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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."
Dead Sea scrolls
The Raven
Actually, the idea seems to have started about 15-20 years ago, of using various attributes to read xsuch documents. A technique was developed in the UK - I believe it was called ESDA - which used magnetic fields and extremely fine iron dust to detect indentations left in paper when layers further up had been written on.
The technique hit the news during the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad fiasco, when it was demonstrated, by use of this technique, that "confessions" had been altered after they had been signed by the supposed confessee. It led to a lot of cases being thrown out on appeal, and a subsequent inquiry as to what had happened.
Other popular techniques include the use of various frequencies of light and/or UV, to reveal marks that wouldn't otherwise be visible, which is how some of the more "legible" parts of the palimpset of Archimedes were photographed prior to this.
Chemical techniques exist, but archaeologists are wary of anything that can damage an ancient find, unless it is so far beyond salvage that preservation of the original would be impossible anyway. Even then, they don't like it and try to avoid it.
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.
To add irony to the story, it was covered by a simple prayerbook. The discoverer was only able to make a tantalizing transcription of some of the text before it was lost. Before it was recovered some con-artist had painted fake devotional paintings over some of the pages in order to increase the value. Then I believe it was bought by a collector who did not understand what it was and taken to France, where his heirs made the re-discovery.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
http://www.thewalters.org/archimedes/frame.html
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
I'm not a protein crystallographer, but I do work at a synchrotron and do lots of x-ray absorption and diffraction experiments. I've never had a problem with x-ray damage to my samples (mostly inorganic solids). Susceptibility to radiation damage varies from material to material. From my understanding, protein crystals are particularly bad, presumably because they not respond well (in a chemical sense) to the large numbers of electrons generated after an x-ray absorption event. This basically causes impurities in the crystal (local changes in the structure factor) that degrade the diffraction measurement. Also, in your typical protein diffraction experiment, you irradiate a particular spot on the crystal for a very long time. I would guess that this is not so much an issue in this case, because (1) no one is really interested in the chemical structure of the parchment itself, and (2) a particular spot on the sample is exposed only for a very short time. Incidentally, there's a better write-up of this at Stanford: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/may25/a rchimedes-052505.html
Whoever rated this post as insightful? It's just ignorant. Vellum was a highly costly resource in medieval society because it's obtain from the skin of a young, animal - usually a calf. As generally speaking a cow would only produce one calf per year the cost of producing a calf's worth of vellum is the cost of keeping a cow alive over the winter needed to produce the calf - which was more difficult at the time because in the abscence of root feeds most cattle were slaughtered and salted in the autumn, plus the loss of revenue from allowing the calf to grow.
Although it's true that there does appear to have been periods when medieval society was relatively affluent - the 12th Century in particular - famine was never far away and the grinding poverty should not be underestimated. There are even accounts of periods where it is remarked by chroniclers that it was not uncommon for peasants to own just a single garment or even none at all. This cannot have been the norm as otherwise the chroniclers would not have remarked upon it, but nevertheless, in a society which is living as close to the edge as medieval europe managed to do it is not suprising that vellum for books was a costly and rare resource
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.