naples, italy — Beneath the horns and operatic screams of Naples, Italy’s most blissfully chaotic city, archaeologist Raffaella Bosso descends into an underground labyrinth of deafening silence, zigzagging her way back some 2,300 years. Go back in time.
She says the ancient Greeks colonized Naples before the Romans, leaving traces of life and death in ancient burial chambers.
She aimed the beam of her flashlight at relief tombstones depicting the feet of those buried inside.
“There are two people in this one grave, a man and a woman,” she explains. “Usually she can find eight or more.”
This tomb was discovered in 1981 through traditional excavations.
Now, archaeologists are working with physicists to replace the pickaxe with a subatomic particle detector the size of a household microwave oven.
Thanks to groundbreaking technology, particle physicists like Valeri Tiokov can use it to see through rocks hundreds of feet up, whether it’s an apartment building 60 feet above the ground .
“It’s a lot like X-ray photography,” he said, placing the particle detector next to a damp wall still adorned with frescoes of colorful flowers.
Archaeologists have long suspected that there were further rooms on the other side of the wall. But just to peek, I had to take them apart.
Thanks to this detector, they know for sure and don’t even have to use a shovel.
To understand the technology at work, Tiokov takes us to a lab at the University of Naples, where researchers scrutinize images from the detector.
Specifically, they are looking for muons, cosmic rays left behind by the Big Bang.
A muon detector tracks and counts muons passing through the structure and determines the density of the structure’s interior space by tracking the number of muons passing through the structure.
In the burial chamber, approximately 10 million muons were captured over 28 days.
“There are muons,” Tiokov says, pointing to a squiggly line magnified using a microscope.
After months of painstaking analysis, Tiokov and his team were able to assemble a three-dimensional model of the hidden burial chamber, which has been closed to human eyes for centuries and is now exposed to subatomic particles. Open thanks to physics.
CBS News
Things like science fiction are also used. Peek inside the pyramids of EgyptAccording to Professor Giovanni De Lellis, there is a chamber under the volcano that could also be used to treat cancer.
“Especially cancers that are deep in the body,” he says. “This technology is being used to measure the damage that can occur to healthy tissue surrounding cancer. It is difficult to predict the breakthroughs this technology could actually bring to these fields. is very difficult because we have never observed objects with such precision.”
“This is a new era,” he marvels.
