This is neat! And once again I'm left in awe of how ancient civilizations discovered such amazing and unique recipes and methods in the first place, which had to be re-discovered using scientific...
This is neat! And once again I'm left in awe of how ancient civilizations discovered such amazing and unique recipes and methods in the first place, which had to be re-discovered using scientific analyses.
This is really cool but they didn't answer the question in was most interested! How did the Romans do it? We got it to work with nanoparticles, but how did someone several thousand years ago...
This is really cool but they didn't answer the question in was most interested! How did the Romans do it? We got it to work with nanoparticles, but how did someone several thousand years ago fabricate such a thing?
I'm no historian, but I imagine the Romans used the same furnaces for glass making as they did silver and gold smelting and the right combination probably came together accidentally and they...
I'm no historian, but I imagine the Romans used the same furnaces for glass making as they did silver and gold smelting and the right combination probably came together accidentally and they tweaked it from there. Perhaps they did unheard of things with gold and silver that made this phenomenon more likely.
You see this a lot in history, that just the right conditions at just the right time with just the right materials creates something phenomenally majestic and it's either figured out and passed on through the ages or lost to time because nobody figured it out before Iustus's smithy burned down in 219CE and they all just said "well clearly the gods hated him for his success".
That's the beauty of it! Roman's did it with nano particles too! The article touches upon the why and the how, but not in a super gratifying way. The gist is, you have a molten glass doped with...
That's the beauty of it! Roman's did it with nano particles too! The article touches upon the why and the how, but not in a super gratifying way.
The gist is, you have a molten glass doped with silver and gold, and there are many knobs you can turn to control nano particle formation/size (like gold/silver concentration, glass composition, cooling rate). Under the right conditions, they form naturally! Depending on the size and distribution (is the particle size uniform, or does the size vary?), you get different optical properties. The article hints at this, saying that how the placement of the piece in the furnace impacted the color properties of the glass:
The colour was quite dependent on conditions in the furnace. If the glass went in a different position in the furnace, then the colour came out differently … The fact that the colour is so sensitive to the position in the furnace suggests that it would have been very difficult for the Romans to control the colour. It makes me think that, with the Lycurgus glass, they hit the jackpot.
So it's a mix of intent, luck, and skill. It's possible they discovered it by accident - by cross contamination between silver/gold smelting and glass making. It's just as possible they were intentionally trying to stain the glass with additives and got something even cooler. Once discovered, then it's a matter of honing the process into something reproducible.
They found the how, we finally understand the why (and used that to rediscover the how). There's a similar story behind Roman concrete.
This is neat! And once again I'm left in awe of how ancient civilizations discovered such amazing and unique recipes and methods in the first place, which had to be re-discovered using scientific analyses.
This is really cool but they didn't answer the question in was most interested! How did the Romans do it? We got it to work with nanoparticles, but how did someone several thousand years ago fabricate such a thing?
I'm no historian, but I imagine the Romans used the same furnaces for glass making as they did silver and gold smelting and the right combination probably came together accidentally and they tweaked it from there. Perhaps they did unheard of things with gold and silver that made this phenomenon more likely.
You see this a lot in history, that just the right conditions at just the right time with just the right materials creates something phenomenally majestic and it's either figured out and passed on through the ages or lost to time because nobody figured it out before Iustus's smithy burned down in 219CE and they all just said "well clearly the gods hated him for his success".
That's the beauty of it! Roman's did it with nano particles too! The article touches upon the why and the how, but not in a super gratifying way.
The gist is, you have a molten glass doped with silver and gold, and there are many knobs you can turn to control nano particle formation/size (like gold/silver concentration, glass composition, cooling rate). Under the right conditions, they form naturally! Depending on the size and distribution (is the particle size uniform, or does the size vary?), you get different optical properties. The article hints at this, saying that how the placement of the piece in the furnace impacted the color properties of the glass:
So it's a mix of intent, luck, and skill. It's possible they discovered it by accident - by cross contamination between silver/gold smelting and glass making. It's just as possible they were intentionally trying to stain the glass with additives and got something even cooler. Once discovered, then it's a matter of honing the process into something reproducible.
They found the how, we finally understand the why (and used that to rediscover the how). There's a similar story behind Roman concrete.