
1,600 Year Old Goblet Shows Romans Used Nanotechnology. - abolishme
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/This-1600-Year-Old-Goblet-Shows-that-the-Romans-Were-Nanotechnology-Pioneers-220563661.html
======
ginko
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.

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

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

~~~
sliverstorm
I'd call it either chemistry or applied physics. Probably lean more towards
applied physics, as chemistry doesn't concern itself with light.

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?

~~~
cosmie
It may seem like commonly known applied physics today, but you can bet 1600
years ago it was a pretty amazing engineering fete to create a glass _that
automatically changed colors_ when different liquids were put in it. 1600
years from now I'm sure our successors will be calling the quantum computers
we're toying with simple applied physics instead of engineering as well.

~~~
Jormundir
The argument is the use of the word nanotechnology. They were not engineering
things on the nano scale, they were just mixing ingredients together. If the
definition of nanotechnology is incidentally using nano scale particles, then
the word is essentially meaningless because everything would be
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.

------
mercuryrising
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/Plasmon)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmonic_Nanoparticles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmonic_Nanoparticles)

~~~
jacquesm
> 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
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Absorption_spectrum_of_liquid_water.png)

~~~
dTal
That still makes no sense: 1) light itself cannot be transparent or
translucent, only objects, and 2) the human body is in fact opaque in the
infrared, as evidenced by the fact that heat lamps warm us up.

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

~~~
DanInTokyo
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.

~~~
umruehren
"You can stand on the shoulders of giants, or a big enough pile of dwarfs.
Works either way." \- (wish I knew the source)

~~~
DanInTokyo
Sounds Pratchett-esque to me...

------
Cowen
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel)

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

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

------
krenoten
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?

~~~
lostlogin
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.

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

~~~
lostlogin
I 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
I 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.

------
balabaster
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.

~~~
vijayr
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhaskaracharya)).
Then there is the wonder of pyramids, non rusting tower in Delhi etc. They
were a knowledgeable bunch.

~~~
saalweachter
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.

------
bonemachine
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.

~~~
falcolas
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
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.

~~~
falcolas
"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?

~~~
beernutz
I think actually it was considered a scientific Theory. A theory in scientific
terms is (I hope I get this correct) a hypothesis made from observable facts,
that has stood up to many experiments that had potential to falsify it.

------
jerf
For Sufficiently Large Definitions Of Nanotechnology

Pun fully intended.

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

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Looks more like engineering and physics to me.

------
matmann2001
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
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.

------
hownottowrite
Romans did love their mixins: [http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-
releases/2013/06/04/roman-con...](http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-
releases/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/)

------
chrisfarms
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
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.

------
mkmk
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.

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

------
dmead
why would someone vote up an obviously sensationalized headline?

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Romans hyped up headlines too, just like us!

