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 Cartagena, 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, water tanks, roofs, and weapons of war. While our civilization has rightfully grown wary of putting water through lead pipes, it still finds plenty of use for the material, 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 of 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 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.
