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."

Comments

Being done

[panxerox]

There is lots of this work going on now see here "A Library of Mud and Ashes" Great stuff will come from this.

X-Ray Fluroescence

[jd]

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.

Archimedes employed rudimentary calculus...

[Hamster Lover]

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.

Big Toys for Big Boys

[Quirk]

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.