The Mystery of Box 7 - Objectivity 44 

"Hey guys, how can we confuse people from the future?" "Easy, cut those crystals up and put them in a box named 'Box 7' , that should throw them off"

I know exactly what these are and have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.

Hey Brady, been watching since episode 1 and I think it would be great if you could talk a bit more about Keith, maybe an interview of some kind. I'm sure that many fellow objectivity viewers would like to hear how he got the job of head librarian and the royal society and/or librarian-ing generally. I actually think that this would be a really interesting thing to do with all of the academics on your other channels too. I'd really like to hear the stars of Numberphile and Sixty Symbols talk about what they're working on. Maybe it could be another channel - 'Brady's Interview Corner' :P

It's a prop piece used by a certain gentleman to explain his copulatory exploits the night before.

Two quartz crystals to demonstrate the piezo electric effect or possibly triboluminescence. If you rub them together, they will produce light.

lego prototype

A set for demonstrating triboluminescence? This phenomena happens with a fair number of crystal types, quartz, sphalerite, fluorite, calcite, muscovite (do you know what mineral they are?). If the item is for this, then vigorously rubbing the crystals together with a twisting motion should make them light up.

among geologists, licking rocks actually is a thing.

Their intention was to mess with Keith and Brady. They were like: "Haha! Lets put some random junk in this box and confuse the royal shit out of everyone in the future!" and then they continued to eat.

Could they be polarizers? If you rotate them when together they let more/less light through

I'm more curious about...where are the other 6 boxes?

It looks like it could be a small mortar and pestle set.

Before speculating the first thing I would do is identify what mineral are we talking about, so we can know it's properties. Are both bits chiseled out or are they part of the crystal structure? It could be gypsum, calcite, quartz, cinnabar, corundum, etc. Could they be studying crystal twinning ? Wasn't the 19th century when crystallography became popular?

We're sure it's not salt? could it have been yused to grind on itself in order to create a little bit of powdered salt?

is it a small model of some way of putting big blocks of stone together

I predict that it's a magical paperweight used by the author of the Voynich manuscript.

Those are Robert Hooke's science rocks. If you bang them together, science comes out.

so the stones belong to a society of scientists and no one's identified the mineral yet?

Seven: What's in the box?

I would not be surprised if this was a seed remover for olives. It was a dinning club, after all.

It's from a man who wanted to laugh of us

Its a model of a joining method used for large stone slabs. Most likely since they were engineers.

I like to imagine that in some bizarre turn of scientific progress, this item could lead to the discovery of FTL travel or the ultimate renewable energy if its purpose is discovered.

As an after dinner entertainment you might try snuffing out the candles and in the darkness, insert one crystal into the other and spin them in opposite rotations while pressing them together to produce an eerie orange glow.

Maybe it's some kind of sunstone, like the viking supposedly used to find the sun on an overcast sky.

It's a suit pin, or accessory. They have been designed in such a way that they could be connected through the material of a suit jacket and the jamming of the material would hold them in place as a sort of suit decoration.

Brady just unleashed a curse.

I remember back when I was into geology someone told me that vikings used two pieces of gypsum to navigate. the fibres in the rock tend to form very straight and the light rays can be seen clearly within the crystal. Maybe this is that. Did it seem like gypsum to you? Edit: it was apparently iceland spar and was referred to as the 'sunstone'. Speaking of which it also bears similarities to a 'Nicol prism' from (William Nicol). I think this is some kind of polarising prism. Many early polarising prisms were made of natural crystals.

When I saw the two pieces of crystal I was immediately thinking about the classic adventure game ‘Zak McKracken’. The goal was to put a ‘Skolarian device’ together with artifacts distributed all over the world. One of them was a yellow crystal that was broken in two pieces.

I think it was either used to grind something, maybe for writing purposes, or that it was used to clamp/stamp stuff together such as stamps or wax seals.

Grinding up pepper flakes on the table?

Massive kidney stones after eating all that food, I'd imagine.

Perhaps the carved hole was made just to fit the stones in a convenient box.

Use the spectrometer from the prior episode. Would be pretty awesome.

A piezoelectric torch? Like a wind up radio, only with the insert crystal rotating inside the larger "lens" crystal? I could t Italy see that being an interesting little show and tell object.

0:57 Table C, bottom left, Prof. Threlfall, formerly of the Uni of Sydney, predicted in 1890 that Hertzian waves would be used for telegraphy, according to Oliver Lodge. Street in Canberra named for him. Crystals may be calcite

I can think of 2 things maybe. Some crystals generate a small charge when rubbed together or struck. Some can also generate light when struck together and can be viewed in the dark. I wonder if looking at a seating guide from the night to see what fellows were there; maybe would assist in shedding at light on what areas of study or science that each man were working on and if any pertained to types of gems, minerals, geology, etc etc

Not sure if anyone has guessed this, but it may possibly be a way to demonstrate triboluminescence, however this is generally demonstrated using short quick strikes rather than a grinding mention that the object seems to imply. Obviously you aren't going to go bashing the two stones together to see for sure, but you may check the society record to see if the subject had be suggested by any of the members around the same time.

In my opinion it's a form of Mortar and pestle. It's regular shaped, posibly cristaline because that hapens to be the resoult of the easiest proces they used to produse the two pices in a linear way. I belive it was intendet to be used in a form of scientific grinding proces they were trying to establih - example: turn the pestle for two rotations and then mix with sth... (posibly po get exactly as fine material as the original experiment). Alternate theories: a primative closing mechanism of a cupbort/ nightstand, two cristals grown on eather side of an abstruction , it's candy, a test if difrent shapes of the same material can skratch eachother(you can scratch iron on wood but not wood on wood)

Perhaps a tongue-in-groove system for tiling ovens or for creating multi-layered tiling that doesn't slip over itself? I do like the personal pepper grinder idea, though.

Perhaps its an example of an early bearing or swivel joint. Like for a heavy door. Just cut a receptacle in the base of the door for the "pin" and one in the floor for the "bowl", mate them together. Perhaps add a bit of charcoal dust and you'd have a graphite lubricated swivel. It appears that the object is made of some kind of quartz, so it should be sufficiently hard for a working joint. Perhaps if it was supporting something, that something was both heavy and soft, like a decorative sandstone or marble door, which wouldn't have stood up to repeated mechanical use, but the quartz on quartz bearing might be hard enough to manage it, and is also readily enough available, and workable by pre industrial tools.

so here's what I think: the larger part, (there might be a piece missing) has a hole in it, wherein different varieties of tobacco or other smokable plants could be put, and the smaller part would then have been used to grind them into handier pieces.

Could these two crystals be 3D scanned and uploaded somewhere for people to manipulate in a virtual environment to see if we can come up with other functions? I'm thinking it might be a double refractory lens that can be twisted to direct light, possibly to focus it somehow, like an early torch or lantern with a manuel adjuster.

I realise that if I start licking the samples it will be the end of our collaborations 😂

I'm going to go with mortar and pestle set for spices. Easy to check: scratch a tiny amount of residue, place it onto a slide, inspect under optical microscope. Pepper and most other spices can be easily identified this way.

Brady, the first book at which you looked, from the 1740s, has on its cover the logo of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits): the monogram "IHS" (first three Greek letters in the name of Jesus), surmounted by a cross, with three nails underneath, surrounded by a sunburst. I am quite amazed by this, especially because of England's protestant (Anglican) history. Do you or Keith have any idea why a book of the Royal Society would feature so prominently on its cover the logo of the Jesuits?

Could it simply be for crushing tobacco or something? Though I like the optical/polarising/luminescent ideas more

You guys should do a full analysis on them. Spectroscopy and looking for characteristics of polarization, diffraction and refraction could maybe shed some insight on their use. Show them to Martyn :D

What is the material? You could have it analysed using spectroscopy I would assume?

They looks like Gypsum or Quartz crystals, you could do hardness test and HCL reaction test to determine the composition.

The fact that they interlock like that and the kind of rounded cavity in the larger piece makes me think it's either some kind of small grinder, like a tiny mortar and pestle. Or it could be some kind of fire starter.

that's two pieces of quartz constructed in such a way that you can put some dry thin plant material between them in order to start a fire. It is triboluminescence as suggested in one of the comments bellow but it creates small actual sparks too so you can start a fire with it.

It's actually a grinder used for grinding up weed and tobacco. It would probably be common for someone to smoke out of a pipe back then at such a meeting, and men with higher status.

It could be iceland spar. Some sort of primitive polarizing filter, maybe?

Cool video as usual :) does Keith have any sort of "top picks" list? the most requested / visited items? I'm going to London in next May and can't wait to visit the Royal Society :)

I think they could be gypsum crystals. Also it does seem a little like the cavity on the big one was not made with the smaller crystal that formed on the smaller of the two pieces. Almost seems that the cavity has flat sides, as if the crystal has formed over another one, that was positioned where the cavity is, and was broken off when the crystals were removed from the rock. Another possibility is that they are hand grown crystals. (I think this because I don't see any obvius spot where these would have been embedded in a rocky surface) You suspend a small seed crystal, usually by a thin thread, and submerge it into an oversaturated solution of the same compound as the seed. The molecules in the solution stick to the crystal, making it grow bigger and bigger, to make a crystal like these, I guess it would take a few months. In this case, a small secondary crystal formed on the smaller of the pieces, and possibly whoever made them tried to forcefully rip off the thread of the bigger one, breaking a chunk of it by accident.

i come back to this video regularly just to hear keith read through that list of DELICIOUS-SOUNDING FOOD at 1:15

There they are! I've been looking for those for years now. May I have them back please?

Reminds me a lot of shaving astringent, the stuff you'd smear over a shaving cut. Those smell like stone too and I wouldn't recommend licking it.

Well, my original thought was that the two crystals were found together, and perhaps they were brought to a society member as an example of nature makes follies too, aka = "Why did that crystal grow a protuberance like that?" which was probably never answered.

put some ink in the small opening, place paper over it, place other piece on top, apply some pressure and pull the paper. it makes straight thick lines. either that or an old hole punch

It could be a demonstration of polarization of light, perhaps. Some minerals have polarizing tendencies, and my guess is that the "tung and groove" (or "spot and divot") are to align areas within the crystals with polarizing tendencies. One could thus turn the minerals around a common axis to produce an occlusion of light passing through the pair.

I think this is a sunstone "Sunstone is a plagioclase feldspar, which when viewed from certain directions exhibits a brilliant spangled appearance; this led to its use by the Vikings to locate the Sun" - wikipedia

Maybe it´s a calcite crystal that causes birefringence to sunlight? And the second part is some sort of analyzer to the light polarized by the first one?

Those actually look like pieces of gypsum...although I haven't a clue about why they have those shapes carved into them....

Twist one inside the other or knock it around in the little divot. I bet it gives a bright spark.

Maybe if you shine a light through them a certain way their shadow will produce a secret message?

My random guess is a pair of piezo electric crystals used to determine sample hardness. Use in a dark room to crush a sample between the two parts where they mesh. Use the amount of light from the crystals as they glow to gauge the hardness of the sample.

my first though was that it has something to do with large building made of stone... maybe they were talking about how Stonehenge or Pyramids were built and how those large stones stick together so someone made this prototype.

I reckon that its a morter and pestel made from Quartz that i think may have been used to crush small amounts of hard material, like glass, diamond (in small amounts), etc, to be put on some sort of sander since judging by the shape on the indentation its got a fairly large opening to the side which i would think would have been for emptying out the powdered form of whatever they were crushing, it's fine saying that it would have been used for tobacco in pipes but the fact its made from quartz seems to be a bit too specific to have been made for tobacco, so the chosen material to make it clearly mattered to the scientist and would have aided in how it worked, also for those comments saying "but why is it so small" its a preview, you don't just make a massive morter and pestel and it not work, thats a waste of material, so if you scale it down if its a failure the wastage isn't so great. But that's just what i reckon it would have been, i don't know what prominence it would have had historically, i just have a fair idea on what it would have been used for.

Maybe some demonstration of optical properties. What happens to light passing through bot crystals, and does it change as you change orientation of the crystals?

Could it be that these crystals are calcite? They look soft enough the way they appear scratched. Trigonal-rhombohedral structure. Perhaps they were rotated on that pivot point and used to demonstrate polarisation, the two of them cancelling out each others polarised light when held up to a candle. That would make fine after dinner conversation.

Looks rather similar to the way the lintel stones at Stonehenge are joined. Perhaps used as a crude demonstration tool to show this?

it's a grinder of some sort, perhaps for spices or snuff, but it seems to made of quartz, which is hard, and could easily serve as a small mortar and pestle. they should test some of that brown schmutz...

Since it's a dining club I'd say it's used to crush spices? but seeing as it's translucent I doubt whether it's sturdy enough. Maybe if you'd licked it we would've had a better idea ;)

Perhaps it is simply demonstrating a concept of stability. Maybe they were investigating a method of strengthening the foundation of buildings to withstand earthquakes, or to achieve some architectural advance. A method for structural integrity - perhaps.

The sidewall of the concave stone appears to have chipped off. If that is so, then the object might have been a salt- or spice grinder, as the depression seems to be about twice the size of the "fitting" piece, and both parts appear to be round.

I think it's a cutaway mock up to illustrate ancient stone socket joints. We can see these sort of lumps an corresponding divots in all kinds of stone structures. Looks to me like someone was fiddling with the idea and brought in what they made to discuss with their club mates. This makes even mre sense if the person doing it was an engineer as you hypothesized. Anyway, there's my guess.

I think it's a prank on our generation. They sat down for show and tell and said, "Hey, we document everything. Let's just leave this thing without any documentation, it will drive the future historians crazy!"

I crystals are the wrong shape for quartz or halite. Could be calcite. I have a double image calcite that looks similar to these crystals. Still, that doesn't tell me what these were used for.

Maybe it's some kind of flint, you smash the parts together and you get a spark?

"presumably altered?" Maybe they were found this way and form a talking point for crystal formation. These crystals have clearly defined facets although a little piece that juts out into the other. Given this is the age when basic atomic theory is coming together, (Bohr model was 1913 I think) maybe it was presented as: "This crystals were found together, what sort of mechanism might of caused them to form this way?" I feel like that would be the natural path of an inquisitive mind... Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

A fancy hole punch? For creating small holes in paper to then be joined by a fastener?

If they're quartz it could be for demonstrating triboluminescence, where rubbing the two together would make a glow. It doesn't explain them fitting together though

When I got my alert yesterday that there was a new video about the Royal Society Club, I thought it would be about the sacking of David Moyes.

Maybe a demonstration of how some of the Stonehenge rocks fit together?

what if they are Sunstones and it is a demo on the refraction inside the crystals.

id suggest getting it under a microscope look for scratches in the surface, i suspect the folks thinking trobolumination are right but a look at the wear would tell if its around the nub. or perhaps the nub is for your fingers to gold it and grind the backs. analysis of the material would be good to, see if its calcite or quarts or whatnot.

Used to demonstrate the piezoelectric effect.

It might be a device to crush something. It would be interresting to get a detailed chimical analysis of the surface to see if it has been in contact with some specific elements. Unefortunately as this object was manipulated by lots an lots of people along the time, the samples might be stained with extra materials..

Given the translucence, and this is waaaaay out there, maybe a sort of iceland spar (e.g.) telescope. I really want to get hands on with it.

Those two stones remind me of the joints in the standing stones circles at Stonehenge or in the Parthenon of Athens: the part with the point is at the top of a vertical stone and the part with the hole is in the bottom of one of the horizontal stones, and when the latter is placed atop the former, they join firmly and can't easily slide away. The point is called a tenon, the hole is called a mortise. It seems to me that those two stones could be a sample to show how the link works.

Maybe the point was it was a mystery to the members as well. Maybe it was discovered on an archeological dig, and was brought to the dinner to see if someone could figure out what its purpose was.

Could it be a demonstration of polarisation? Hold the crystals in on position and light passes through. Try turning one 90 degrees and see if it blocks the light.

Did someone keep minutes of what was discussed during these dinners? Were speeches or presentations given? There is a record of who was at the dinner, did someone go over their diaries or notes? Any papers in Phil Trans from around the time the box was stored that cover properties of crystals? I wonder if the thing has no purpose, but was found in the field and brought in as a curiosity after some layer of material between the two crystals had been removed.

To me it looks like someone at the table had a hard time explaining something and decided to carve it.

They are salt crystals and used, instead of a salt shaker, by grinding the two pieces together to sprinkle salt on your food.

Maybe it was just a geological find of two neighbouring yet separate crystals - a coincidence deemed not worthy to report on further during that gathering?

Crystaline objects are difficult to handle. Maybe it was a challenge to cut that crystal into fitting shapes after one guy mocked another one for his trade. "You just cut stones, Jerry. Whoop-di-fucking-do." "You try it, Theodor. If you succeed I'll put it in a box, label it 7 and we'll never speak of my craft again. Dare I say, we never even write about it!"

maybe you put some sort of dry leaves and squeeze em trying to get a spark? some Bear Grylls' stuff going on there? dunno.