Researchers Spot Fake Ancient Pottery Using the Earth's Magnetic Field(smithsonianmag.com) |
Researchers Spot Fake Ancient Pottery Using the Earth's Magnetic Field(smithsonianmag.com) |
From understanding what exactly stars are made of, to the evolution of life on Earth, and the exploits of humans living thousands of years ago.
It's really uncanny the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, something we made up by manipulating abstract symbols, in modelling and helping us understand the universe in every minute detail we care to inquire. Truly miraculous.
It’s why cancer is so prevalent and damn near unsolvable: an organism our size has about 7 octillion atoms, even forgetting the impacts of the stuff smaller than that. That’s 30ish trillion cells, many are multipurpose little motor vehicles inside our body running around doing stuff constantly.
It’s just so much STUFF happening, take the brain out of someone and leave them a vegetable digesting on a bed and they still burn hundreds of kcal a day, and that’s a highly efficient system millions of years in production.
So two things emerge from that, 1: extremely robust universal principles like electromagnetic gradients being used for travel, and 2: runaway feedback loops like black holes or cancerous cells.
What that means is that you can view mathematics as a spontaneous emergence FROM a high resolution system, or the inverse. We usually think of the inverse, because it seems like no matter what we discover in the system it can be explained by increasingly complex math.
But the inverse of that is very interesting to me: math emerges as a side effect from the high resolution system. It also passes the smell test, if you make a low resolution simulation of the solar system you will not see the effects of the high complexity systems, relativity works perfectly without any quantum dynamics.
I just love these kinds of chicken and egg problems.
The debate is fascinating. I tend to be more of an idealist but I recognize that science is predicated on materialism. I believe we ought to find a complete explanation for how things work.
It is odd though that experimental data seem to indicate that at the quantum level locality is not preserved and there are no hidden variables thus non locality seems to be intrinsic to the universe. That would indicate to me that materialism is in serious trouble.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sound-recordings-on-ancien...
(sound recordings in clay)
> “So it’s hard for us to be ahead of the forgers since they can read our papers and figure out ways to trick our methods.”
Cost. Same as them fooling carbon dating, electron microscopes, isotope analysis, and a host of other techniques.
Forgery has always been about how cheaply you could make fakes, vs. the odds and consequences of them getting enough scrutiny to be identified as such.
Because people desire owning ancient pottery and are therefore willing to pay for it.
People have paid top dollar for archeological artifacts for centuries. Humanity lost a lot of knowledge from graverobbers, illegal artifact hunting and unreported thefts of stuff getting exposed after stuff like forest fires.
Quoting my book:
"Studying these layered strata is known as magnetostratigraphy and can be used to verify radioactive dating methods. Geologists used magnetostratigraphy to cross-check the dates of the Nakali Formation, where Nakalipithecus nakayamai’s jaw was found."
Did anyone else have a strong "WTF?" reaction upon reading that sentence? Yes, the pole has moved. No, it's completely irrelevant given that not every piece of pottery even manufactured at the same time is going to be fired in the exact same orientation relative to the pole.
The researchers determined that any sample older than a millennium had to be heated to at least 234 degrees Fahrenheit before its VRM was erased. New pottery samples’ VRMs, meanwhile, could be wiped at lower temperatures.
That's a more useful difference which I would attribute to the ceramics having different Curie points in their compositions, and of course it's not something too difficult to change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature#Changing_a_m...
Incidentally, this effect of temperature on magnetism is how the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive media records data.
That weak magnetization happens below the Curie temperature. Actually, any magnetization happens below the Curie temperature. Heating above the Curie temperature just erases any previous magnetization. A material is easier to magnetize immediately below the Curie temperature, but it can be magnetized at any lower temperature. Thus the ceramics that contains iron oxides acquires an initial strong magnetization while cooling down, and a weaker superposed magnetization if it is not moved for a long time. The 2 magnetizations can be distinguished by having different directions, as the pottery stayed buried in a different orientation than when it had been fired.
Only pottery that has not been moved for a very long time acquires a strong enough secondary magnetization. So the test distinguished pottery that has been used recently from pottery that stayed buried for centuries, by the strengths of their secondary magnetizations, not by their primary magnetizations.
A weak magnetization can be erased by heating even below the Curie temperature (which completely erases any kind of magnetization), so this is how they tested. The ferromagnetic materials are divided into hard and soft. The former are used for things like permanent magnets, while the latter are used for things like transformers and inductors.
The difference between hard and soft magnetic materials is that the latter loose quickly their magnetization even at the ambient temperature. Most ferromagnetic materials, which have not been specifically designed to be as soft as possible or as hard as possible, have intermediate softness, i.e. they start to loose quickly their magnetizations at temperatures higher than the normal ambient temperatures, but still much lower than their Curie temperatures. The tested ceramics also behave like this.
Imprecise but will fink on ceramics that were fired 30 years ago vs 3000 years ago. Difficulty you need to heat a fair sized sample.
"Reads article"
Impression, author didn't understand any of what he was told.
But yes similar, over time the object picks up a faint magnetic field superimposed on the one locked in when the ceramic was made.
Though it is possible to test only a fragment of an object, but I do not know if the instruments that were used were sensitive enough to work with only a very small chip, which could be glued back, afterwards.
Many such ancient pottery objects are already broken, so they must be glued anyway, if a restoration is desired.
Don’t forget the major scale destruction wrought by wars (religious and otherwise) - eg in the Middle East.
You might also want to count cultural theft. (Where are the gates of Babylon now??)