Carbon nanotechnology in a 17th century Damascus sword | Hacker News Reader

Carbon nanotechnology in a 17th century Damascus sword

scienceblogs.com

67 pointsph0rque20 comments

I remember reading somewhere(?) about attempts at reproduction, where the experimenters grounded leaves into the mix. I can't find it now (i.e. can't back it up)

But anyway, there's apparently lots of attempts at reproduction. Here's one interesting read I found about the spectral analysis of the swords

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.htm...

How in the world did they come up with this process in the first place, if 400 years later we still can't really reproduce it? Either there was serious genius at work there or they made one hell of an accidental discovery.

I suspect it wasn't so much accidental discovery as a trial and error refinement of their craft. Metalworking began long before they knew the science of it all.

History seems littered with these practical applications of phenomenon without full understanding. You can even say software development is done (programs are built and used) without true understand how to do it "correctly".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalworking http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/samurai/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy

I suspect it wasn't so much accidental discovery as a trial and error refinement

Trial-and-error = accident.

We use science because it is more efficient than brute force (trial-and-error; accident).

Not really. Trial and error implies intention: you know more or less what you want to accomplish, and you try over and over until something works, or you give up.

over and over until something works

Indeed. ...Until something accidentally works.

Lower animals tend more to learn by accident. They might memorize or ritualize what works, but they do not resonate with why it works. Higher animals tend more to learn by developing mental-resonance with natural processes (i.e. they do resonate with why things work), saving the effort involved in accidental-discovery learning techniques such as trial-and-error.

The main indices of intelligence in animals are the speed of learning and the complexity of what can be learned, the integration of sensory information to achieve a goal, flexibility of behavior in the face of obstacles, insightful rather than trial-and-error problem-solving behavior, transfer of learning from one problem situation to somewhat different situations, and capacity to acquire abstract or relational concepts.

(Arthur Jensen. Bias in Mental Testing. http://www.amazon.com/Bias-Mental-Testing-Arthur-Jensen/dp/0... From the section "Animal Intelligence".)

Perhaps trial-and-error should be classed as a subset of accidental discovery -- e.g. there would be myriad ways of accidentally discovering, one of which would be the motivation-driven trial-and-error.

Place a chicken on one side of a limited-length chain-link fence, and food on the other side, and the chicken will use the sheer force of its hunger-drive to discover how to get to the food. It has a motivation to get to the food, but it cannot mentally-resonate with the spatial processes -- the distance, the fence, gravity, etc. -- that are keeping it and the food separate. It therefore applies its motivation to accidental discovery -- sepcifically, the motive-driven accidental-discovery technique of trial-and-error. E.g., it will scramble around in a panic until it accidentally discovers one of the two routes to the food -- a few feet to either side of its original location. This process might take many minutes or hours. The chicken might even die of hunger without discovering that walking a few feet around the fence will get it to the food.

In the same test, a dog will mentally-resonate with the spatial processes involved, and simply walk around the fence.

The chicken applies the accidental-discovery technique of trial-and-error. The dog theorizes, i.e. mentally-resonates, i.e. applies science.

From the link I posted: "Based on our studies, it is clear that to produce the damascene patterns of a museum-quality wootz Damascus blade the smith would have to fulfill at least three requirements.

1) the wootz ingot would have to have come from an ore deposit that provided significant levels of certain trace elements, notably, Cr, Mo, Nb, Mn, or V. ...believe the blades with good patterns were only produced from wootz ingots made in southern India, apparently around Hyderabad.

2) ...wootz Damascus blades with good patterns are characterized by a high phosphorus level. This means that the ingots of these blades would be severely hot short, which explains why Breant's9 19th century smiths in Paris could not forge wootz ingots.

3) a smith who developed a heat-treatment technique that allowed the hot-short ingots to be forged might still not have learned how to produce the surface patterns, because they do not appear until the surface decarb region is ground off the blades; this grinding process is not a simple matter. "

A combination of the right technology along with the right materials set the stage to allow trial and error to make incremental discoveries.

Besides, back then, there was a commercial need for swords, so people worked on it day and night for hundreds of years. You can get pretty good at something when you work on it long enough. Nowadays, our effort is put into semiconductors, among other things.

Maybe one day, when a new technology surpasses semiconductors is being used, and the 'art of semiconductors is lost', people of the future might wonder how we built things that were so damn small and hot with [yet unnamed or not understood physics effect].

There were a few bits about this stuff in Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

The description in the Baroque Cycle involved cooling the hot metal extremely slowly, from which I understand that Stephenson assumed the process was similar to what simulated annealing simulates (AFAIK the creation of diamonds is based on similar principle.)

what does hot-short mean in this context, the duration of the heating cooling cycles?

HOT SHORT

Brittleness in hot metal.

From: Alloy, Metal Terminology (H) http://www.metal-mart.com/Dictionary/dictleth.htm#I16

if 400 years later we still can't really reproduce it?

we can, lots of people sell damascus steel razors and kitchen knives, but very few people are interested in a knife too hard to sharpen

Nanotechnology + Swords = Awesome

(Nanotechnology = Awesome - Swords)?

And there you have it: the pitfalls of operator overloading.

Well, seeing as how you computer science people regularly abuse equals signs, I figured it didn't matter much. Interpret it as:

Nanotechnology + Swords = O(Awesome)

where equals is the usually CS way of saying "they're close"

hehe

(Nanotechnology + Swords) ε AwsomeThings

Here's another article: Continuing Study of Damascus Steel: Bars from the Alwar Armory

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5348/is_200409/ai_n2...

This was surely alien technology.

(ducks)

dama steel is not that amazing, you can buy straight razors and kitchen knives made from damascus steel aka "wootz"

but guess what? for most uses it SUCKS. why? because it is almost impossible to sharpen

most surgical-quality steels are more than hard enough, but soft enough to actually be sharpened on a garnet (belgian coticule) or synthetic hone. my best straight razors are the ones from the 20s and 30s....before people knew how to make even today's surgical steel. i can actually sharpen them. harder steel requires hours of honing and doesn't work any better.

look at some web forums for straight razors....very few fans of damasteel can be found

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