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1,600 Year Old Goblet Shows Romans Used Nanotechnology.
- chrisfarms 13y agoAre 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 13y agoNo, 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 13y agoThis 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel
- balabaster 13y agoI 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.
- DanInTokyo 13y agoIt'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 13y agoTotally. 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 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 13y agoCathedral: The Story of Its Construction: http://amzn.com/0395316685 http://amzn.com/0395316685 Pyramid: http://amzn.com/0395321212 http://amzn.com/0395321212
- saalweachter 13y agoWell, 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.
- jacquesm 13y agoMost of those can be explained by oceans of time and cheap (slave) labour.
- bonemachine 13y agoOK, 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 13y agoOK, 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".
- falcolas 13y agoWhat 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 13y agoI 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.
- falcolas 13y ago"Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."[1] Newton speculated about mass and gravity in the absence of knowledge or speculation of atomic interaction, and it's considered to be a scentific discovery... why couldn't the discovery of the effect of small particles of gold and silver in glass, and its practical application thereof, in the absence of knowledge of the electron behavior be any different?
- jerf 13y agoFor Sufficiently Large Definitions Of Nanotechnology Pun fully intended.
- DanInTokyo 13y agoPart 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 13y ago"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants." -- Isaac Newton (1676)
- DanInTokyo 13y agoNot 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.
- umruehren 13y ago"You can stand on the shoulders of giants, or a big enough pile of dwarfs. Works either way." - (wish I knew the source)
- DanInTokyo 13y agoSounds Pratchett-esque to me...
- 13y ago
- krenoten 13y agoIf 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?
- lostlogin 13y agoNo 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 13y agoquick! 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 13y agoYou forgot the part where you may buy a replacement bottle of water inside the airport for $3.
- lostlogin 13y agoI can't tell if you're saying this makes it all ok or if you're saying this makes it worse? The things that were taken off me were things like deodorant, toothpaste and hand sanitizer. Nothing special, just things that are irritating to replace.
- sokoloff 13y agoI assume his point is, rather than being able to bring your choice of water or soda aboard the flight for $0.20, they've granted an oligopoly to the newstands and vendors of overpriced water and soda in the airports.
- mercuryrising 13y agoI 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/Plasmon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmonic_Nanoparticles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmonic_Nanoparticles
- jacquesm 13y 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.
- mercuryrising 13y agoWhoops, 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_liquid_water.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Absorption_spectrum_of_liq...
- ginko 13y agoIs 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.
- chm 13y agoThis 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.
- geuis 13y agoAgreed. This is more along the lines of chemistry.
- samatman 13y agoA 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.
- DLWormwood 13y ago> chemistry was alchemically transformed into nanotechnology under the Clinton administration Clever way to put it… although how much was the president’s doing directly, or the consequences of trends within one of the various government agencies that he just rode the wake of, might not be clear without some citation.
- Simple1234 13y agoI think the technology part in this case comes from the fact that it had a real world application, albeit an aesthetic one.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
- hownottowrite 13y agoRomans did love their mixins: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/ http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-con...
- dmead 13y agowhy would someone vote up an obviously sensationalized headline?
- MarcScott 13y agoAnother 'headline' that needs editorialising. It should read "1,600 Year Old Goblet Shows Romans Used Chemistry."
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoLooks more like engineering and physics to me.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y agoRomans hyped up headlines too, just like us!
- matmann2001 13y agoI 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 13y agoI 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mwhooker 13y ago"10000 year old lamp shows mesolithic man used quantum mechanics"
- mkmk 13y agoNot 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.
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