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.