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Stanford Accelerator Uncovers Archimedes' Text
AI Playground points to a Newsday.com report which reads in part "A particle accelerator is being used to reveal the long-lost writings of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, work hidden for centuries after a Christian monk wrote over it in the Middle Ages. Highly focused X-rays produced at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center were used last week to begin deciphering the parts of the 174-page text that have not yet been revealed."
we have it!
"What is Six Times... NINE?"
There is lots of this work going on now see here "A Library of Mud and Ashes" Great stuff will come from this.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
May I be the first (O.K., second) to run naked through the streets of Syracuse crying, "Eureka!".
The answer to your question, sir, is the little boy I have under my bed for BUGGERY.
How are (Michael Jackson | the ancient Greeks) and McDonalds alike?
They both put 30 year old slabs of meat in 10 year old buns.
Wont such a strong beam potentially destroy the precious paper that had weather thousand years?
...with the Lone Gunmen.
Beep. Boop. Beep. You have questions. I have answers and your home address.
urge someone to step up and STOP this blatant piracy of Archimedes valuable IP!!!
A particle accelerator is being used to reveal the long-lost writings of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, work hidden for centuries after a Christian monk wrote over it in the Middle Ages.
:)
Proving yet again that Christians can't stand it when someone proves there's more to the world than God.
I kid though
They're using a particle accelerator hey? Well I hope if anything goes wrong they remember to depolarize the fibrulator.
...Archimedes' estimations of the value of pi by drawing polygons with lots of sides?
You mean "when Archimedes totally freaked out on mushrooms?"
Did they find the screw?
Archimedes helps invent modern mathematics,
...which we're using to read Archimedes' writings.
Modern math (after surviving the Dark Ages) enables modern science,
Modern science gives us nifty toys like particle accelerators...
I can't help but think the guy would really get a kick out of that.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
(Actually, the reverse is also true. If you bombard atoms with electrons of the right energy, the atoms will radiate X-Rays.)
The very brief article submitted by the poster does not do this subject justice, as this is a highly sophisticated story involving the specific nature of ancient inks, the problems of 12th century economics which reduced many cultures to reprocessing books (the results of which are called palimpsets), the fact that these texts are direct transcripts of the original scrolls written by Archimedes, in their original format, the fact that the book was stored in a city that was virtually razed to the ground during the 4th Crusade, the fact that the book went missing during the early part of the 20th century, etc.
It also doesn't cover the fact that the pages are badly damaged by fungi, age, fire, vandalism, the whole palimpset process, poor storage, etc.
This is a truly amazing story, that covers both some of the most ancient and most modern of sciences, involving wars, religion, several renesance periods without which the text would have been lost forever, and numerous other adventures that would put the entire Indiana Jones series to shame.
This story deserves telling in the full, especially on a site like Slashdot where people have the background to appreciate the nuances involved.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Dead Sea scrolls
The Raven
...if the monk erased and wrote on the parchment. Animal skins may have been hard to come by, but it seems that if anyone would see the importance of academic writing it would have been a monk. Out of the 174 pages that make up the work, the monk probably chose to write over the section deemed least valuable.
They'll be fine, as long as they don't cross the streams.
I watched a program about the amazing discoveries uncovered through the painstaking analysis of this parchment.
One of the most stunning discoveries was the description by Archimedes of his method for finding the area under a curve though a rudimentary form of integral calculus, 2000 years before Newton or Leibniz!
He established the law of levers, found the relationship of the area of a cylinder to a sphere (which he believed to be his greatest discovery and he directed a model of which to be inscribed on his tomb), described the relationship of volume and buoyancy in water (his eureka! moment), among many other mathematical and mechanical discoveries.
A true genius that stands with Newton, Pascal and others.
They will turn the accelerator to more useful purposes, like seeing all the women in the Sears catalog without their underwear.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
He developed the claim into The Claw, which must have been a wonder to see in action. I've never been able to find out if the Roman soldier who killed him was punished or had anything to say. Archimedes was an engineer who applied the principles of Euclidean geometry.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
#include <stdio.h>
#define NINE 8 + 1
#define SIX 1 + 5
int
main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
printf("\nWhat do you get when you multiply six by nine? %d", SIX * NINE);
return 0;
}
That got translated from the original Attic Greek into common Greek, then into High Latin, then Vulgar Latin, and then into Old French, then soon after that into Old English. When William the Conqueror took over England in 1066, the new language that got created got it a little mixed up at first:
Somehow it doesn't seem to mean quite the same thing, but I can't quite figure out where the difference is.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
n/t
The Grecians were famed for fine art,
And buildings and stonework so smart.
They distinguished with poise
The men from the boys,
And used crowbars to keep them apart.
Google knows this one:
Answer
No text. Full comment in subject heading.
(Apologies to Pratchett fans)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's also ironic that he was killed by a Roman soldier, who was trying to steal his IP by stealing him. (He was busy and told the soldier to go screw himself.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's a good documentary of this on Nova called "Infinite Secrets of Archimedes".
You can grab a torrent from digitaldistractions.
as Archimedes Plutonium. According to the aforelinked repository of unblemished truth that is Wikipedia, Archimedes has since discovered
1. Plutonium Atom Totality theory. According to this theory, there was no Big Bang, but rather growth from a "Hydrogen Atom Totality" into the present "Plutonium Atom Totality", in which "the galaxies are dots of the electron dot cloud".
2. Fusion Barrier Principle. Quoting Plutonium, "Fission energy is the highest form of energy that is able to be controlled and surpass breakeven".
3. Unification of the Forces of Physics as a Coulomb Unification.
4. Stonethrowing theory. This theory states that the difference between apes and humans resulted some 8 to 10 million years ago from a solo quadruped ape that "started throwing rocks overarm and overhead". This activity gave the ape advantages in getting food and more females for mating purposes "by killing other rivals using throwing".
5. Possibility of global warming reversal. According to Plutonium's theory, there exists a CFC variant or methyl molecule that when produced and released will act as an "upper atmosphere earth air conditioner and reverse global warming".""
Despite that the brilliance of his ideas so obviously extended the work of Archimedes the Greek, it took the reincarnated Archimedes 44 years to realize that he was in fact Archimedes:
In autumn of 1994 he claims to have realized that he was the reincarnation of the great early Greek scientist Archimedes, and so once again changed his name to Archimedes Plutonium.
What I want to know is why we continue to dwell so much on Archimedes' old work when he has been producing so much insight as of late and it has yet to be properly appreciated.
Were any Alias fans (or just Jennifer Garner fans) out there reminded of Rambaldi?
Instead of writing over it and 'leaving it in the hands of god'
Old Man Tucket
Sat upon a bucket
Eating his beans and grits
Until he got an urge
To squeeze hard and purge
As he got a case of the shits
The smell wafted and sailed
For miles philosophers hailed
Of how it pillaged their wits!
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
"In the 12th century, parchment -- scraped and dried animal skins -- was rare and costly, and Archimedes' works were in less demand."
Why would scraped and dried animal skins be rare and costly in the 12th Century farming economy where these monks lived? There were certainly lots of skins, from all the animals. And monks were making their own ink, and spending their lives working on transcriptions and other writing. I don't buy the "necessity" of erasing Archimedes' works, no matter how often they repeat that story to elementary schoolers learning the definition of "palimpset", or how many of us grow up to write stories for newspapers repeating it.
The "less demand for Archimedes" part does ring true. After 600 years in the hands of the Catholic Church, European civilization had lost most of its heritage of learning and rationality it inherited from the Grecoromans who produced it. So much that it would be another 600 years before the rebirth ("Renaissance") of individual inquiry and reason, leading to the Enlightenment ("you can know it for yourself"), the "Age of Reason", and the rise of science as the most popular way of explaining life.
Looking at today's antiscience crusade by religious powermongers, it's easy to believe that a monk a thousand years ago just scrubbed the pages. Not for the great value of a blank page for new writing, but to destroy the scary science already written on it. Foreign words, explanations without "god" every other sentence, and especially these writings, where Archimedes tells how his mathematical proofs were derived from physical evidence (mechanics), rather than just consistent language - all inconvenient to a society which demanded obedience from the few people lucky enough to learn to read. Maybe if we can read between the lines in this story, we can learn to avoid the plunges into darkness we get when we erase science in favor of blind faith.
--
make install -not war
http://www.thewalters.org/archimedes/frame.html
Clearly this is a violation of DCMA... ;)
http://www.hawknest.com/
Boy, this really puts my efforts to retrieve my old Amiga files off 10 year old 8mm Exabyte tapes in perspective. ;)
planet texture maps and more
- International Treasure -
From the hidden writings of archmides to the hidden messages found in the back of euro notes. Ancient tunnels under ancient cities open up to reveal secrets nobody has seen for millenia...
Until NOW...
Coming soon to a theater near you,
Not only was a lot of the knowledge preserved, much of what was lost was destroyed by secular forces. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier who grew impatient when the inventor didn't come quickly enough. The Library of Alexandria was burned down by the Romans.
I must say, if the Church ever did anything right, it was preserving the works of the great masters. Sure, they may not have been complete, and they may have destroyed some other works that they disagreed with, but all in all, it was the Church that made the Renaissance possible.
I think the grandparent poster was really just taking advantage of Slashdot's antireligious bias to score some karma.
I admit I *am* curious; but I would not mind this money being spent elsewhere. The article was not totally clear, but at least some of the funding is private.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Actually, the technique you refer to in order to find out which atoms are in there works a little differently. The actual technique is called X-Ray diffraction. X-ray diffraction is done by shooting rays at the surface from different angles. If the rays are diffracted, it means that they have crossed through a plane of atoms, hit the next, then "bounce" back. The angles at which the rays are diffracted can then be used via Bragg's Law to find the interplanar spacing. This interplanar spacing yields an atomic radius which reveals which atoms we're working with.
Take goatskins ( 1 ) and stand them in water for a day and a night. Take them and wash them till the water runs clear ( 2 ). Take an entirely new bath and place therein old lime (calcem non recentem) and water mixing well together to for a thick cloudy liquor. Place the skins into this, folding them on the flesh side. Move them with a pole two or three times each day, leaving them for eight days (and twice as long in winter) ( 3 ). Next you must withdraw the skins and unhair them ( 4 ). Pour off the contents of the bath and repeat the process using the same quantities, placing the skins in the lime liquor, and moving them once each day over eight days as before ( 5 ). Then take them out and wash them well until the water runs quite clean ( 6 ). Place them in another bath with clean water and leave them for two days ( 7 ). Then take them out, attach the cords and tie them to the circular frame ( 8 ). Dry, then shave them with a sharp knife, after which, leave for two days out of the sun...( 9 ) moisten with water and rub the flesh side with powdered pumice ( 10 ). After two days wet it again by sprinkling with a little water and fully clean the flesh side with pumice so as to make it quite wet again ( 11 ). Then tighten up the cords, equalise the tension so that the sheet will become permanent. Once the sheets are dry, nothing further remains to be done ( 12 ). Parchment, the recipe
Wrong.. The Answer it 42!
It's the GREEKS, Mr Bush.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
No, no... the revealed text on the first page so far consists of:
"F1RSTUS P0STU5"
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I want you to re-read your post, and replace all reference to religion and religious people to Homosexuality, and Homosexuals.
Shocked by your choleric screed,
Anonymous coward.
"Have you ever read Slashdot, man?"
"Well, yeah, uh I guess..."
"But have you ever read Slashdot -- on weed."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
When i tried this at my accelerator, i burnt a hole through it and started a radioactive fire.
This story wouldn't be here today if the Christian monk had erased Archimedes text using the US Government DOD 5220.22-M standard.
I guess you didn't read the part where the book in question was copied by a scribe (most likely a monk) in the 10th century from the original Greek scrolls. But that would be a case of religious people making sure that the knowledge would be kept alive and that just doesn't fit with your bias, now does it?
(Note, Beowulf is not "English" literature any more than Ibsen is.)
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
"There once was a lady from Venus,
Whose body was shaped like a..."
"Thank you, Mr. Data!!"
"I have discovered a lovely little proof of my theorum about x^n + y^n = z^n, but alas, I fear to write it down because some french git will probably nick it."
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
He defined and solved all of the 23 Hilbert Problems in advance ;)
And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is the ultimate proof that humanity indeed originated from Golgafrincham.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Dude, it's a joke. Plus, this is Slashdot... acurracy doesn't matter anyway.
*rolls logs*
This is X-Ray Fluorescence, NOT X-Ray Diffraction.
Photon hits atom.
Atom absorbs photon, promotes electron to higher energy level.
Electron drops into core level vacancy left by promoted electron.
A fluorescent photon is emitted (or another electron is emitted).
This has nothing to do with any nucleus. I am a physicist. Bow to my knowledge.
Naked... well, naked walking around wasn't that odd as it is now, and the climat allows it. But it is good to have a article that seems to please the broad spectrum of /.-ers. ;-)
Especially when the document turns out to contain UNIX source code
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Perhaps not, but there's an excellent chance it will reveal more of what little we now know of his anticipation of Integral Calculus by 1,000 years. For the Physics and Mathematics communities, this is *huge*.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
It's probably more like:
Did they finish anything useful before the tree hit?
Answer to live universe and everything on google
pretty sweet.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Wow. You read HHGTTG.
42. Now that's clever.
We want to hear this joke over and over and over again, because it is so damned funny.
Right.
Stop trolling about the chinese already. It's not as if the US doesn't torture prisoners for kicks, so don't expect any action. Especially not resulting from spamming /. with anti-chinese posts for months on end,
Archimedes was Greek. Duh.
Yes, those famous secular Romans, with their pantheon of gods... ahem
Nova - Infinite Secrets Of Archimedes - a documentary about this (though the latest X-Ray news not included).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Archimedes last words were: "You may take my life, but I will take my mind" thereby indicating his retention of intellectual property rights.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
And _iron_ in the paint is what makes it possible for us to appreciate the _irony_...
FRA: STFU GTFO
... i understand it as a joke, yes
... no knowledge of other world parts and mixing different cultures! go back in time to archimedes and tell him (who was a slave under romans for some time) that you think he writes in latin .... he would immediately invent mass desctruction weapons and use it before america even exists!
:P
but its a kind of joke typical for america
*spoiler* this is some kind of joke, too
"Three and a bit"
It's a cookbook !!!!
"Be sure... To drink... Your Ovaltine..."
No, no, no... You don't get it. If you put parenthesis it doesn't work. And you read his problem wrong too... he put NINE after SIX. See the Wikipedia Entry for an explanation on how/why the program works.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Hey, idiot! He was multiplying SIX * NINE, not NINE * SIX. So it becomes 1 + 5 * 8 + 1 = 42. Get it? (In case you don't, look up HGTTG and 42 on goober.)
"F1RST0S P0ST05"
Satisfied? Sheesh.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's Stanford not SUNY.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
butter bread milk grapes papyrus Math for Dummies dish soap
in Kansas....
From TFA, "In a time of such political upheaval, advanced mathematical treatises by Archimedes were not in great demand. Far more urgent was the need for Christian texts, which would help monks and priests carry out religious services for the salvation of souls."
...Christians have been consistent throughout the ages. Squashing the advancement of our knowledge about the world time and time again. Can you imagine if Bush was in the White House during the 50s and 60s. Instead of giving the American people an amazing goal to reach, he'd have arrested scientist who were attempting to disprove the existence of the firmament!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Thanks for reminding me that the Church is a single man.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Since Archimedes was Greek and not Roman, that should be: "F1RSTOS P0STO5"
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
And even if he WAS Roman, it would be: "F1RSTVS P0STV5" -- the letter U is relatively modern invention (as is J). More recent, in fact, than the street names in Washington, DC.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
OK, I give up. No doubt I'm missing the obvious, but I can't figure it out.
I think he'd just say ""
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
I think he'd just wonder what the hell language you were speaking.
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
this is some kind of joke
You apparently forgot, or never learned, that a joke just isn't a joke without the funny. Typical of an America-bashing AC - not nearly as smart as you think you are.
Not that /. is supposed to make sense or anything, but shouldn't the parent post be moderated "funny" rather than "interesting"?
There are 10 kinds of people: Those that understand ternary; those that don't; and those that don't care.
I've met Archimedes Plutonium, he was one of the resident kooks while I was at Dartmouth. He'd spend hours in Kiewit (the computer center) with his shiny silver briefcase, tapping out his wacko theories on the Indys in the public cluster. Not surprisingly, he was paranoid about everything. He embarassed the school, and they finally got rid of him (he was kitchen staff, of all things).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK genius, let's hear your super-enlightened, non-american rendition of the joke. Latin is generally the only ancient language well known enough that one can appropriate a couple word endings, apply them to modern language, and still get the point across. Yes, it would have been more accurate if he'd had Archimedes writing ancient greek, you pedantic troll, but due to lack of greek characters on our keyboards, and the fact that almost nobody would be able to read it, it would no longer be an effective joke because no one would get it.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
this will no doubt change math, at least in a historical sense.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The Library of Alexandria was burned down by the Romans.
The Library of Alexandria was torched by Moslems under the command of Caliph Omar. His reasoning was, "To the extent knowledge is necessary, it is in the holy Quran. To the extent it is not necessary, it is blasphemy."
Romans?!?? Sheesh. You must be taking faith-based history, or something.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Just like mainframe COBOL code today. Sometime in the distant future, software monks will study old COBOL Y2K program listings, hoping to glean some knowledge of the algorithms that control how their business runs.
Closer to 1900 years, from 212 BCE to the seventeenth century.
Taking a bit as one eighth (two bits is a quarter), that would give an approximation of 3.125. Not as accurate as the 22/7 (3.142857. . . . ) from Archimedes.
-- $SIGNATURE
The program appeared on PBS as a Nova special and it was clear that scholars were stunned to find that Archimedes devised a simple form of integral calculus in an attempt to find the area under a curve, something that was unknown prior to the investigation of the parchment.
Archimedes treatises on levers, the value of PI, and his other mathematical discoveries have been known to us for centuries and I was simply listing off his notable achievements.
The technique being used sounds like an Electron Probe, or Wavelength Dispersive Spectroscopy. Here is a nice Java application demonstrating Bragg's Law, on which the techniques are based.
Futhermore, I'm not sure everyone could understand ancient english :-D
Who the FSCK modded this insightful?
My mother always said "if you don't have anything funny to say, don't say anything at all".
Scientists in the year 3010 finally managed to unencrypt the DVDs from 2008 which the keys were lost in the great Bush Fires of 2020...
Nothing new was revealed, it was the same junk which has been unencrypted since scientists managed to rebreak the CSS key in 2989 which also was lost over time.
But it gave a good insight of the primitivity of the archaic pre Bush Fire cultures, which relied on something stamped on paper and they even destroyed sucessively their whole living base for gaining more of the paper. All in all the late pre Bush fire cultures now that scientists gained insight never reached the standards of the ones 20-30 years earlier, it is still undecided yet why this happened, because words like share holder value, or buy mania have not yet been deciphered by the language experts, but one thing is for sure, those people were primitive.
It is still undecided how such a cultural downfall after the heydeys of greece could happen 2500 years later, with cultural standards close to cavemen.
SSRL and all the other big synchrotrons in the US are facing cuts in funding.
:(
These facilities are truly amazing and used by many different types of scientists to do all sorts of things (protein structures are what I use them for).
They are asking all of their users to pump their respective PR so that they can tell the Feds why they need the funding they do.
SSRL has been out for a fews days due to a tree falling on a power line..
Although some of them (such as the Sikh religion) consider that people of different religions can also achieve "transcendence"
The Raven
CREATION IS CUBIC, but you are educated singularity stupid by academic bastards. Athens 1 day time is evil. I know that you possess the mind to think that there are 4 simultaneous 24 hour days within a single Earth rotation, I think that you are just evil. Can you explain the 4 days rather than the 1 day taught? If not, you are truely stupid. To ignore the 4 days, is evil.
Poor smartie-PANTS greek-pingwhoop! was reverseAHEAD of his time and in front of it simoultaneousnessly, you uneducated stupids.
That's all Greek to me!
... another amazing fact discovered by the linear accelerator.
If you know any of your art history, you should be aware that there was very little Roman in Romanesque art. The reason that period is called Romanesque is because there was some superficial similarities in the architecture of cathedrals, but that's about it. Compared with Roman arts, Romansque period is rather inferior.
Unfortunately, the level of mathematics required to read the parchment is contained in the parchment.
same here
Thanks for pointing this out. That's what happens when you type your sigs while holding a conversation with the people in the office at the same time.
It should read:
I'll try to fix it as soon as I stop getting the "Eror 503 service unavailable" message.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
And from the same people we get the man's prayer:
Hopefully many fans of duck tape (aka duct tape, aka gaff tape, aka 100 mph tape, aka............) will recognize them.I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Archimedes DID invent weapons of mass distruction, or at least as massive as you could get with then current technology. But I don't think he would have given a flying trireme about whether someone thought he spoke Latin or Greek.
What about "e^n arke o'logos" which is usually translated as "In the beginning was the Word." I would think that THIS would have been the original first post
After spending several hours stacking dirty lead bricks, breathing lead dust, and being exposed to radioactive materials, in the hot and arid beamline at SLAC; perhaps a new breed of archaeologist will be born that more resembles the likes of particle physicists. Ever wondered why particle physicists are always irate, short and balding men who drive beat up subarus? Fortunately after being mutated, and getting a PhD, they always have graduate student slaves to carry on the tradition while they kick back and sip a coke they smuggled into the beamline.
not to mention the fact that the subject says TRANSLATING.# 919;.
or if you prefer babelfish greek (heres the tags):
για να μην αναφέρει το γεγονός ότι το θέμα λέει τη ΜΕΤΑΦΡΑΣ&