[Corey] Is this 2,000-year-old lump
of corroded metal
the world's oldest analog computer?
[Tamar] There are over 30 gears inside
and some gears have up to 65 teeth on them.
[Corey] Could this world war two bomb
really have been piloted by pigeons?
[Sascha] If you are worried about pigeons
going to the bathroom on your car,
now you've got a pigeon piloting
a thousand-pound bomb.
[Corey] And how can this ancient Roman cup
change color?
[Andrew] It's not an optical illusion.
It really does change color from red to green.
[Corey] These are the most remarkable
and mysterious objects on Earth,
hidden away in museums, laboratories,
and storage rooms.
Now, new research and technology
can get under their skin like never before.
We can rebuild them,
pull them apart...
and zoom in to reveal
the unbelievable,
the ancient,
and the truly bizarre.
These are the world's strangest things.
[suspenseful music playing]
In a museum in Athens sits a misshapen lump
of corroded metal.
In all of archaeological history,
no other object like it has ever been found.
It has blown our ideas of the ancient world
clean out of the water
and it's still doing it today.
[Philip] It's an utterly extraordinary object.
There is nothing remotely like this
that is that old.
[Corey] Now, using cutting edge imaging technology,
it's been restored to its original state.
This is the Antikythera mechanism,
a 2,000-year-old machine just 13 inches tall.
Inside is an astonishing network
of interconnected cogs and dials.
[Abigail] The level of precision
of all the different gears and the mechanisms,
it's incredible.
It's almost stultifying.
[Corey] This is technology for understanding the heavens
that's over a thousand years ahead of its time.
[Abigail] It's a portable cosmos.
[Corey] For 100 years,
archeologists have been grappling with its secrets.
Now, new research can finally reveal them.
Who made it?
Where does it come from?
How does it work?
And what exactly is it?
[suspenseful music playing]
[Corey] The mystery begins over 100 years ago,
40 miles off the southern tip of Greece.
[Tamar] It's 1900
and we're in the island of Antikythera.
There are some sponge divers who take shelter in a cove
and they go diving and they discover bronzes
and marbles, and they realize
they've stumbled on an ancient wreck.
[Corey] Using coins recovered from the seabed,
archaeologists date the wreck to around 60 BCE.
The incredible hoard of treasures they find
hits the headlines.
The small block of corroded metal
barely makes a ripple.
[Tamar] So local archaeologist is looking at the finds
and little piece actually falls off
and he notices a cog inside.
And that's unexpected.
[Corey] But many archaeologists believe
the presence of gears and cogs
means this is a relatively modern object
that's ended up on the wreck by accident.
Generally, when you find
intricate metal objects like that,
it could look like it had just fallen in there.
[Corey] For 40 years,
the metal curiosity is ignored.
It can't be genuine or can it?
In 1951, it catches the eye of a scholar
from Cambridge University.
[Tamar] Derek de Solla Price, a physicist,
begins to study this mechanism
and he realizes that actually this is
an advanced clockwork mechanism.
[Corey] Based on a detailed study
and the presence of some ancient Greek letters,
Price makes a radical claim.
This is not modern.
It really is 2,000 years old.
It's an extraordinary theory.
[Abigail] It's almost inconceivable
that this kind of object could have been made
in the ancient world.
[Corey] Price analyzes other fragments
and further faint characters that are barely visible.
And he makes an even more astonishing claim.
It's a celestial computer.
[Philip] When he suggested this,
it was considered outrageous.
Nothing like this was known or thought to be possible
from that period of history.
[Corey] 20 years later,
Price destroys any remaining doubts.
He uses a combination of x-rays and gamma rays
to peer through millennia of corrosion.
What he finds is even more astonishing
than his most outlandish suggestions.
[Tamar] You can see that
there are over 30 gears inside.
Some of these are made of flat sheet bronze
and some of the gears have up to 65 teeth on them.
The complexity of that was unexpected.
[Corey] And in the last few years,
our understanding of the Antikythera mechanism
has been transformed by new research.
Experts ship in a cutting edge
3D x-ray tomographic scanner
with a resolution far beyond
anything Price has in the 1970s.
[Philip] Tomography basically means
you take a series of slices that you can see
through the device that you can see
- buried structures. - [Corey] And it turns out
that Price barely scratched the surface.
[Philip] We now know that there are
37 or 38 of these gears involved
in making the movement of this device.
[Corey] The scans reveal a machine
vastly more complex than Price imagined.
And in the last decade,
computerized image analysis of these scans
has resolved buried writing,
writing that hasn't been seen
by a human eye for 2, 000 years.
[Abigail] The inscriptions not only fill in
missing pieces that don't survive,
but they also give us a much greater idea
of how this was used.
[Corey] Experts are even able to read
parts of an instruction manual
that explain what the mechanism is.
Price has been right all along.
[Philip] What this device is basically designed to do
is to show you the positions of the celestial bodies.
So that's the five planets, the sun, and the moon
at any point in the year. Five planets
because that was all that were known at the time,
so it was Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Corey] This is what experts now believe
the Antikythera mechanism originally looked like.
It can predict the positions of the sun, moon, and planets
years into the future.
No other clockwork celestial calendar will appear
until 1348, 1,400 years later.
And that one is like a toy in comparison.
Because this isn't just the world's first known
analog computer,
it's also extraordinarily accurate.
How did its creator build in
such astonishing precision using technology
we didn't even know existed 2,000 years ago?
[suspenseful music playing]
[Corey] How does this 2,000-year-old device
accurately predict the movements
of our solar system?
It was originally housed in a wooden case
about the size of a shallow shoe box.
The mechanism inside is driven
by complicated combinations of gear sets,
including a spur gear
designed to turn the rotary system 90 degrees,
technology that isn't seen again
until the middle ages, 1,400 years later.
[Philip] On the front, there's a dial
that shows 365 days of the year.
And if you turn the handle of the device,
the pointers that represent
the different celestial bodies,
the planets and so forth, move around to show you
where they would be in the sky
at any day during the year.
But also throughout different years
because, you know, the outer planets
take much more longer than a year
to complete their orbit.
[Corey] There are separate pointers for the sun,
Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, and the moon.
Each dial and clock face serves a unique purpose,
such as counting down to athletic games
like the Olympics,
or indicating which sign of the zodiac the sun is in,
while tables record annual events
like the summer and winter solstices.
[Philip] It captures with great accuracy
throughout the entire year.
You know, the fine details of the...
For example, the trajectory of the moon.
[Corey] The tomographic scans
revealed that the moon pointer
has a tiny rotating moon on its end.
Experts believe it was painted
half white and half black.
[Philip] You see the little ball
that represented the moon rotates
so that you can see the different phases of the moon.
[Corey] Experts also notice
that the speed of the moon pointer
changes as it turns.
But it's not a mistake.
It's genius.
[Maggie] If you go outside and measure the moon
as it passes through the sky,
it seems to speed up and slow down.
This is because the moon is going around the Earth,
not in a circular orbit,
but in what we call an ellipse,
a squashed circle.
So, when the moon is closer to the Earth,
it seems to speed up.
And when the moon is further away from the Earth,
it seems to slow down.
[Philip] It's an incredibly difficult thing
to realize with circular gears,
but there's a mechanism for doing that.
[Corey] The changing speed of the moon pointer works
using two gears slightly out of alignment
with each other.
The drive gear has a peg
that fits in a slot on the moon gear.
As it goes around, it's fastest
when the peg is at either end of the slot,
but slows down as the peg slides along the slot.
[Philip] The kind of precision
with which you had to make these gears
was extraordinary.
[Corey] Research in the last 15 years reveals
that the Antikythera mechanism
can even predict solar eclipses.
[Maggie] The mechanism isn't just extraordinary
because it's complex.
But it condenses all the knowledge
of Greek astronomy into one very small convenient box.
It is quite breathtaking.
It's the universe in a box.
[Corey] No other machine like this
will appear for another 1,400 years.
Its inventor must be a genius.
So who is it?
[dramatic music playing]
[Philip] One of the first people that
one might think of from this period
is Archimedes.
Archimedes was not just someone
who was incredibly knowledgeable about
how the world worked
and about the physics of the heavens.
He was also an inventor.
[Corey] Archimedes creates large war machines
with levers and pulleys.
He designs intricate devices
such as the world's first odometer,
a portable machine for measuring distance.
And the Archimedes screw,
a water pump still used across the world today.
[Abigail] He was really the first port of call
when people thought who could have invented
this incredible object,
who could have encapsulated so many different aspects
of Greek science into one thing,
into one place.
[Corey] So, is this another of Archimedes' inventions?
There's one problem with this theory.
The creator of the Antikythera mechanism
knows that the moon speed seems to vary.
[Maggie] The first person we know of
that was aware of the apparent speeding up
and slowing down of the moon
was Hipparchus of Nicaea around 170 BC.
[Corey] By that time,
Archimedes has been dead for more than 40 years.
So if not the great Archimedes, who else?
Inscriptions on one of the dials provide
a tantalizing clue.
[Abigail] One set of dials tells about
the Olympic Games, which we all might expect,
but also lesser known
really more locally based festivals like the Halia.
[Corey] The Halia, a regional games
that only take place on the Island of Rhodes.
[Tamar] It's thought that this might be
a special calling card as if to say,
"Made in Rhodes,"
because it's a very localized game.
[Abigail] And Rhodes had a long standing tradition
of metalworking, most famously,
the Colossus of Rhodes
which was a massive bronze statue
that framed the entrance to the harbor.
[Corey] So if the mechanism came from Rhodes,
did its creator as well?
A prime candidate is the man who discovers
the changing speed of the moon,
Hipparchus.
[Philip] Hipparchus lived
and worked around the right time,
about 170 BC and are in the right place,
he worked in Rhodes.
And it's thought to be likely that
that's where this device came from.
[Corey] It could be Hipparchus
but he died 60 years
before the Antikythera ship sinks,
meaning the mechanism would be very old already
when it's lost.
And there is one other candidate.
He also lived in Rhodes
and at exactly the right time...
the astronomer, Posidonius.
[Philip] One very enticing reason
why it's thought that he might
have had something to do with this device
is that at one stage he was visited
by the Roman writer, Cicero
who wrote about it in his diary.
And Cicero said that this man Posidonius
told him about a device that he'd made
to represent the motions of the planets.
[Corey] Archimedes, Hipparchus,
or Posidonius,
we may never know for sure.
Whoever makes it is clearly a genius
because he envisions the universe
as a clockwork mechanism.
[Philip] It suggests a kind of thinking
that really we don't get familiar with
until the age of Newton, mechanical age,
the idea that you can think about the universe
as a kind of clockwork system as a mechanical device.
Clearly someone at that time
in ancient Greece
already was thinking
that perhaps nature works that way.
[Corey] If not for a group of sponge divers
100 years ago,
the secrets of this strange thing
might have remained lost
at the bottom of the Aegean forever.
[suspense music playing]
[Corey] At the National Museum of American History
in Washington, DC,
is the nose cone of a World War II bomb,
but this is no ordinary bomb.
On the front are tiny windows for its tiny pilots.
[Tim] The aim of this technology
was to guide a 1,000-pound bomb...
with a pigeon.
[Corey] Now, using state of the art digital imaging...
we can reveal it in all its glory.
This is the pigeon bomb.
[Sascha] In some ways, it might be
one of the smarter bombs that we've ever invented.
[Corey] Measuring 25 inches long
and 23 inches wide,
it's just large enough to carry three
tiny kamikaze pilots.
Could this bizarre contraption really work?
Who came up with it?
And why on Earth does anyone need
a pigeon-guided bomb in the first place?
[suspense music playing]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Corey] This is a bomb
designed to be flown by a pigeon.
Why would anyone do that?
Most of the history of modern aerial bombing
has been a history of bombs missing their targets.
And now if you're thinking about naval bombing,
it becomes an even dicier proposition
because you're trying to drop
a large piece of metal
unguided onto a moving object
that is going to be pretty small
relative to where you are.
[Corey] It's estimated that during World War II,
as few as one percent of bombs dropped on ships
hit their targets.
[explosion]
[Corey] The need for more accurate bombing strategies
becomes top priority.
There's a couple of different possible solutions.
One is, use torpedoes,
drop torpedoes from planes because torpedoes
are actually meant to hit ships.
Another is, use a guidance system of some sort,
something to make these dumb bombs
at least a little bit smarter.
[Corey] As an alternative to simply dropping a bomb
and hoping it would plummet to its target,
both sides developed glide bombs.
[Tim] The intent of the glide bomb
is that there's enough control,
so as opposed to just doing a free fall,
you can do some adjustments
and increase the probability
that you're gonna hit your target.
[Sascha] The Germans have some success
with the first glide bomb, the Fritz X.
[suspense music playing]
[Sascha] However, the Fritz X has a weakness,
it's radio-controlled.
And this creates two potential problems.
Number one, you have to keep the plane that launched it
flying at the same time so it can steer it
and that puts the plane and its crew in danger.
And two, as a radio-guided bomb,
the radio signal can be jammed
and later on in the war,
the Allies were able to jam that signal
quite successfully.
[Corey] The perfect glide bomb
would not only need to be unjammable,
it would also need to be autonomous,
able to guide itself to a target
without the need for external control.
[Sascha] So how do you create a guided bomb
without radio guidance?
Well, you wanna put the guidance package
inside the bomb itself
and make something that's not dependent
upon a radio signal.
Hence, the pigeon bomb.
[Corey] But of all the animals in the world, why pigeons?
[suspense music playing]
[Philip] Pigeons have been useful to us
for sending messages for centuries
because they have this incredible ability
to navigate in particular to home to navigate back
from where they were sent out from.
And so they've been used
for this purpose for millennia.
The ancient Egyptians use them.
The ancient Greeks use them.
In fact, one of the messages
the Greek trusted to pigeons
was the results of the Olympics.
[suspense music playing]
[Sascha] The use of pigeons in warfare
really came into its own in the modern age.
World War I, half a million pigeons
were used to send messages back and forth.
And one pigeon even became a hero.
This was a pigeon that served the French
and was named Cher Ami,
and it delivered its message
despite the fact that it lost an eye
and was severely wounded in the process.
It was actually given a military commendation
for its heroic service in wartime.
Pigeons also saw very important uses
in the Second World War.
The Allies dropped homing pigeons
with requests for information
over German-occupied territory,
and the pigeons had little cards on them
that resistance fighters could use,
fill out the information,
put it back in the pigeon, and then the pigeon of course
would fly straight home.
[Corey] And there is one other pigeon characteristic
that would be essential
to becoming a bomb guidance system.
[Philip] Birds generally are actually a lot smarter
in many ways that they're given credit for,
you know, this notion of birdbrain is really unfair.
But even among birds, pigeons are among the smartest.
Pigeons are very good it seems at learning a task.
[Corey] So pigeon pilots
do make a strange sort of sense.
But that still leaves one big question.
How on Earth do you teach them to fly this bomb?
[suspenseful music playing]
[Corey] The pigeon bomb,
one of the strangest inventions
in the history of warfare.
Who could have come up with such a bizarre idea?
Enter pigeon fancier, BF Skinner.
[Sascha] BF Skinner is one of the fathers
of modern psychology and he's particularly famous
for developing various methods
of what we now call behavior psychology.
Really trying to understand the basic impulses
by which thinking creatures operate,
how they respond to stimuli.
[Philip] This idea that you can get a response
according to some particular stimulus,
that goes back at least to the experiments
that Pavlov did, famously with dogs.
He found that, you know, dogs would start to salivate
if they were shown food.
[Sascha] Pavlov was much more interested in very,
very simple responses to stimuli
and physical responses
whereas Skinner is taking it a bit farther.
He's actually trying to, in some ways,
control the way you respond
consciously to various signals.
[Philip] Skinner devised this apparatus.
It was really just a box.
It's often now called a Skinner Box.
So the animal is put inside it
and then given a particular stimulus,
and once it happens to make the response you're after,
then the animal gets a reward, food for example.
And quite quickly,
relatively intelligent creatures like pigeons
will figure out what it is
that's being expected of them.
They will remember the behavior
that created the reward
and they'll do it again and again and again.
[Corey] In initial tests, the pigeons respond
even better than expected.
[Philip] Skinner found that you can actually train pigeons
to do some pretty complicated things,
things that certainly you'd never find birds
doing normally. So for example,
he trained them to play ping pong.
[playful music playing]
[Corey] Encouraged by the results
of his pigeon training experiments,
Skinner goes to the government
seeking money to develop his pigeon bomb.
[Sascha] BF Skinner comes to the US military
with what on the surface would seem like
an utterly absurd idea.
But you have to understand that World War II
is a time of great experimentation
and it is hardly the craziest idea
that is tried out.
Amongst those crazy ideas are bats carrying napalm.
And my personal favorite
which was the Soviet-trained dogs
carrying anti-tank bombs.
They were trained to climb underneath the German tanks
to set off their bombs.
Just one tiny miscalculation,
they were trained on Russian tanks
so as soon as these dogs were let loose,
the first thing they did with their bombs was dive
right under the Russian tanks so not...
not going as according to plan with the whole bomb dog thing.
[Corey] Using animals as bomb delivery systems
clearly has a poor track record.
But BF Skinner is convinced
his pigeon bomb concept
is... Well, bombproof.
But how would it actually work?
[suspense music playing]
[Tim] The idea was to take a glide bomb
and at the front
add a pressure-sealed nose cone
where the pigeon could actually be mounted.
[Sascha] There's a little screen
in front of the pigeon onto which
an image of their target is being projected,
and the pigeon is trained to peck at the image,
and then the steering system
responds to the pigeons movements
and aims the bomb at the target.
[Corey] To minimize the chance of one pigeon
guiding the bomb off course,
each bomb would carry three pigeon pilots.
[Tim] The three pigeons would actually operate
so that the majority vote would always end up
controlling the trajectory of the glide bomb.
[Corey] Understandably, the idea of putting
a high explosive bomb under the control
of three pigeons does not initially go down well
with the US military.
But Skinner is adamant it can work.
[Sascha] So in 1943,
Skinner receives $25,000 to explore his idea,
which was a princely sum at the time.
[Corey] Skinner is given basic details
of the glide bomb.
It's known as a Pelican.
His experiment is given the perfect code name.
Project Pigeon.
Having settled on the idea of projecting the image
from a lens onto a tilting screen
that could sense where the bird was pecking,
Skinner begins testing them on realistic images,
and the results are startling.
[Sascha] When someone describes the pigeon bomb to you,
it just sounds ludicrous.
But when you see footage of these pigeons
pecking at the image of the ship
projected on the screen in front of you,
you see, no, this is actually working.
[Corey] But as far as we know, the pigeon bomb
never takes flight.
So what goes wrong?
[Corey] This is a bomb piloted by pigeons.
Its creator, BF Skinner is convinced
it's a viable weapon in the war against the Nazis.
[Sascha] In 1944, Skinner turns up
to demonstrate his solution to a team of scientists
and he's ready to go. He's got the film,
he's got his little pigeon pilots,
he's got the mock up of the capsule,
and it worked. He has solved the problem.
He has created an unjammable guidance system,
assuming no one has breadcrumbs handy.
[Corey] But convincing the skeptical scientists
proves impossible.
[Tim] In fact, the meeting ended
by someone pulling Skinner aside
and suggesting to him
that he just go out and get drunk,
which he interpreted accurately
as a very bad sign.
[Corey] Unknown to Skinner,
while he's busy training pigeons,
a rival project is developing
an alternative solution to the problem.
Skinner's solution works.
He has the guidance system all set up.
The problem is by the time he's perfected it,
the other solution that was being explored,
the radar guidance system
has also advanced considerably,
and that's the one that the military goes with,
and they end up making 2,600 of these bombs,
which are known as the bat bombs.
And you can say this about the radar-guided system is,
is there's a lot less cleanup afterwards.
[Corey] The pigeon bomb never takes flight.
And despite all that training,
it's brave feathered pilots
are never given the chance to prove
they have the right stuff.
It's tough being a war pigeon.
In the depths of the British Museum in London,
is one of the strangest Roman artifacts
ever discovered.
At first glance, this 1,700-year-old cup
looks decorative,
but otherwise unremarkable.
Now, carefully reconstructing it
with the latest digital imaging technology
reveals its secrets,
standing roughly six and a half inches tall,
this is the Lycurgus Cup.
It's an ancient relic with a mystifying party trick.
It changes color.
[Andrew] This is such an incredible artifact.
It's not an optical illusion,
it really does change color from red to green
as you move around in the light.
[Corey] How does it work?
How was it made?
And what exactly is it?
[Mark] The Lycurgus Cup is a cup
from about 1,700 years ago from around 300 AD,
so late Roman period,
a time when glass technologies
have been fairly well developed at this point
and getting more complex.
[Corey] Mythical figures seem to float
above the inner glass chalice.
Archeologists call this a cage cup.
[Mark] In fact, it's the most well-preserved cage cup
in the ancient world.
Even in the Roman days in the Fourth Century,
when this cup was actually made and used, uh,
this would have been a rare piece.
[Corey] Microscopic examination shows the cup
and its floating cage
are made from a single piece of glass.
[Anna] Glass is a really brittle
and breakable material.
So the delicacy involved is quite incredible.
They would have used tiny tools
to file away very carefully
the areas of glass that they didn't want.
They actually undercut the design
so that there's areas under the person
where there's air gaps and just little legs
that attach it to the cup.
The terrifying thing about this,
is one slipup or one sneeze
from the person that was doing this
would have meant melting the whole thing down
and starting again from scratch.
[Corey] But it's the glass itself
that is truly spectacular.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Mark] What's remarkable about this glass
is the fact that it changes colors
and that I've never seen outside of this cup.
[Andrew] If you look at the cup
just under normal light,
then the cup appears green.
But if you put the cup in front of the light,
the light shining through it appears red.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Mark] No one would have really seen these things
even in the Roman days a cup changing color,
it would have been an extremely rare piece.
Most people would have just been completely amazed.
[Corey] Possession of such a unique object
would broadcast the owner's status.
[Mark] This is the kind of piece
you really wanna show off.
Here you are, you've built your fancy house,
you have your fancy parties, but finally,
the sort of center showpiece would be this cup.
[dramatic music playing]
[Corey] It's known as dichroic glass,
which means two-colored.
For centuries, its secrets remained a mystery.
Studying the cup under a normal microscope reveals...
nothing.
It appears to be like any other Roman glass.
So how can a 1,700-year-old cup
change color?
[dramatic music playing]
[Corey] An ancient Roman cup
with a color-changing party trick.
For centuries, this unique ability
defies explanation.
[Anna] In 1990, scientists used
an electron microscope to have a look
at what was going on inside the glass itself.
[Corey] They discovered tiny particles of gold,
silver, and copper suspended in the glass.
[Anna] These are nanoparticles,
so they're about a thousandth
of the width of a human hair.
It's these tiny metallic particles
that hold the secret to the amazing
color-changing effects that we see in this glass.
And it's all because of quantum effects
which happen down at the subatomic level.
[Corey] The effect works because white light
is not just one color.
[Andrew] White Light is actually a mixture
of all the colors of the rainbow,
red, orange, green, blue, indigo, violet.
[Corey] The smallest particles of light are called photons.
And each color of light is caused by photons
of a different energy.
The magic happens when these photons
enter the glass and hit the nanoparticles of metal.
[Daniel] Because they're metal particles,
they've got like a cloud of electrons
around the outside of them.
And when the photon hits the cloud of electrons,
it's absorbed, and it sets up
a sort of vibration in the cloud of electrons.
It's like a jumper hitting a trampoline,
the whole thing flexes and a wave runs around it.
And then when it flexes back out again,
it spits out the photon back the way it came.
[Corey] Scientists discovered that the precise diameter
of the nanoparticles in the glass
causes only green photons to bounce back.
[Andrew] By very carefully varying the quantities,
the ingredients, when you're making this glass,
you can make these particles exactly the right size
to scatter the green light, allow the other colors through
and create this beautiful effect.
[Corey] When you look at the light
reflected by the cup, you see green.
[Daniel] The rest of the light goes right through the cup.
And white light minus green
is that kind of plummy red color.
[Corey] So when the light is shining through the glass,
you see red.
[Anna] What's incredible about this glass is that
in order to produce these nanoparticles,
the maker would have had to have ground up
the metals into a really, really fine powder,
much, much finer than talcum powder, for example,
and then embedded that into the glass
and dispersed it evenly so it's evenly distributed
throughout, in a very, very specific amount.
[Corey] The effect is caused by a minute amount
of the metals.
[Anna] We think that the amount of silver
and gold in this cup is about 300 parts per million
for the silver and about
40 parts per million for the gold.
So if you were to clump all of that silver
and gold together, it would still be
a particle that is too small for the naked eye to see.
[Corey] Scientists call the quantum effect
that causes the color change, surface plasmon resonance.
This is nanotechnology,
the manipulation of matter
at an atomic or near-atomic scale.
[Anna] It's probably pretty safe to say
that the Romans didn't understand
the quantum effects of what was going on
inside their glass.
But clearly, someone knew enough to know
that if you added these metals
in these quantities into this material,
then you could create these amazing
color-changing effects.
[Corey] With its extraordinary quantum glass,
the Lycurgus Cup may well be
the most spectacular cage cup ever created.
Who is this unique object made for?
[dramatic music playing]
[Mark] You'd have been certainly an extremely wealthy individual,
a high-class individual, maybe even someone
associated with the emperor or the emperor's family.
[Corey] The cup is probably made
in the early Fourth Century AD,
when the Roman Empire is divided
between two warring emperors, Constantine and Licinius.
Crucially, Licinius is based in Thrace
in the eastern empire.
[Mark] The cup shows the mythical king, Lycurgus,
who is a Thracian king,
battling Dionysus, God of Wine.
[Corey] In the myth, Lycurgus of Thrace
is defeated by Dionysus.
Also known as the Roman God, Bacchus.
[Mark] And it could be symbolic for Licinius,
the western Roman emperor who moved to Thrace.
During this time, the emperor Constantine,
who was the ruler of the eastern Roman Empire,
did defeat Licinius and this may be
a kind of symbolism, if you will.
[Corey] So it's possible the cup's decoration
is symbolic of Licinius' defeat
by Constantine.
If it is made to celebrate his victory,
Emperor Constantine may have drunk
from this very cup.
Whoever owned it, the survival
of this extraordinarily fragile ancient wonder
through 2,000 years of turmoil
is nothing short of a miracle.
[dramatic music playing]
[Corey] Today, our understanding
of the cup's unique color-changing ability
is helping develop pioneering new technology.
[Andrew] Inspired by these beautiful brightly-colored
nanoparticles in the Lycurgus Cup,
scientists at the University of Illinois
have been able to develop incredibly sensitive sensors.
So in the Lycurgus Cup, all of those little gold
and silver nanoparticles are surrounded by glass,
but instead of glass, you put these nanoparticles
in something like water, you can detect tiny changes
in the concentration of different things
dissolved in the water by looking at the changes
in the color of the sensor.
This means this technology has applications
for medicine where you can detect
tiny quantities of things in people's bodily fluids,
to setting explosives where you can detect
trace amounts of signature chemicals
that give away the presence of a bomb.
[Corey] It seems that sometimes
discovering the secrets of the ancient world
may unlock the secrets of our own future.