How an Ancient Roman Shipwreck Could Explain the Universe

In a 1956 New States­man piece, the British sci­en­tist-nov­el­ist C. P. Snow first sound­ed the alarm about the increas­ing­ly chasm-like divide between what he called the “sci­en­tif­ic” and “tra­di­tion­al” cul­tures. We would today refer to them as the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, while still wring­ing our hands over the inabil­i­ty of each side to learn from (or even coher­ent­ly com­mu­ni­cate with) the oth­er. Nev­er­the­less, recent his­to­ry pro­vides the occa­sion­al heart­en­ing exam­ple of sci­ences-human­i­ties col­lab­o­ra­tion, few of them as dra­mat­ic as the sto­ry told in the SciShow video above, “An Ancient Roman Ship­wreck May Explain the Uni­verse.”

The ship­wreck in ques­tion occurred two mil­len­nia ago, off the west­ern coast of Sar­dinia. Hav­ing set sail from the min­ing cen­ter of Carte­ge­na, Spain, it was car­ry­ing more than 30 met­ric tons of lead, processed into a thou­sand ingots. An impor­tant met­al in the ancient Roman Empire, lead was used to make pipes (like the ones installed in aque­ducts), water tanks, roofs, and weapons of war. While our civ­i­liza­tion has grown jus­ti­fi­ably wary of putting water through lead pipes (and has at its com­mand much stronger met­als in any case), it still has plen­ty of use for the stuff, espe­cial­ly in shields against X‑rays and oth­er forms of activ­i­ty.

No mat­ter how lit­tle con­tact you have with the sci­en­tif­ic cul­ture, you can sure­ly appre­ci­ate how researchers in need of radioac­tiv­i­ty shields must have felt when this lead ingot-filled ship­wreck was dis­cov­ered in 1988. Hav­ing spent a cou­ple thou­sand years at the bot­tom of the ocean, the Roman lead aboard had lost most of its radioac­tiv­i­ty, mak­ing it ide­al for use in the shield of the Cryo­genic Under­ground Obser­va­to­ry for Rare Events (CUORE) at the Gran Sas­so Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry in Italy. Engi­neered for research into the mass of neu­tri­nos, sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles long thought to have no mass at all, CUORE held out the promise of data that could lead to insights into the ori­gin of the uni­verse.

Ulti­mate­ly, the physi­cists and archae­ol­o­gists struck a deal, allow­ing the for­mer to melt down the least-well pre­served ingots from the ship­wreck (after first remov­ing the his­tor­i­cal­ly valu­able inscrip­tions from its man­u­fac­tur­er) and use it to shield the high­ly sen­si­tive CUORE from out­side radi­a­tion. The design worked, but as of last year, none of the exper­i­ments have pro­duced con­clu­sive results about the role of neu­tri­nos in the emer­gence of life, the uni­verse, and every­thing. Prob­ing that ques­tion fur­ther will be a job for CUORE’s suc­ces­sor CUPID (CUORE Upgrade with Par­ti­cle Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion), sched­uled to come online lat­er this year. Though C. P. Snow nev­er lived to see these projects, he sure­ly would­n’t be sur­prised that, to find con­ver­gence between the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, you’ve got to dive deep.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New­ly Dis­cov­ered Ship­wreck Proves Herodotus, the “Father of His­to­ry,” Cor­rect 2500 Years Lat­er

How the Ancient Greeks Invent­ed the First Com­put­er: An Intro­duc­tion to the Antikythera Mech­a­nism (Cir­ca 87 BC)

See the Well-Pre­served Wreck­age of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarc­ti­ca

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titan­ic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Cap­tur­ing the Wreck’s Every Detail

“The Val­ue of Cul­ture” Revealed in a New BBC Radio Series by Melvyn Bragg

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.