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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!".
urge someone to step up and STOP this blatant piracy of Archimedes valuable IP!!!
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?
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
Much as I'd love to make one of the jokes forming up in my mind, I have to say this may have been something less than intentionally stifling percieved heresy. The paper was erased and reused to make a prayer book. The usual way of treating heresy was to burn it. The fact that it was erased and reused suggests it wasn't considered heresy, which in turn suggests to me one of a few likely scenarios:
A. The monk who erased it didn't know there was any significance in the paper to make it worth preservation.
B. The monk thought there were other copies in existence (and there well could have been at the time, only to be lost later), and thus the one he had was expendable
C. The monk just wasn't that bright.
#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.
D. Church wanted paper and that was the cheapest way to get it.
(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.
hey frank, STOP THE BEAM!!!!
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.
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.
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.
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."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This story wouldn't be here today if the Christian monk had erased Archimedes text using the US Government DOD 5220.22-M standard.
Virtuous act? My ass.
There are plenty of twelfth-century scholars in the West and in the Greek East who read and appreciated ancient Greek and Latin texts; and the vast majority of these were churchmen. Their reaction to a 12th-century monk scraping off Archimedes and copying down a prayer-book would be much like ours, as in "Hey Rube, WTF are you doing?" But well, not everybody is educated to the same degree, and a poor monastery may indeed find the parchment more valuable than the indeciphrable gibberish written on it.
For those of you who can't grasp the concept, it's like when ma threw out all the old baseball cards; you fought it at the time, and twenty years later you know the retail value of what you lost. Ignorance spans all periods; but in spite of what crap 19th-century progressivism may make you think about the middle ages, medieval people didn't hate and seek to destroy antique texts; quite the contrary, they liked them, and they found ancient science very useful. Remember this text was copied in the 10th century by a monk as well.
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?
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!
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:
you fought it at the time, and twenty years later you know the retail value of what you lost.
Of course if most people's mums hadn't thrown out their baseball cards they wouldn't have been worth much.
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
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
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
"Be sure... To drink... Your Ovaltine..."
First, the concept of monastic "order" really begins in the beginning of the twelfth century with the military orders, the cistercians, and the premonstratensian canons.
Second, you're assuming this is a western manuscript, when some of the other contextual marks suggest that in fact it was produced in Constantinople. Basilean monks did know Greek. And in the west, it depends on where you're talking about. Spain was an active center for Greek/Arabic/Hebrew -> Latin translation of texts, especially scientific ones. Southern Italy had large communities of Greek speaking peoples. Hell, even the bishop of Lincoln and not a bad scientist in his own right, Robert Grosseteste, knew and translated ancient Greek.
Something abstract such as "The Church" is not an historical agent; individual churchmen can be.
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?
"F1RST0S P0ST05"
Satisfied? Sheesh.
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
"That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods.
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.
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.
Now, if you want to donate your time and money to cancer research, great. But don't whine because others care about other causes.
-- $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.
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.