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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.