1,600 Year Old Goblet Shows Romans Used Nanotechnology.
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
When I think of nanotechnology I think of actual designed automatons at nano scale, not anything just containing nm sized particles.
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.
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? :-)
Likely for a similar reason that glass was mostly forgotten by the West during the early Middle Age and we completely lost how to make Damascus steel. Information was not preserved in a permanent multigenerational manner, either by intent or oversight, that we can still access today.
How many thousands of dollars do you want to spend?
Given the effect of being different colors when different types of liquids were in the cup seems so novel, I found that surprising. I have no idea if I can write to the glazing company and ask them to mix me up a special glaze, but if it recreated this effect I am sure it would be popular with folks.
Also I don't know about applying glazes to glass, only ceramics.
It's not simply chemistry as it's using [apparently] engineered physical effects of light transmittance.
I mean, in what way is this engineering? Metal particles emit characteristic glows when struck by light. Romans ground up the metal and mixed it in with glass. Now the glass does it too. Voilà.
If I'm reading the article right, this is analogous to me making lemonade by mixing sugar and lemon juice into water, granting the water the flavors of sugar and lemon with nanometer-scale particles (citric acid and sucrose). Is lemonade now the tastiest form of nanotechnology?
The grievance is that bloggers and journalists throw these buzzwords around for attention, and their articles end up being ridiculous, and if you're picky about definitions, outright false.
Well, there goes my proposal for an ingenious plan to apply nanotechnology to the field of communications. I was thinking of calling them "smoke signals".
it was even going to be in the cloud...s
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
This is not _exactly_ how it goes, but you get the point.
> 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
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.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Absorption_spectrum_of_liq...
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)
It's turtles all the way down.
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.
2: Observe
3: Think
4: Guess
goto 1
Start at any one of 1..4.
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.
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...now seriously, the cost/result ratio would still be higher than the one for mm wave scanners...
Pyramid: http://amzn.com/0395321212
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.
...there have been COUNTLESS documentaries in the UK showing time and time again surprisingly small teams of people erecting megalithic monuments
[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.
For example,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/06/120622-easte...
But to imply that they had any understanding of "nanotechnology", or even modern optics is well -- typical sloppy minded, modern science journalism.
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".
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.
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?
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.
Pun fully intended.
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.