Reading the Ancient Papyri

quietglow points to this article at Discovery.com, writing: "See here for the story describing the use of some sort of spectronomy to read lots and lots of really important old books. Specifically, lots of Aristotle's lost texts, poems of Sappho etc. Did I mention they are using 'puters to do this? Jeeze."

Comments

Re:Other applications

[dutky]

Yes, similar techniques are used to identify chemicals all the time (and have been for at least the past 30 years). In fact, identification of materials through chemical reaction is only the crudest manner of identifying materials. Try doing some google searches on the spectroscopy, spectrometry, spectral analysis, mass analysis, chromatography and chromotography (note the different spellings: chromo versus chroma). These methods make use of non-chemical atomic and molecular properties (the mass of atoms or molecules, absorbtion or emission of various frequencies of light by atoms' electrons or by certain molecular bonds, etc.) to identify the components of test samples and how the compenents are arranged.