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Stanford Accelerator Uncovers Archimedes' Text

Posted by timothy on from the 2-quarts-olive-oil-1-bunch-grapes-goat-milk dept.

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."

11 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Being done by panxerox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Being done by the+gnat · · Score: 3, Interesting

      archaeologists are wary of anything that can damage an ancient find

      The funny thing is, I use a synchrotron regularly to study protein crystals, and we're always freaked out about radiation damage to our proteins. All of our crystals are frozen in liquid nitrogen, and kept cool in a cryojet while collecting data. (At room temperature, crystals fry extremely fast.) I'm curious how they protected the document while doing this study. It wouldn't be hard to burn it, unless they're using extremely short exposure times or a very diffuse beam.

  2. X-Ray Fluroescence by jd · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The actual technique used is quite ingenious, but has been around for a while. If you blast the nucleus of an atom with X-Rays of a frequency specific to that type of atom, it will radiate electrons. No other atom will do so, so you can get an exact picture of what is there.


    (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)
    1. Re:X-Ray Fluroescence by mboverload · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Although many will be quick to jump on the damn monk that wrote over one of the most important texts in history, that is what saved it from destruction and damage.

      PBS did an AWESOME ducomentary on it.

    2. Re:X-Ray Fluroescence by the+gnat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you blast the nucleus of an atom with X-Rays of a frequency specific to that type of atom, it will radiate electrons. No other atom will do so, so you can get an exact picture of what is there.

      I thought this was particularly cool because it's the exact technique used to determine the majority of new protein structures. I would not have predicted that it would be equally well suited towards a completely different type of imaging, particularly for something so esoteric as ancient manuscripts. (On a side note, I almost ended up studying ancient history and literature but decided to stay in science, and now play with particle accelerators. If I'd known I could do both, my career might have turned out differently.)

  3. Archimedes employed rudimentary calculus... by Hamster+Lover · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Archimedes employed rudimentary calculus... by Raven_Stark · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Religion played a big part in the fall of Rome. Perhaps much more of that great civilization would have survived had it not been for the Christians. In the name of censoring for God, they paid monks to chisel the 'naughty bits' off works of art, destroyed beautiful pagan temples and otherwise defaced and destroyed the local maxima of culture and science. At that time, at least in West, Rome was the high point of human accomplishment.

      Here is some rather biased support for what I say about Christianity's role in destroying knowlege and setting us back a thousand years. Figure out for yourself how much of it is true.

      I believe that to judge someone or something one must take motives into account. The monk was trying to spread the Christian virus. That he accidentally saved a work of Archimedes doesn't make him or his religion good. Do we call drunk drivers good people if they accidentally run over bad people?

      --
      http://www.marxist.com/
    2. Re:Archimedes employed rudimentary calculus... by westlake · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I like blaming religion for stuff too, but in this case, you can't really pin it on them.

      Classical Greek thought was rooted in deductions based on first principles. Think of the elegant abstractions of Euclidean geometry. Archimedes was very much the outsider in his taste for experiment and in learning from the imperfections of the real world.

      That makes it all the more striking that Archimedes was known and read in Christian Byzantium for 900 years, 300-1200 AD, and influced the design the great 6th C. church of the Hagia Sophia.

      The Archimedes Palimpsest rested somewhere in the libraries of Constantinople for 200 years before being erased in the years of chaos which followed the sacking of the city in the Fourth Crusade of 1204 Archimedes Palimpsest.

      You could forgive the surviving scriptoriums for thinking that the civilizing influence of their prayer books was more urgently needed than instruction in higher mathematics.

  4. Big Toys for Big Boys by Quirk · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Archimedes claimed: "Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world."

    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
  5. Re:Damn those Christians by bVork · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. According to the documentary... by Hamster+Lover · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.