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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."
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
(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)
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.
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
There's just a little more to the story than that. It was considered a virtuous act to cover over 'heathen' writings with Christian writings. More cynical /. readers will probably say that this is a nice way of justifying what the parent poster said.
One of the major problems with the whole palimpsest system of, er, 'recycling' is the difference in binding. Most Classical-era works were in scroll form, and by the time the monks started copying over them, the book was the dominant form of binding. This meant that scrolls were often cut up and rebound in books, almost always shuffled completely out of order.
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.
I hate to bust a good conspiracy theory, but I've worked with the DSS, going on 2 years now, and I've got 2 words for you to define the contents therin: bor-ing.
You want to know whether you can pull your brother out of a pit using a stick on the Sabbath? Well then, thems your texts, but other than that, it's a bit of a yawn fest.
The reason for the partial and delayed release of the DSS has everything to do with academic jealousy and selfishness and absolutely nothing to do with the contents of the scrolls - and if you don't believe me, just go ahead and read the fully released DJD translations. I think you'll find naught conspiritorial grist for your paranoid mill.
- HolyRomanUmpire
(Who is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Umpire)
... 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
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.