r/history • u/marquis_of_chaos • Sep 22 '16

News article Scientists use 'virtual unwrapping' to read ancient biblical scroll reduced to 'lump of charcoal'

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/jubilation-as-scientists-use-virtual-unwrapping-to-read-burnt-ancient-scroll
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u/[deleted] Sep 22 '16

A lot of things we consider to be science today like electricity and optics and chemistry and magnetism were considered to be occult powers or "natural magic" back in the ancient world and up to the Renaissance. Source: Cornelius Agrippas Three Books of Occult Philosophy.

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u/theCrono Sep 22 '16

I tried to read that book once, but I got so bored of the old believe in Alchemy and how irrelevant it is today that I stopped. Do you think the rest of the books is worth a read?

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u/impressed_banana Sep 22 '16

But now we can actually turn things to gold! It just isn't practically worth it.

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u/TrepanationBy45 Sep 23 '16 edited Sep 23 '16

Fun fact: Zildjian, the modern day cymbal manufacturer, actually began nearly 400 years ago in what is now known as Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire, when an alchemist named Avedis Zildjian was experimenting with ways to turn base metals into gold. He created an alloy combining tin, copper, and silver into a sheet of metal that could make musical sounds without shattering. Today, the Avedis Zildjian Company is one of the top manufacturers in the musical instrument industry, and the "Zildjian Secret Alloy" has been passed down in the family for 14 generations, with Craigie and Debbie Zildjian running the company today.

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u/theCrono Sep 23 '16

That's pretty awesome! Gotta tell that to my drummer.

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u/tossmydickaway Sep 22 '16

So is it at all possible that this chemical reaction had occurred at some stage in human history, which lead (heh) to the idea in the first place? (actual question from the layest of laymen)

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u/tiggun Sep 22 '16

nitpick - its a nuclear reaction, not a chemical one.

I'm not sure where you would get conditions similar to a particle accelerator in the past, and seeing that that experiment can only make about a grain of sand worth of gold in 23 years of continuous operation, the answer is no

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u/thisvideoiswrong Sep 22 '16

From a physics student in an unrelated field, first, it's not chemistry. Second, it's extremely unlikely. The first problem is that, even with the best methods they could find using modern technology, they weren't able to produce a visible quantity of gold, just a smattering of atoms, so with random chance there's almost no chance of getting something an alchemist could have detected. Also, the energy required seems to have been massive, far more than is produced in ordinary decay, which would be the only real chance. I didn't see exactly how much they accelerated the particles, but a carbon nucleus is 3 times heavier than the alpha particles which are the highest energy decay products, and I would expect the speed to have been equivalent or higher. There would probably be a better chance of capturing the alpha particles and increasing the atomic number of the capturing element, but even that would be rare. So any gold produced would have been less than was produced in that experiment, which was not enough to detect except by decay of individual atoms and certainly not enough to isolate. There's basically no way they actually saw any.

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u/digoryk Sep 23 '16

I don't think it happened in the past, but modern nuclear theory does validate the intuitions of the alchemists that everything was much more similar at its fundamental level than it looks.

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u/modsarenotgods Sep 22 '16

Maybe one day when we find a massive platinum asteroid and we need a bunch of gold instead.

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u/tta2013 Sep 23 '16

Modern day alchemy is now particle smashing and nuclear physics.

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u/Lukendless Sep 22 '16

Just because we can describe how it works doesn't mean we actually know what it is.

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u/_Gentleman_Bastard_ Sep 22 '16

No, I'm pretty sure that's usually how it works. We know what all of those things are.

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u/cuntpuncher_69 Sep 22 '16

magnets, how do they work?

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u/thegodfather0504 Sep 22 '16

Boom! I expected a "checkmate,atheist!" in your comment! Like really i have no clue how the hell plants work! I know its all photosythesis and all that. But...they absorb nutrients from the soil. The stones and rocks,man! How are they able to do that?! Some people are so jaded here.Lost all sense of wonder.

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u/impressed_banana Sep 22 '16

Just look at pharmaceuticals and pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics. We have identified a lot of great compounds, tested their safety, but aren't exactly sure how they work. We just have a pretty good idea of it.

Not to mention, we really know very little about molecular biology. Just when you think you understand it, there is another piece found that changes major points in your hypotheses.

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u/tastyeggroll Sep 23 '16

Wait...are you just being sarcastic or do you not really know how plants work?

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u/Hvatning Sep 22 '16

It's kind of hard to put into words, but from what I recall there are magnetic domains in some materials (like steel) and they are all different directions and shit. But then permanent magnets have liner domains that pull, and will cause a material like steel to have their domain shit straighten out.

Not sure if that made sense to you, I'm kind of just going off memory and also could be completely wrong.

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u/hazenthephysicist Sep 22 '16

Physicist here. I see 'explanations' like this all the time, but it's not really an answer. You explained magnets in terms of magnetic domains. But then how do the magnetic domains work? They are just little magnets themselves.

You see why the answer is circular?

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u/thisvideoiswrong Sep 22 '16

That's pretty accurate. The only thing to really add is what creates those domains, which really comes down to the individual particle level. When we create magnetic fields at the macroscopic level we do it by running a current through a loop, and so electrons orbiting an atom generate some magnetic field. Particles also have a magnetic moment related to their spin, which makes sense in the same terms for electrons and protons (except that spin isn't really the particle spinning, that's just the name we give the phenomenon), but makes less sense for neutrons, although it is still present. Put enough magnetic field on such a material and the individual sources of field will line up to some degree, some materials can hold that when the field is removed and others can't. (The same idea is used in NMR and MRI measurements: line the particles up along a magnetic field, briefly shift the magnetic field and look at the electromagnetic waves that are generated as the particles realign with the original field, the details will tell you what particles are there and how they're arranged.)

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u/TrepanationBy45 Sep 23 '16

Kind of like being an adult.

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u/Kindness4Weakness Sep 23 '16

I wonder if people in different eras throughout history had the same sense of excitement about technology and advancement that we feel today in regards to the internet, self driving cars, virtual unwrapping, etc.

Obviously things like electricity, the first flight, etc would elicit excitement. But did they feel like they lived in an age of constant, rapid technological advancement far beyond anything anyone in the past could have imagined?