Thought the "Roman concrete self-heals" claim was TikTok junk science until I read the 2023 MIT paper in my dentist's waiting room | Alternate History Scenarios

David Jones · 2026-10-12T15:10:06.348945+00:00

I kept seeing those clips about Roman concrete fixing its own cracks and I wrote it off as internet hype, mostly because I got burned believing that "baghdad battery" stuff back in high school. Then I'm sitting in a waiting room in Akron flipping through a magazine and there's a whole writeup on the MIT team who found lime clasts in the mix, tiny white chunks that crack open and react with water to seal gaps. What sold me was that they actually made a batch using the old recipe and it patched a crack in like two weeks while normal concrete just sat there. I went down the rabbit hole after that and it kind of blew up my idea of what counts as legit history. I always figured the Romans just got lucky with seawater and pozzolana ash, not that they were basically running ancient materials science on purpose. Now I wonder what else I tossed out as fake because it showed up on my phone first. Anybody here got a "lost tech" claim they changed their mind on, and what finally did it for you?

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Thought the "Roman concrete self-heals" claim was TikTok junk science until I read the 2023 MIT paper in my dentist's waiting room | Alternate History Scenarios - Thought Shares