If "containing nm sized particles" is all something needs to do to be considered nanotechnology, everything is nanotechnology. This is getting ridiculous.
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.
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?
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.
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.
But despite appearing primarily in popular culture as extremely small robots, nanotechnology simply refers to the scale of the technology, so actually, this is by definition, nanotechnology. It is actually the popular representation of nanotechnology which has always been too specific.
That's what 'nano' means, but 'nanotechnology' is a set phrase with a specific meaning. You have to be manipulating matter at that scale, not simply using particles that size. Smoke is not nanotechnology.
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".
A lot of chemistry was alchemically transformed into nanotechnology under the Clinton administration. It's a follow-the-money sort of thing. Turns out, chemists were working in the nano scale all along. Who knew.
> chemistry was alchemically transformed into nanotechnology under the Clinton administration
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.
It is entirely unclear if it was purely aesthetic. The article points out that the color changes are extremely sensitive to small changes in ratios of different elements in the containing fluid. It is entirely possible (although I agree it is a stretch) that the color would change if the drink it contain was contaminated with a poison.
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? :-)
> 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.
Sort of depends on the effectiveness :-) But more seriously looking through my daughters old glaze catalogs there doesn't seem to be a glaze with a mix of gold and silver particulates, much less one with "exact proportions" hinted at in the article.
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.
I think it may be because gold and silver melt too close to the temperature at which glazes are usually designed to flow. For gold the melting point is ~ 1060 deg C (Earthenware firing temperatures). I'd expect the gold might tend to coalesce rather than maintaining the sizes required to produce the effect in the OP.
Also I don't know about applying glazes to glass, only ceramics.
This is due to politics. If the chief editor of Journal A likes the prefix nano, you'll see nano in the titles. Then journalists read the abstracts, write a story and proliferate the use of the word.
This is not _exactly_ how it goes, but you get the point.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Well, innovation means introducing new things or methods. Invention is creating something with ones own ingenuity, as opposed to replicating something.
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.
I don't disagree, it's just been a change in my own perspective of late... kind of like when you stop believing in magic and start understanding the reactions of a variety of elements. It starts to seem so... straightforward. Puts discovery into perspective.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We don't have that much mystery about Stone Henge. An old physics teacher of mine was an expert on Stone Henge, back in the 80s and did a lot of original research. It's pretty clear what Stone Henge does, why it does it and how it was built. Mystery is for pop science papers.
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). Then there is the wonder of pyramids, non rusting tower in Delhi etc. They were a knowledgeable bunch.
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.
I do think great thinkers in previous eras had probably profound ideas about "nature".[1] But for buildings, it's probably a good trick + hundreds of human lives dedicated at implementing the process.
[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.
Actually, while they can be, the latest theories are that they weren't built using slave labour at all... though, everything we think we know about these subjects from all the TV shows and literature I've come across appears to be based almost entirely on speculation... it would be nice if someone could actually base some of them on hard facts... except all the hard facts are lost, so we're pretty much left with our own imaginations.
What lack of understanding? We know how those things were built or have a very good idea. Although most of the techniques are clever, they're not particularly advanced.
It's all about documentation. Documents destroyed in a "dark age" of some sort? Start from scratch, hope the branches of discovery lead to the same conclusion at some point.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
What is nanotechnology, or modern optics, if not a collection of observations, leading to correlation and causality?
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.
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."
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
When I think of nanotechnology I think of actual designed automatons at nano scale, not anything just containing nm sized particles.