If it is as sensitive to change as the article suggests I could see passing it off as the latter.

My question then is why I can't get a wine glass today made this way? :-)

sliverstorm3• 13 years ago

If "containing nm sized particles" is all something needs to do to be considered nanotechnology, everything is nanotechnology. This is getting ridiculous.

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

Then what would you call [purposefully] generating nano sized particles and mixing them in a specific ratio to add to glass to create a colour change effect that is highly sensitive to contaminants?

It's not simply chemistry as it's using [apparently] engineered physical effects of light transmittance.

sungx105• 13 years ago

But despite appearing primarily in popular culture as extremely small robots, nanotechnology simply refers to the scale of the technology, so actually, this is by definition, nanotechnology. It is actually the popular representation of nanotechnology which has always been too specific.

Dylan16807• 13 years ago

That's what 'nano' means, but 'nanotechnology' is a set phrase with a specific meaning. You have to be manipulating matter at that scale, not simply using particles that size. Smoke is not nanotechnology.

foysavas• 13 years ago

Sadly, I've read pieces where obsidian blades are labeled as nanotech as well.

In other news, cranberry glass is actually kind of cool and helped win this guy a Nobel Prize in 1925: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Adolf_Zsigmondy

chm• 13 years ago

This is due to politics. If the chief editor of Journal A likes the prefix nano, you'll see nano in the titles. Then journalists read the abstracts, write a story and proliferate the use of the word.

This is not _exactly_ how it goes, but you get the point.

hownottowrite• 13 years ago

Romans did love their mixins: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-con...

dmead• 13 years ago

why would someone vote up an obviously sensationalized headline?

MarcScott• 13 years ago

Another 'headline' that needs editorialising. It should read "1,600 Year Old Goblet Shows Romans Used Chemistry."

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

Looks more like engineering and physics to me.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 13 years ago

Romans hyped up headlines too, just like us!

matmann2001• 13 years ago

I think a key point they hint at but never actually come out and say is that such a cup likely existed for the purpose of detecting poisons.

205guy• 13 years ago

I came to say the same thing. The article hints that such a use is possible, but makes it sound like it is a modern discovery of its capabilities. Turns out that poisoning was always an effective way of killing enemies (even still today), and there are many tales of goblets or gems that could detect or (as an embellishment) purify a poison. The fact that such a goblet actually existed is the real story here.

I'm very surprised no historian is grabbing this research opportunity to see what salts, oils, etc. (based on historically known poisons) and what concentrations the goblet can reveal.

mwhooker• 13 years ago

"10000 year old lamp shows mesolithic man used quantum mechanics"

mkmk• 13 years ago

Not mentioned in this article, but perhaps of interest, is that this goblet is currently on loan, and on display, at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is quite neat and I recommend going to see it if you're in the area.

1,600 Year Old Goblet Shows Romans Used Nanotechnology.

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