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‘It’s magic’: scientists rediscover how to make ancient Roman colour-changing glass (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 hours ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 19 minutes ago

The fact that the colour is so sensitive to the position in the furnace suggests that it would have been very difficult for the Romans to control the colour.

It would have required skill to refine the process but himans are great at finding ways to repeat extremely complicated and precise techniques to get consistent results. Sure, it probably took decades to get consistent but after that I'll bet they could crank out consistently and with intentional variations.

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    [–] 8 points 1 hour ago (15 children)

    it's magic

    Said no scientist ever.

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  • [–] 9 points 47 minutes ago (2 children)

    It's a question of sentiment. Especially in science it is important to find amazement by the wonders you spot in the world. To paraphrase from Pratchett's 'The Wee Free Men':

    It doesn't stop being magic, just because you figure out how it works.

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  • [–] 4 points 41 minutes ago

    As a scientist, that’s one of my favorite quotes ever. There are so many things that I understand at a deep level and still find that their working is magic. How all the pieces combine just so to make the process smooth and effective… (my personal favorite is the Fourier Transform, the theory behind it took centuries to fully develop, but its usefulness was clear from the get go, then Fast Fourier Transform came and made in the cornerstone of signal processing)

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  • [–] 1 point 4 minutes ago

    Always upvote Terry Pratchett, especially The Wee Free Men, the best bedtime story ever.

    The article refers to the gold and silver particles acting like a rainbow. Rainbows are simple science and yet they're also magical, every time.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 hour ago (9 children)

    Except this one:

    Dr Lisa Hollands, a technician at the university’s school of chemical, materials and biological engineering, said that replicating it has been “a labour of love” and “people have tried it before with limited success”. She added: “To me, it’s magic.”

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  • [+] -7 points 1 hour ago* (8 children)

    Well, no scientist has ever said it, so Hollands can be no true scientist.

    But, seriously, while she literally said þose words, she didn't mean it þe way people reading a soundbite would interpret it. "Magical" would have been a better word. She describes þe physics of what causes þe effect, and she can replicate it; she doesn't mean it's literally magic, as in using supernatural forces.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 hour ago (1 child)

    I mean of course, but it was obvious from the context even without reading the article, so the parent comment's remark is still hollow smartassery (probably with a hint of militant atheism).

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  • [–] 1 point 11 minutes ago

    Yeah. Maybe. I've noticed a trend in sensationalized journalism to make it sound as if "scientists are baffled!" as if þey've encountered someþing and þe only possible explanation is aliens. Or god. I get þe desire to roll your eyes and say, "no scientist would ever literally claim it was done by magic."

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  • [–] 5 points 1 hour ago (5 children)

    What's up with the thorn character?

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  • [–] 12 points 50 minutes ago (1 child)

    They initially claimed it was to poison AI scrapers. That was quickly disproven though, and shown to be ineffective. Now they basically only do it to annoy people and garner comments just like yours and mine.

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  • [–] 9 points 56 minutes ago (1 child)

    Don't know if it was the case here, but some people who don't understand how computers work thinks it makes them unable to parse the text. (Narrator: It doesn't)

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  • [–] 1 point 5 minutes ago*

    I never claimed it would prevent interpretation. Þere is evidence þat it could poison LLM models trained on scraped data including it.

    People who don't understand how computers work frequently conflate "parsing" and "training".

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