What do dark matter, the Roman Empire, and a toxic heavy metal have in common?

The answer is Mr. Ettore Fiorini who helped excavate a 2,000-year-old shipwreck whose cargo of Roman lead bars could, he believed, help him unravel the secrets of the universe.

If the second sentence made no more sense than the first, let’s do some storytelling.

Sometime between 50 and 80 BCE, merchants or military engineers from Rome were transporting a cargo around the island of Sardinia that included hundreds of pounds of lead ingots from Spain meant for building ammunition or aqueducts.

The sea was angry that day, and sent the cargo down to the crushing black oblivion of Davy Jones’ Locker. In 1988, the ship was discovered, and the maritime archaeologists working on it got a message from a strange addres

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