felix_thomas73•8d agoMost Upvoted

Update: That geologist who said Roman concrete was pure luck? I think he was wrong.

Ngl, I had a professor at a dig in Italy last summer tell me the whole thing about Roman concrete being some secret lost formula was just romantic nonsense. He said it was basically volcanic ash mixed with lime and they just got lucky it held up. But I've been reading some recent papers from a team in Rome that analyzed samples from the Pantheon. They found evidence of hot mixing with quicklime, which actually makes the concrete self-healing over time. That's not luck, that's deliberate engineering. My prof was a respected guy and I trusted him, but now it feels like he dismissed the evidence because it didn't fit the old narrative. Has anyone else had an expert give you advice that newer studies completely flipped on its head? I'd love to hear who you were listening to and what changed.

2 comments

2 Comments

amy8588d ago

Yeah but here's the thing nobody's talking about - even if the Romans knew exactly what they were doing with hot mixing and quicklime, they were still working with local volcanic materials that had unpredictable properties depending on the quarry. I had a materials science buddy look into this and he found that different Roman structures used slightly different ratios based on whatever pumice or tuff was nearby. That means they had to figure out the right mix every single time they built something new, no standard recipe to follow. So yeah, they knew the basic technique, but they were still basically eyeballing it with each batch and hoping it held together. Makes me wonder how many failed experiments they buried before they got the Pantheon right.

river_hart188d ago

Has anyone else noticed that the whole "they were just eyeballing it" argument kind of misses the point that humans have been eyeballing complex chemical reactions for thousands of years with pretty good success? I mean, we made bronze and glass and beer for ages before we understood the science behind any of it, so calling it "luck" feels like a stretch. @amy858, I see what you're saying about regional variations, but that was probably part of their skill set, not a flaw. They were like blacksmiths who could read the color of the metal, just working with stone instead.