To make the cup, they would have had to grind up gold and silver into
grains many times smaller than sand and fuse it to the glass in
specific proportions to produce subatomic effects that we're only just
beginning to understand in recent decades.
For some reason, the scientists weren't allowed to take this
millennia-old relic and fill it with Tang and tequila (That's a TnT, and
we heartily recommend it) just to see what happened. So they did their
best to replicate it and found that it would probably also have changed
colors based on what kind of liquid was poured into it. It's a
Hypercolor chalice! What's more, it's even more effective at detecting
different kinds of substances in water than modern sensors are, which
means that science is actually considering using a piece of technology
from the time of Caesar to improve modern substance detectors. The Ancient Romans were so good at getting drunk that they broke the science of the future.
