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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."
we have it!
"What is Six Times... NINE?"
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
May I be the first (O.K., second) to run naked through the streets of Syracuse crying, "Eureka!".
Wont such a strong beam potentially destroy the precious paper that had weather thousand years?
...with the Lone Gunmen.
Beep. Boop. Beep. You have questions. I have answers and your home address.
urge someone to step up and STOP this blatant piracy of Archimedes valuable IP!!!
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.
:)
Proving yet again that Christians can't stand it when someone proves there's more to the world than God.
I kid though
They're using a particle accelerator hey? Well I hope if anything goes wrong they remember to depolarize the fibrulator.
...Archimedes' estimations of the value of pi by drawing polygons with lots of sides?
Did they find the screw?
Archimedes helps invent modern mathematics,
...which we're using to read Archimedes' writings.
Modern math (after surviving the Dark Ages) enables modern science,
Modern science gives us nifty toys like particle accelerators...
I can't help but think the guy would really get a kick out of that.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
(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)
Dead Sea scrolls
The Raven
They'll be fine, as long as they don't cross the streams.
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.
They will turn the accelerator to more useful purposes, like seeing all the women in the Sears catalog without their underwear.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
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
#include <stdio.h>
#define NINE 8 + 1
#define SIX 1 + 5
int
main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
printf("\nWhat do you get when you multiply six by nine? %d", SIX * NINE);
return 0;
}
That got translated from the original Attic Greek into common Greek, then into High Latin, then Vulgar Latin, and then into Old French, then soon after that into Old English. When William the Conqueror took over England in 1066, the new language that got created got it a little mixed up at first:
Somehow it doesn't seem to mean quite the same thing, but I can't quite figure out where the difference is.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
The Grecians were famed for fine art,
And buildings and stonework so smart.
They distinguished with poise
The men from the boys,
And used crowbars to keep them apart.
Google knows this one:
Answer
(Apologies to Pratchett fans)
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)
As I posted above (and got modded flamebait somehow), there's quite a few explanations for this.
A. The monk may not have realized it was something special at all. If you don't understand the material at hand, two papers on the same subject tend to look an awful lot alike.
B. He may have assumed more than one copy existed, and for that matter he may have been right at the time, and only afterwards were the other copies lost. It's really not an unreasonable assumtion to make - most of the monks in medieval Europe spent their whole lives copying and recopying various texts. You'd expect any book to find its way into a monastery would end up being duplicated many times over, and sent to other monasteries where it would be duplicated furthur. This didn't always happen, of course, and I personally suspect that simple carelessness like this is responsible for a great deal of lost writings, and not mindless book burning and censorship that gets blamed so often.
It's also ironic that he was killed by a Roman soldier, who was trying to steal his IP by stealing him. (He was busy and told the soldier to go screw himself.)
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)
There's a good documentary of this on Nova called "Infinite Secrets of Archimedes".
You can grab a torrent from digitaldistractions.
as Archimedes Plutonium. According to the aforelinked repository of unblemished truth that is Wikipedia, Archimedes has since discovered
1. Plutonium Atom Totality theory. According to this theory, there was no Big Bang, but rather growth from a "Hydrogen Atom Totality" into the present "Plutonium Atom Totality", in which "the galaxies are dots of the electron dot cloud".
2. Fusion Barrier Principle. Quoting Plutonium, "Fission energy is the highest form of energy that is able to be controlled and surpass breakeven".
3. Unification of the Forces of Physics as a Coulomb Unification.
4. Stonethrowing theory. This theory states that the difference between apes and humans resulted some 8 to 10 million years ago from a solo quadruped ape that "started throwing rocks overarm and overhead". This activity gave the ape advantages in getting food and more females for mating purposes "by killing other rivals using throwing".
5. Possibility of global warming reversal. According to Plutonium's theory, there exists a CFC variant or methyl molecule that when produced and released will act as an "upper atmosphere earth air conditioner and reverse global warming".""
Despite that the brilliance of his ideas so obviously extended the work of Archimedes the Greek, it took the reincarnated Archimedes 44 years to realize that he was in fact Archimedes:
In autumn of 1994 he claims to have realized that he was the reincarnation of the great early Greek scientist Archimedes, and so once again changed his name to Archimedes Plutonium.
What I want to know is why we continue to dwell so much on Archimedes' old work when he has been producing so much insight as of late and it has yet to be properly appreciated.
Were any Alias fans (or just Jennifer Garner fans) out there reminded of Rambaldi?
To add irony to the story, it was covered by a simple prayerbook. The discoverer was only able to make a tantalizing transcription of some of the text before it was lost. Before it was recovered some con-artist had painted fake devotional paintings over some of the pages in order to increase the value. Then I believe it was bought by a collector who did not understand what it was and taken to France, where his heirs made the re-discovery.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
Old Man Tucket
Sat upon a bucket
Eating his beans and grits
Until he got an urge
To squeeze hard and purge
As he got a case of the shits
The smell wafted and sailed
For miles philosophers hailed
Of how it pillaged their wits!
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
http://www.thewalters.org/archimedes/frame.html
Clearly this is a violation of DCMA... ;)
http://www.hawknest.com/
Boy, this really puts my efforts to retrieve my old Amiga files off 10 year old 8mm Exabyte tapes in perspective. ;)
planet texture maps and more
- International Treasure -
From the hidden writings of archmides to the hidden messages found in the back of euro notes. Ancient tunnels under ancient cities open up to reveal secrets nobody has seen for millenia...
Until NOW...
Coming soon to a theater near you,
Not only was a lot of the knowledge preserved, much of what was lost was destroyed by secular forces. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier who grew impatient when the inventor didn't come quickly enough. The Library of Alexandria was burned down by the Romans.
I must say, if the Church ever did anything right, it was preserving the works of the great masters. Sure, they may not have been complete, and they may have destroyed some other works that they disagreed with, but all in all, it was the Church that made the Renaissance possible.
I think the grandparent poster was really just taking advantage of Slashdot's antireligious bias to score some karma.
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.
Take goatskins ( 1 ) and stand them in water for a day and a night. Take them and wash them till the water runs clear ( 2 ). Take an entirely new bath and place therein old lime (calcem non recentem) and water mixing well together to for a thick cloudy liquor. Place the skins into this, folding them on the flesh side. Move them with a pole two or three times each day, leaving them for eight days (and twice as long in winter) ( 3 ). Next you must withdraw the skins and unhair them ( 4 ). Pour off the contents of the bath and repeat the process using the same quantities, placing the skins in the lime liquor, and moving them once each day over eight days as before ( 5 ). Then take them out and wash them well until the water runs quite clean ( 6 ). Place them in another bath with clean water and leave them for two days ( 7 ). Then take them out, attach the cords and tie them to the circular frame ( 8 ). Dry, then shave them with a sharp knife, after which, leave for two days out of the sun...( 9 ) moisten with water and rub the flesh side with powdered pumice ( 10 ). After two days wet it again by sprinkling with a little water and fully clean the flesh side with pumice so as to make it quite wet again ( 11 ). Then tighten up the cords, equalise the tension so that the sheet will become permanent. Once the sheets are dry, nothing further remains to be done ( 12 ). Parchment, the recipe
It's the GREEKS, Mr Bush.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
No, no... the revealed text on the first page so far consists of:
"F1RSTUS P0STU5"
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"Have you ever read Slashdot, man?"
"Well, yeah, uh I guess..."
"But have you ever read Slashdot -- on weed."
For the answer to your question get thee hence and read The Name of the Rose.
."rose." Just thought I'd get that out of the way so you can read the book properly.
For the answer to the question that doing so will bring to mind the name of the rose is. .
KFG
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
When i tried this at my accelerator, i burnt a hole through it and started a radioactive fire.
This story wouldn't be here today if the Christian monk had erased Archimedes text using the US Government DOD 5220.22-M standard.
I guess you didn't read the part where the book in question was copied by a scribe (most likely a monk) in the 10th century from the original Greek scrolls. But that would be a case of religious people making sure that the knowledge would be kept alive and that just doesn't fit with your bias, now does it?
(Note, Beowulf is not "English" literature any more than Ibsen is.)
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
So what do you call all the Platonists and Aristotelian Catholic philosophers? St. Augustine was a definite Platonist, using it to explain Christian ideology in a manner that (attempted to be) rational. Same with St. Aquinas, who was an Aristotelian and hailed as the greatest philosopher of the Catholic Church. Whatever you might think of their Scholasticism, they were trying to be as hyper-rational and logical as one could imagine. Yes, they had definite agendas in mind (i.e. justifying Christianity), but you can't just dismiss them and say that Grecoroman learning and rationality "disappeared."
If you know any of your art history, Grecoroman culture was also preserved to a certain extent (hence, Romanesque art), but it was later pushed aside by more German and French styles (Gothic), which were in vogue because people liked windows (which Romanesque styles didn't really support) in their Cathedrals.
Such irE
"I have discovered a lovely little proof of my theorum about x^n + y^n = z^n, but alas, I fear to write it down because some french git will probably nick it."
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
He defined and solved all of the 23 Hilbert Problems in advance ;)
And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is the ultimate proof that humanity indeed originated from Golgafrincham.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This is X-Ray Fluorescence, NOT X-Ray Diffraction.
Photon hits atom.
Atom absorbs photon, promotes electron to higher energy level.
Electron drops into core level vacancy left by promoted electron.
A fluorescent photon is emitted (or another electron is emitted).
This has nothing to do with any nucleus. I am a physicist. Bow to my knowledge.
Naked... well, naked walking around wasn't that odd as it is now, and the climat allows it. But it is good to have a article that seems to please the broad spectrum of /.-ers. ;-)
Especially when the document turns out to contain UNIX source code
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Perhaps not, but there's an excellent chance it will reveal more of what little we now know of his anticipation of Integral Calculus by 1,000 years. For the Physics and Mathematics communities, this is *huge*.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
It's probably more like:
Did they finish anything useful before the tree hit?
Let's take that overwriting the book takes, let's say 5 weeks. Writing a text on a new paper takes, instead 3 weeks. Let be X the time to create paper from sheeps' skins. If X is less than 2 weeks, there is no reason at all to overwrite. Even if he wanted to destroy Arhimedes work, he would have burned it in less than an hour, than created new skin and wrote whatever he wrote. Why didn't he burned it down ? Probably because X is >= 2 weeks. If X is more than 2 weeks, you don't have a point. If X is exactly 2 weeks, and the monk figured that this method was effectively faster saving him an hour, then the genius is the monk, not Archimedes :)
Answer to live universe and everything on google
pretty sweet.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Nova - Infinite Secrets Of Archimedes - a documentary about this (though the latest X-Ray news not included).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Archimedes last words were: "You may take my life, but I will take my mind" thereby indicating his retention of intellectual property rights.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
And _iron_ in the paint is what makes it possible for us to appreciate the _irony_...
FRA: STFU GTFO
Whoever rated this post as insightful? It's just ignorant. Vellum was a highly costly resource in medieval society because it's obtain from the skin of a young, animal - usually a calf. As generally speaking a cow would only produce one calf per year the cost of producing a calf's worth of vellum is the cost of keeping a cow alive over the winter needed to produce the calf - which was more difficult at the time because in the abscence of root feeds most cattle were slaughtered and salted in the autumn, plus the loss of revenue from allowing the calf to grow.
Although it's true that there does appear to have been periods when medieval society was relatively affluent - the 12th Century in particular - famine was never far away and the grinding poverty should not be underestimated. There are even accounts of periods where it is remarked by chroniclers that it was not uncommon for peasants to own just a single garment or even none at all. This cannot have been the norm as otherwise the chroniclers would not have remarked upon it, but nevertheless, in a society which is living as close to the edge as medieval europe managed to do it is not suprising that vellum for books was a costly and rare resource
... 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
Your whole post can pretty much be summed up with "get a clue".
Why would scraped and dried animal skins be rare and costly in the 12th Century farming economy where these monks lived?
You start your post off by showing that your just making stuff up, this is good because it lets any reader who knows anything about 12th century Europe, and especialy anyone with a college degree (I'm pretty sure most schools require Medieval Lit as a GE requirement), know that you dont have a clue. Unfortunately some mod seems to have fallen into the "with out clue" category. You see parchment was incredibly expencive in the Middle Ages. To put it into perspective, it took around 200 sheep to make 1 bible. And while your right that it was a farming economy, the nobles owned all the land, and all of the cattle on the land. Only the wealthy could afford even a single book. Even into the 13th and 14th centuries the largest libraries had at most 1000 books.
I don't buy the "necessity" of erasing Archimedes' works, no matter how often they repeat that story to elementary schoolers learning the definition of "palimpset", or how many of us grow up to write stories for newspapers repeating it.
Sure it wasn't "necessary" to erase Archimedes work, but it was definately much cheeper. Imaginge a new notebook cost somewhere in the area of $5k, and you had to write a book, would you a) Buy a new notebook or b) Erase some less important writings. Of course you go on to suggest that the christian monk erased it because it was evil science. But considering every single work of writing that we have that originated durring or before the dark ages was writen by someone who had church sanctioned training? In fact, beyond that, just about everything from the Roman era and earlier can be attibuted to Irish monks who were very much religious. And then there is the the book in question that had Archimedes on it, and oh yeah, it was a monk who wrote that as well. Are you starting to see how your argument doesn't make much sense? The reality of the matter is, some monastery felt a prayer book was a more important use of the parchment than the writings or Archimedes, writings that no doubt existed in other places at the time. Writings that were probably all destroyed by fires and other natural causes.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now. - Ed Howd
"Three and a bit"
It's a cookbook !!!!
"Be sure... To drink... Your Ovaltine..."
No, no, no... You don't get it. If you put parenthesis it doesn't work. And you read his problem wrong too... he put NINE after SIX. See the Wikipedia Entry for an explanation on how/why the program works.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Hey, idiot! He was multiplying SIX * NINE, not NINE * SIX. So it becomes 1 + 5 * 8 + 1 = 42. Get it? (In case you don't, look up HGTTG and 42 on goober.)
"F1RST0S P0ST05"
Satisfied? Sheesh.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's Stanford not SUNY.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
B. He may have assumed more than one copy existed, and for that matter he may have been right at the time, and only afterwards were the other copies lost.
If you've ever read any historical novels that set in medieval monastaries, the burning of the scriptorium it the predictable highlight the way a roast pig is the predictable highlight of a luaua. While in real life obviously you aren't going to be sure that you are going to have a fire over the next few months the way you are when you're reading a book, over the centuries it's pretty common.
I seem to remember a recent Science News article on a researcher using mathematical techniques used in evolutionary biology to explain the extinction of literary works, as well as the way manuscripts vary from each other. If you look at a work as a species, it has certain characteristics which from a modern evolutionary standpoint predispose it to mutation and extinction. Chiefly, medieval books don't tend to travel very much, and reproduce very slowly.
The chief mechanism by which a book can reproduce and move to a new geographic location is by somebody requesting a copy be made for their collection. Medieval record keeping and commincation being what it is, it is possible that nobody outside the monastary knew that the monastary had a copy, and nobody in the monastary had any idea if the book was rare.
Another aspect of this particular work is it may not have had a great deal of reproductive fitness. History as a scientific didn't exist, and while ancient authority was respected, the importance of original sources wasn't understood. Therefore, it may well be that there weren't many requests for reproduction even though the medieval scholarly respect for Greek mathematics was well established. Much of the material in the work was probably convered in later, more comprehensive works.
I think you're right on both counts, and possibly I'd add a third, which is that the monk who did this may not have perceived the book as important because nobody had ever requested copies of the book or needed the book for scholarly purposes. The kind of scholarship that would use the unique properties of a historically important manuscript didn't exist yet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
butter bread milk grapes papyrus Math for Dummies dish soap
Since Archimedes was Greek and not Roman, that should be: "F1RSTOS P0STO5"
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
And even if he WAS Roman, it would be: "F1RSTVS P0STV5" -- the letter U is relatively modern invention (as is J). More recent, in fact, than the street names in Washington, DC.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
OK, I give up. No doubt I'm missing the obvious, but I can't figure it out.
Writing the text on new parchment takes no less time than writing on scraped parchment. But scraping the parchment (174 pages) takes time, probably weeks, if not months - of tedious, constant labor. Making new parchment takes as little as 4-5 weeks, all but a few days of which is waiting (a couple of stirs a day in a bath for most of that). The scraping labor is much greater than making a new one. And scraping destroys the labor of the original 174 pages. About the only thing this censorious monk had in common with Archimedes was the screwing.
--
make install -not war
Here's a clue: only the Irish, with few exceptions, copied the pre-Church texts they had. The rest of "Christendom", apparently, didn't care. Even the monks, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Pope, who owned the nobles - and colleced taxes from the nobles for their purpose. You can invent "probable" fires and other natural causes out of whole cloth. But I find it improbable that the only ancient texts to survive for public consumption were conserved by the outpost most distant from the religious bureaucracy running the empire.
The "reality of the matter" is that an Archimedes text, that took weeks or months to tediously transcribe, was destroyed rather than spend a month of light labor and some goats to make new parchment. You can project whatever you want onto how they "felt" about it. The economics show that they had at least no regard for the economics, or that maintaining the Archimedes text was a cost in itself.
--
make install -not war
I think he'd just say ""
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
I think he'd just wonder what the hell language you were speaking.
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
Not that /. is supposed to make sense or anything, but shouldn't the parent post be moderated "funny" rather than "interesting"?
There are 10 kinds of people: Those that understand ternary; those that don't; and those that don't care.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK genius, let's hear your super-enlightened, non-american rendition of the joke. Latin is generally the only ancient language well known enough that one can appropriate a couple word endings, apply them to modern language, and still get the point across. Yes, it would have been more accurate if he'd had Archimedes writing ancient greek, you pedantic troll, but due to lack of greek characters on our keyboards, and the fact that almost nobody would be able to read it, it would no longer be an effective joke because no one would get it.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
We are not lacking for life of human life on this
planet. OTOH restoring whose desctruction, many
agree, set us back hundreds of years is arguably a
very noble goal, so as to serve as warning against
other religious fervor and opression of the arts
and sciences.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Now, if you want to donate your time and money to cancer research, great. But don't whine because others care about other causes.
this will no doubt change math, at least in a historical sense.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Producing does take longer - MUCH longer. You don't tke into account from where the material was beeing obtained (freshly born lambs for vellum)
One that hath name thou can not otter
The Library of Alexandria was burned down by the Romans.
The Library of Alexandria was torched by Moslems under the command of Caliph Omar. His reasoning was, "To the extent knowledge is necessary, it is in the holy Quran. To the extent it is not necessary, it is blasphemy."
Romans?!?? Sheesh. You must be taking faith-based history, or something.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I also don't take into account the time it takes for Europeans to figure out how to make parchment out of goats. So? Goats get slaughtered all year long. There are plenty of feasts in which many goats are slaughtered. The extra time to make parchment is at most 7 weeks, almost all of which time is waiting.
--
make install -not war
Closer to 1900 years, from 212 BCE to the seventeenth century.
Taking a bit as one eighth (two bits is a quarter), that would give an approximation of 3.125. Not as accurate as the 22/7 (3.142857. . . . ) from Archimedes.
-- $SIGNATURE
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.
The technique being used sounds like an Electron Probe, or Wavelength Dispersive Spectroscopy. Here is a nice Java application demonstrating Bragg's Law, on which the techniques are based.
Having destroyed higher education, the church was all that was left. It's like killing your parents and begging for mercy because you're an orphan.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
RTFA.
The article plainly states that the parchment was reused because parchments were hard to come by and archimedes' work wasn't in demand. It's the simple issue of supply and demand and a monk that made a rather careless mistake, not some evil church cabal trying to quash all knowledge.
Christians, as stupid as they are sometimes, don't have anything against mathematics anyways.
Futhermore, I'm not sure everyone could understand ancient english :-D
My mother always said "if you don't have anything funny to say, don't say anything at all".
Firstly, Grecoroman culture had about 1200 years (the first noted philosopher Thales, who is dated from about 585 BC by the eclipse he observed) to the fall of Western Rome and Latin culture at about 600 AD, while Christianity had a about 800 years (400-1200) in the Middle Ages, before what most people call the Renaissance (which is really just a misnomer). But since you are so anti-religion, lets take the word of Bertrand Russell, a noted famous atheist philosopher. He gives many Greek philosophers, but he also attests to St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great, John the Scot, Abailard, St. Aquinas, the Franciscans, and so on. The problem here, of course, is that there is a false dichotomy between philosophy and theology; almost all Church philosophers were theologians. If one doesn't explicitely exclude theologists for being theologists, then we can also consider people like St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Ignatius, and so on, all the people that had ideas about how to live and what the structure of the world is (which is really what philosophy is all about).
The church actively saved tons of Grecoroman culture, and most of it, in fact, was not "lost" during the Middle Ages. Also, it's a relatively false claim that the Renaissance brought about a secularization of the people. Contemporary historians are now of the belief that during the early Renaissance, people became *more* religious, and religion became more widespread. During the Middle Ages, religion was mostly confined to the wealthy and the members of the clergy. Most people saw it was there, but it didn't really affect their lives. In the Renaissance and thereafter, religion became more widespread, and people started to practice, and the laity became a huge part of the religious movement. So you can't really put this strange dichotomy between the Medievalists and the Renaissance.
The main difference in the Renaissance was not that they discovered Grecoroman culture again, because they'd done that a while ago, but that 1) Wealth started being democratized 2) People started invoking Grecoroman republics to justify seizing power (cf. Cosimo de Medici, Lorenzo de Medici). Those two lead to people being antiquarians (i.e. not really reviving Grecoroman learning, but learning about it because it was fashionable). You'll remember that Latin only really survived because of the Church; how many countless books would have been lost if not for the preservation of Latin in the west and Greek in the east by the Church? Plato, Aristotle, and many other famous Greek philosophers only survived because the Church preserved them. It's not like they didn't recognize the value of such things.
You exaggerate to dishonesty my assertion, then argue with a strawman.
Sheesh. You're more in the tradition of wiping out inconvenient learning than the Catholic church is. People as dogmatic as you who talk about subjects before they even have an adequate, working knowledge of them are the people who lead to things like Kansas' problems with evolution, or the people in favor of intelligent design, and so on. Get with the 21st century, man; try reading first.
Such irE
Scientists in the year 3010 finally managed to unencrypt the DVDs from 2008 which the keys were lost in the great Bush Fires of 2020...
Nothing new was revealed, it was the same junk which has been unencrypted since scientists managed to rebreak the CSS key in 2989 which also was lost over time.
But it gave a good insight of the primitivity of the archaic pre Bush Fire cultures, which relied on something stamped on paper and they even destroyed sucessively their whole living base for gaining more of the paper. All in all the late pre Bush fire cultures now that scientists gained insight never reached the standards of the ones 20-30 years earlier, it is still undecided yet why this happened, because words like share holder value, or buy mania have not yet been deciphered by the language experts, but one thing is for sure, those people were primitive.
It is still undecided how such a cultural downfall after the heydeys of greece could happen 2500 years later, with cultural standards close to cavemen.
Totally idiotic reasoning,
a) the try for controlling the wave of knowledge by the catholic church is not a middle age thing, it is more like rooted back into the age after the rennesance and only related to religious works. b) Europe fell into sort of a dark age only in areas where the romans never were, so the areas were dark before. France, southern england, spain, all the ex roman parts kept high standards of knowledge, although many works were lost over time, the monestaries were places of trying to preserve the ancient works.
You can see that if you go into a european monestary and see the huge really old libraries. Part of the work of the monestaries was to preserve the works and teach.
Third there were lots of catholic philosophers who preached very openly towards a good eduction (the scholastics was an entire philosophy related to it)
Third, there were areas where the standards of eduction and science never went lowe than roman levels and infact were improved, Spain for instance under islamic rule was the root of all european universities, paris was the second one. Then there was Constantinople which basically was the gateway of goods and also the gateway of books between east and west, with lots of libraries and bookshops dedicated the preservation and copying of the ancient works. The arabs got their knowledge over Constantinople, they increased the knowledge in mathematics and medicine severely (one thing the eastern roman empire did not manage, due to constant struggles with its neighbours and lazyness caused by immense wealth9 and it flooded back to europe mostly over Spain, with Granadas universities as entry points.
Also Europe was not entirely dark before the rennesance, way back in the 12th century when the political situation all over europe had calmed down (the Hungarians were the last peoples flooding into europe in the 11th century), there was the first rennecance which led to the rediscovery of architecture and related mathematics, which rooted in the building of Cathedrals in the ex roman part of europe which is called France. This Rennecance was stopped by famine and plaque and basically again was triggered 100 years later due to stabilization and cultural exchange between Byzantine and Italy (in fact a number of Discussions and Lectures Pleton did in Italy triggered them). The result was the age we call now rennesance. But saying that all over Europe went into a dark age because of the catholic church is plainly wrong, the ex roman areas (well maybe except Britain) never fell into an entirely dark age and outside of europe the knowlege was flooding although the speed of increasing was slowed down for whatever reason.
SSRL and all the other big synchrotrons in the US are facing cuts in funding.
:(
These facilities are truly amazing and used by many different types of scientists to do all sorts of things (protein structures are what I use them for).
They are asking all of their users to pump their respective PR so that they can tell the Feds why they need the funding they do.
SSRL has been out for a fews days due to a tree falling on a power line..
Actually you mix a lot of things up... Lots of things were lost in the downfall of the western roman empire, but the monks of the middle ages, over here in Europe are well regarded as keepers and safers of the knowlegde and teachers of the incoming peoples which were setteling on ex roman soil. Here are cloisters in the area where I live, where they have a school tradition going back more than 1500 years and the libraries which were built over time are equally impressive, although books were luxury. But one of the main works ever monk had to do, was to copy the books by hand so that the work get preserved. The monks back then simply know, knowlegde can only be preserved by constant copying (unless our business bastards nowadays who would sell the entire human knowlege for the next dime if they could)
What you are referring to is stuff like the index and bookburnings, those things as well as the witch burnings never happened in the middle ages, those things are much closer to our age.
Secular as in religion had absolutely nothing to do with it. Archimedes was killed because he angered a soldier, not because of his religion. Caesar burned whatever he burned (as I mentioned in another post, it turns out that it's disputed whether or not his forces burned the Library or not) in order to gain a tactical advantage. So yes, these were secular forces. Whether or not the Romans had their own religion is irrelevant.
No, let's say that re-using pages of an existing book is essentially free in this context, or at least a lot cheaper than getting new pages. There might have been limited supply of pages for writing as well, at least limited supply of inexpensive pages.
Although some of them (such as the Sikh religion) consider that people of different religions can also achieve "transcendence"
The Raven
Oh I'm sure the marauding barbarian hordes which brought down the western roman empire causing a total collapse of society had nothing to do it it.
*sarcasm*
Nice troll. It was the church that preserved all the ancient texts we have today concerning Ancient Rome and Greece. Really, if your conspiracy theory had any merit, we would not know anything about this Archimedes fellow or his other works.
Look around you, most democracies today are loosely modeled on the Roman and Greek experiments with democracy.
I do not hate you because I know that you attack out of ignorance. Humans instinctively fear the unknown and attack what they fear.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Are you saying all the ancient works we have today preserved themselves?
Do you know that "The Da Vinci Code" is a work of fiction?
Since you have no idea, why did you feel the need to post here?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Check your math. The average extra time is 6months & 7 weeks. Sheeps don't fuck all year long, as humans do. And also the problem in middle ages was lack of food - so people usually couldn't afford to kill animals right after birth, because it was usually wiser to let them grown a little, kill most of them at Autumn and have food to survive winter.
One that hath name thou can not otter
... another amazing fact discovered by the linear accelerator.
If you know any of your art history, you should be aware that there was very little Roman in Romanesque art. The reason that period is called Romanesque is because there was some superficial similarities in the architecture of cathedrals, but that's about it. Compared with Roman arts, Romansque period is rather inferior.
The "reality of the matter" is that an Archimedes text, that took weeks or months to tediously transcribe, was destroyed rather than spend a month of light labor and some goats to make new parchment.
Well, first off, the monk still had to spend the month of labor to write it, and second, if you still want to ignorantly proclaim that parchment was cheap and any monk who wanted one could just get a hold of them no problem, go for it, I'm done arguing that point.
You can invent "probable" fires and other natural causes out of whole cloth.
Yes, fires destroyed almost all of the writings from that era. I can't believe your even suggesting otherwise, because it's realy elementry knowledge. See books were so expensive, that most libraries kept them chained up to prevent theft, and so, in the case of fire, a quite common occurance in a day when everything was flamible, and fire was the only source of light and heat, it was very difficult to get the books out to safty in time.
But I find it improbable that the only ancient texts to survive for public consumption were conserved by the outpost most distant from the religious bureaucracy running the empire.
And I believe it is improbable that aliens are living on the moon. Do you realy expect me to argue against stuff you just make up? I'm not going to do it, you need to get a little more up to date on your history before this discusion is going to make it anywhere.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now. - Ed Howd
Who's talking about barbarians?! I'm not. I'm talking about the original posting dealing with a CHRISTIAN destroying KNOWLEDGE. Something CHRISTIANS have been doing since their formation.
Are Christians the only group to destroy knowledge? Nope. Did I ever say that in your wildest dreams? Nope.
Once again, every thing I've said is irrefutably true, so what are you bitching about? I have no idea.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
same here
But parchment is not the same a vellum, and your medieval monk would only wish to use the finer material for holy texts. Also, whilst it is possible to make vellum from the skin of a young goat, calf vellum was strongly preferred.
As to monks soaking up meager supluses, well apart from the medieval mind seeing praying as crucial for the well-being of the community, they also provided lodgings for travellers, hospitals, employment, charity and much else.
Thanks for pointing this out. That's what happens when you type your sigs while holding a conversation with the people in the office at the same time.
It should read:
I'll try to fix it as soon as I stop getting the "Eror 503 service unavailable" message.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
And from the same people we get the man's prayer:
Hopefully many fans of duck tape (aka duct tape, aka gaff tape, aka 100 mph tape, aka............) will recognize them.I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Just who is spouting dogma? I think for myself, showing why the dogma, that valuable texts were probably destroyed ideologically, rather than according to some false economics. I back up my attack on the dogmas with facts and logic. I get led down some road pitting the Christian philosophers, slaves to their one legitimate book, to the vastly superior Grecoroman philosophers, upon whom the Christians relied. Those Christians were almost entirely restricted to ethics, which, while certainly a priority for thinkers and doers, is cramped by the Church dogma that makes their conclusions tautological. In the fields which include Archimedes, the Church bet on Ptolemy and a host of other propped-up mistakes about the physical world, all sanctified by decree. And the Grecoroman philosophers surpass the Christians in metaphysics. Christian metaphysics is mostly spin on Greek philosophy of "essence" and "soul", often merely translating books available only to the privileged mouthpieces of the Church, standing on the shoulders of giants hidden from the congregations.
.sig is "It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning." - Calvin
You swing from hypocritical cries of "dogma" to dragging in another strawman: you want to argue with someone "anti-religion", because that makes you feel stronger (with "god on your side"), so you call me that. I am anti-church. You can't clothe the diseased institution of the Church in the garment of "religion", though your favorite philosophers claim a Church monopoly on it. The Church you're defending was about to start burning "heretics" in the Inquisition, right about the time Archimedes' scientific work was scraped clean for some more propaganda about the fantasy world that replaced it. People can believe whatever they want - but when they justify with those beliefs actions like destroying knowledge and murdering people, no philosophy protects their institutions from the judgement of history.
A judgement we can make only because the influx of knowledge from outside the tyranny of the Church undermined its control over all knowledge in its empire. You try to throw yet another strawman into the argument, something about "secularization" in the Renaissance, which you contradict as if I had somehow said anything about it. The fact is that science, the rational investigation of nature unfettered by Church thought police, regained momentum after a thousand years of Church suppression. Because thinking for yourself destroyed Church dogma. This palimpsest was a late example of the success of the Church (if the Eastern brand in their Coke/Pepsi dogma wars) in wiping away accumulated knowledge that showed a superior civilization predated their administration of the faith that was to "free us all". A shameful legacy of coverups and anti-intellectual tyranny that lasted a thousand years.
So I call you on your dishonest exaggerations, your irrelevant strawman arguments. And your hypocrisy: you throw around baseless talk of "dogma", merely an indefensible insult, while dredging up all kinds of dogma of your own in response. My knowledge of the Church, and its cheating history, works quite well in catching it in all kinds of interesting lies. And in turning out its worshippers, slaves to its dogma who fear the truth, and the risky, free path to it. You can offer the Church your gratitude for destroying only 90% of the culture they took over and cannibalized, but don't expect me to appreciate that kind of selfserving hypocrisy and dogma that offer only contradiction in the face of free thinking.
BTW, I probably could have skipped this long response, and merely meditated on the credibility of a Churchlover whose
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"the knowlege was flooding although the speed of increasing was slowed down for whatever reason."
No, that reason couldn't have been the Church which captured all the Grecoroman learning for itself, imprisoned in fortresses accessible only to the Pope and his minions. Those works were confiscated as the Church thought police exterminated the tradition of philosophers teaching successive generations of thinkers in the science of inquiry - many of whom demonstrated their craft in public, producing and revealing discoveries in public debate. Every place the Church laid its claws was suppressed in its traditional knowledge. From Mediterranean Grecoroman philosophy to Celtic astronomy, and all points between.
You can sing the Church history dogma all you want, but the centuries of greatest Church power are 100% coincident with the worst repression of thinking. The Church worldview was so oversimplified, inaccurate, wrong, and fragile in the face of reality that it required constant indoctrination and defensive campaigns against freethinking "heretics" to keep its absolute power. This is perfectly clear, now that we are freer to think for ourselves, science having mostly shrugged off the old regime. So your unsupported insults have no power, however nostalgic you might be for the time when you could have depended on intimidation rather than thinking to act like an expert.
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Archimedes DID invent weapons of mass distruction, or at least as massive as you could get with then current technology. But I don't think he would have given a flying trireme about whether someone thought he spoke Latin or Greek.
Check yourself - the instructions call for goats, and not newborns. The Autumn slaughters you mention happen every year, producing a volume of skins for parchment. There's no waiting 6 months for the goats, and the Autumn season (especially in the eastern Mediterranean, where the palimpsest was "recycled") means something like 4-5 weeks, tops. During which the labor is really a few days of scraping, and a few weeks of stirring a bath 2-3 times a day. Very clearly easier than scraping 174 pages, and the discarded work of the original transcription.
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Moderation -1
10% Troll
30% Insightful
30% Overrated
TrollMods just want to scrape my comment clean for their own dogma. I note that the breakdown omits the many mods of "Flamebait", "Underrated", "Informative", and every other mod except "Funny". At least the TrollMods are consistent hobgoblins, without a sense of humor.
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What about "e^n arke o'logos" which is usually translated as "In the beginning was the Word." I would think that THIS would have been the original first post
I accept your concession that new parchment was more economical than laboriously destroying valuable old labor.
And I accept your further concession. Ireland was as lawless as the rest of Medieval Europe, more plagued by burning Vikings, and home to heating fires for longer than practically all of Christendom. That such a prime candidate for these fires, which selectively destroyed records of a superior civilization while preserving the Christian writings, is the only place that those politically valuable bookburnings didn't devastate, is as improbable as aliens living on the moon. Those kinds of "miracles" don't fool anyone anymore, now that we've had a chance to read histories not written by a self-serving Church and their lightweight rhetoricians.
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This palimpsest is made of parchment, not vellum. And the new text wasn't quite "holy", it was mostly a list of instructions for how to carry out local rituals.
The "medieval mind" created by the Church through centuries of indoctrination, purges, and thought police, did indeed create an economy and culture as you described. No wonder there was so little surplus value, and meager activity in traveling, medicine and "employment", creating such demand for the "charity" which kept the people dependent on the Church.
The Archimedes restoration project itself manages to hint at the real story of the "coverup", though its respect for the Church keeps it from stating the clear implications for the manuscript:
""The Fourth Crusade had got there and instead of proceeding directly to the Holy Land, they stopped and sacked the city. The destruction of books and other historic monuments was immense, and was indeed a major disaster for the history of European culture."
The specifics really underscore the context. The Christians tear in, destroy the complex christian/"pagan" balance in the area, and local monks purge the scary old science books in favor of safe Christian manuals. The more they uncover of this story, the more "palimpsests" look like imposed amnesia, rather than the desperation of poverty we've been led to believe.
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I think for myself, showing why the dogma, that valuable texts were probably destroyed ideologically, rather than according to some false economics. I back up my attack on the dogmas with facts and logic.
Since you don't actually have any logic or facts, I'm done arguing with you. That whole thing about the Irish being the only ones to transcribe pre-Catholic texts is actually a myth. The Spanish Inquisition happened in the 1400's, this manuscript was turned into a prayerbook a few hundred years before that. You glorified the return of the Renaissance as the "Age of Reason" and a return of science, when in actuality, it was the Age of Religion and the Inquisition. No facts, no logic, no reason. Go figure, you're a Slashdot junkie, that's pretty typical.
Such irE
I get Calvin & Hobbes. What I don't get is someone shooting off their mouth defending the Church, while joking about divine assassinations in their every post. Unless it's just the convenient mask of religion, the power of the Church, that they value, while mocking its essence. How like a hypocrite. And how like a dishonest exaggerator - yet another strawman, this time the "Spanish" Inquisition. In 1215, the Church passed laws for killing heretics and confiscating their property. Spain's famous Inquisition got really heated up a couple of hundred years later, but the burning, looting and sanctimonious coverups were underway for hundreds of years (and finally gave way to real thinking again, after hundreds of years of desperate suppression). Look even closer at the history of this Archimedes manuscript, if you've got even any private intellectual honesty: the "pagan" text was destroyed as the 4th Crusade sacked its town, burning books, making a coverup a matter of survival for many monks. Of course, you've already conceded my point that the Irish weren't the only transcribers, so your confused squeals of "I'm done arguing" are really more like an echo. People who are done arguing usually shut up, rather than spout desperate nonsense like some strange implication that the wane of the Church's power finally allowed the rise of science. But I guess that Church apologists never really die, though they're deathly boring.
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Perhaps if the records of a "superior civilization" had been destroyed while the christian writings were preserved, you might have a point, but as it stands, you just inventing pretexts for you argument. The only miracle is that writings from thousands of years ago survived at all.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now. - Ed Howd
You stated "Yes, fires destroyed almost all of the writings from that era". And, in fact, there are very few Grecoroman writing that survived that era. Yet there are many Christian records that survived - most of which are much less valuable knowledge, like tax records, than the science they discarded. That's no "miracle", that's exactly the kind of favoritism to expect from custodians more interested in preserving a Dark Ages empire than in preserving knowledge. The "pretexts" speak for themselves.
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No real imprisonment happened... In spain the ancient knowledge flooded under islamic rule, in the very church dominated byzantine empire, the ancient knowledge was copied over and over again and made its way into the islamic countries, france got the first university outside of spain and it is no coincidence that france and italy former roman core countries were the countries which basically had the rennecances of the 12th and 14th century. Those were the ones fastest to stabilize after the downfall of Rome.
I am telling you that the church did not lock up too many things, but after everthing went down, constant raids and battles for hundreds of years which shattered France i Italy and other ex roman countries, lots of knowledge simply was lost. Germany and northeastern Europe simply were wilderness until 700-800 with many parts being uncultivated way until the 13th century. It is true, the church wanted to lockup certain knowledge, but that is more a thing of the newer times not of the middle ages and it did not work anyway!
It was mandatory however, that if you wanted access to the works, in the middle ages, you either had to live in parts of europe which not have been affected by the chaos between 350 and 700, or you had to be rich, to be able to buy one of the byzantine, arabic or cloister copies (and remember books were very expensive at those days, even the very rich could only afford a handful)
And you had to had a good knowlege of latin and greece, because most of the books were never translated, including the bible.
True instructions, from the era, call for newborns. Who cares what some "hobbyist" today use?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Let's see your example of 12th Century professionals requiring newborn goats for parchment. Then consider how many newborn goats died or were killed every year anyway. It doesn't really matter, anyway - parchment suitable for writing today without newborns would of course be suitable 900 years ago, too. If newborns were too rare or precious, why start destroying even more rare and precious books for parchment, when suitable adult goats were available?
Really, you have tried so many tactics in this tread to defend the conventional wisdom of palimpsests. Every one has failed, though you have often exaggerated, ignored holes in your own argument, and generally tried to win an argument, rather than possibly learn something new. You have created weak arguments by starting from a foregone conclusion, then looking for possible ways you could be right, without regard to probability or practicality. I'm not going to convince you with reason, so I'm not going to bother anymore offering you the possibility of new insight. All I can do is suggest that you are attached to the traditional explanation for reasons that have little to do with logic, and perhaps open your eyes to your preference for dogma instead of scientific analysis. Which seems even more important to me than the provenance of palimpsests, though they also both seem to me to be related.
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After spending several hours stacking dirty lead bricks, breathing lead dust, and being exposed to radioactive materials, in the hot and arid beamline at SLAC; perhaps a new breed of archaeologist will be born that more resembles the likes of particle physicists. Ever wondered why particle physicists are always irate, short and balding men who drive beat up subarus? Fortunately after being mutated, and getting a PhD, they always have graduate student slaves to carry on the tradition while they kick back and sip a coke they smuggled into the beamline.
not to mention the fact that the subject says TRANSLATING.# 919;.
or if you prefer babelfish greek (heres the tags):
για να μην αναφέρει το γεγονός ότι το θέμα λέει τη ΜΕΤΑΦΡΑΣ&