Lycurgus Cup Shows Incredible Scientific Discovery

As featured in Smithsonian magazine, a 1,600-year-old goblet named the Lycurgus Cup (due to its depiction of King Lycurgus of Thrace trapped in tangles of grapevines by the Greek god of wine Dionysus) displays the Romans striking grasp of nanotechnology.

The Roman goblet calls the British Museum home. When the museum first acquired it in the 1950s, staff noticed that the Lycurgus Cup glowed bright green when front-lit and dark red when backlit.

England's researchers cracked the goblets riddle in 1990, when they examined broken fragments of the Lycurgus Cup under a microscope and saw that infused within the glass were silver and gold particles, some less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The precise calculations of the metals show a clear intent, an incredible achievement given the Romans resources and knowledge.

So how does it work?

When light hits the goblet, electrons within the metal specks begin to vibrate. This process, along with the cups positioning and contents, alter its color. When Gang Logan Liu, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, tested the goblets science with a variety of different liquids, he observed that the same vibrating electrons had the same interactions (with different colorful results). Using billions of small holes pressed into a piece of plastic the size of a postage stamp, the experiment was able to create a very tiny version of the science used in the goblet. Compared to current sensor techniques grounded in the same process, the goblets nanotechnology is 100 times more sensitive to sodium levels.

What else do you think can be discovered from ancient technology? Do you know of any cool tech that was previously lost to time? Share your stories here!