Renaissance Potters Were Nanotechnologists

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this article, Nature says that "tiny metal particles give 15th century Italian ceramics lustre." Nature adds that iridescent glazes -- changing colour when viewed from different perspectives -- were achieved by using "particles of copper and silver of between 5 and 100 billionths of a metre across." And the story becomes even more interesting. Nanotechnology meets alchemy! "The ability to change colour was regarded as an alchemical property, making iridescence magic too." Read this summary for more details. And for more information, you can read the abstract of this research paper, "Copper in glazes of Renaissance luster pottery: Nanoparticles, ions, and local environment," published by the Journal of Applied Physics."

Comments

Change color ... (colour, whatever)

[inertia187]

"The ability to change colour was regarded as an alchemical property, making iridescence magic too."

Yep, I can attest to that. Just take a look at all of the magical leftovers in my refrigerator.

Does that make...

[MoxCamel]

...the first caveman to figure out how to throw a spear an "Aerospace Engineer?" :)

Re:Does that make...

[Junior J. Junior III]

Maybe we can just send a missle back in time...


Only if you were somehow able to encase the entire thing in flesh, as cyberDyne Systems have proven, you can't send inorganic material back in time without encasing it in living tissue.

I really don't wanna think about what that would look like.

Meh

[cultobill]

That's not really nanotech. They weren't using the nanomaterials directly, or intentionally. The particles just happened to be the right size.

In Other News...

[Raindance]

... In other news, we're all 'Nanotechnologists'!

Seriously; we all use nanoproperties of materials to achieve macro results; just this morning I used nanotechnology in the form of nano-molecular-structure surface tension in my coffee, preventing spillage. I think this is very interesting but in the interests of linguistic integrity, having words actually *mean* something through exclusion, I question the spin that 'Renaissance Potters Were Nanotechnologists'; that implies a level of conceptual or technological understanding of nanophenomena which simply wasn't there.

Were Renaissance Potters clever? Yes. Were they 'Nanotechnologists'? No.

Using a fine powder is NOT nanotechnology

[Samir Gupta]

It doesn't take too much technology knowhow to grind something up into very fine bits.

Forget terminology

[LilJC]

Whether this is technically nanotechnology or not, I still find it very interesting. I always wondered how alchemists continued to find work after without ever making gold.

I suppose we still do the same thing current day - people are ever searching for perpetual motion machines and researching anti-gravity. Every time someone puts together a device the layman can't figure out, funding pours in and our modern alchemists continue employment in various potentially unsolvable problems.

Myself, I prefer Feymann's approach: considering how likely you are to solve a problem as well as how valuable the solution is (not to mention how many others could solve the problem).