spoilers: damascus steel is actually just okay when compared to modern steel, roman concrete is only as strong as it is because of freak chance and would suck for modern roads, we could still build the same kind of rockets that put men on the moon just fine if we had the budget, and blind tests show that a stradivarius is not better than modern violins.
as for the rockets, we may not have the exact skills and papers, but we still know how they were put together and we actually have better rocketry tech now than we did in the 60s and 70s, so...
stradivarius violins can't be exactly replicated now, due to environmental differences mainly, but blind play tests have a majority of audiences and performers preferring modern violins when we've got the mystique of the name peeled away from things.
and there's a lot of science behind the strength of roman concrete, but the trick is that there's some mineral in there that gets stronger as it ages. if we mixed up a fresh batch and used it for a few miles of road, under the same stress as a modern concrete road, it'd likely end up faring rather poorly.
stradivarius violins are also suspected to have a slightly different sound due to the chemicals that were used in the varnish which, no, we don't know the recipe for, but we can still make up batches that do the job just as well.
damascus steel really was better than anything of its day. stradivarius violins really are masterworks. those rockets did their jobs just fine. roman concrete has lasted longer than the empire itself.
I was actually listening to a Science Friday where they had a professional who created a 3D printed violin to reduce the entry level price for music education.
the Roman concrete was strong because of the quick lime I think. The concrete would crack over time and when water seeped in the lime would dissolve and fill in the cracks and somehow make it stronger, but it wouldn't really make for good roads today.
I would argue that early computer people were much better programmers than the average phone app designer, but that's comparing apples to something I scraped off my shoe
I think with the stradivarius it's always been sort of an open secret that the only differences are the ones you can only notice with either an extremely well trained ear or technology. But even that's not so much "lost technology" as happening to make them from Ice Age-era trees.
there's a story (idk if it's apocryphal - kinda think it was) that the crew suspected something was up but didn't bow out because they didn't want to risk their friends' lives, knowing that the higher-ups wouldn't pause the program, they'd just sub in a new crew
Well. My parents both worked in computing for decades (about a century combined) and they definitely complained about losing the ability to really work with and improve tech when people retired, but it was really specific cases.
the banking system runs on COBOL, so that's gonna be fun in a decade or two when there's no one left to maintain it - but that's not because we don't have better programming languages and hardware now
(i have a rant about programmers calling themselves "software engineers" because BITCH, IF SOMEONE WITH A PE DESIGNS SOMETHING THAT KILLS PEOPLE, THERE IS JAIL TIME INVOLVED)
people swallowing the myths that ~lost technology~ is better than what we've got now