The Lycurgus Cup is an Ancient Roman goblet kicking around at the
Smithsonian. You might wonder what could possibly be so technologically
advanced about a cup (does it shimmy over to the fridge and fill itself
with beer?). Scientists didn't notice anything special about it either,
until they held it up to the light. You see, it looks green when lit from the front :
But when lit from behind, it turns a demonic red:
In 1990, British researchers tried to unlock the mystery of the devil's
beer stein. What they found was that the glass was full of gold and
silver flecks 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. Basically, the
Romans discovered nanotechnology -- the science of manipulating incredibly small particles -- and used it to make a bitchin' pimp cup.
To make the cup, they would have had to grind up gold and silver into
grains many times smaller than sand and fuse it to the glass in
specific proportions to produce subatomic effects that we're only just
beginning to understand in recent decades.
For some reason, the scientists weren't allowed to take this
millennia-old relic and fill it with Tang and tequila (That's a TnT, and
we heartily recommend it) just to see what happened. So they did their
best to replicate it and found that it would probably also have changed
colors based on what kind of liquid was poured into it. It's a
Hypercolor chalice! What's more, it's even more effective at detecting
different kinds of substances in water than modern sensors are, which
means that science is actually considering using a piece of technology
from the time of Caesar to improve modern substance detectors. The Ancient Romans were so good at getting drunk that they broke the science of the future.
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