Original subtitles

[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]

[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.