Eureka! Archimedes Revealed

pin_gween writes "The Mercury News has an AP wire that shows science uncovering history. 800 years ago a monk scrubbed the text off a goatskin parchment to write prayers. Nothing unusual there, except the parchment contained writings from a copy of Archimedes' Palimpsest. Now scientists are using x-rays, generated by a particle accelerator, to cause tiny amounts of iron left by the original ink to glow without harming the delicate goatskin parchment. It takes 12 hours to scan one page, then the information is posted online."

Comments

Too cool!

[lisany]

Will overlook the Christian Monk scrubbing scientific things away for religion to say this is really cool. I wonder how many other documents were similarly reused for $whatever. Wonder what it all says...

Explain those "dark" ages

[mangu]

If it was just the text of archimedes, then it would have been destroyed during the dark ages...
Since it was a prayer book, nobody dared

Well, why do you think those ages were "dark" in the first place? It was because they destroyed scientific writings to record prayers. You are inverting cause and effect here.

Dark ages will cease to exist when people have more respect for scientific works than for prayer books.

Re:Explain those "dark" ages

[bcwright]

And the Roman Empire collapsed when religion became the only thing worth worrying about. You cannot just ignore the effect that christianity had in the collapse of the empire.

And of course the Spanish Empire and the British Empire (both heavily - in fact nearly exclusively - Christianized) never existed. :-)

When a society faces serious difficulties, science only comes into the picture when the society faces threats that can be addressed by scientific means - either through the need to compete with other societies, or against nature. Neither of these were case in ancient Rome.

The primary factors in the collapse of the Roman Empire were economic, not religious or scientific. Oversimplifying only slightly, the privileged classes used the tax revenues from the empire to give the people "bread and circuses" and endless extravagent parties for themselves, and nobody got any real work done other than the overtaxed peoples who had been subjugated. Obviously this arrangement can't go on forever, especially when the subjects start becoming restless or when faced with a formidable external enemy - both of which happened to Rome.

In all seriousness, the modern welfare state as practiced in Europe and North America is a modern and thoroughly secular parallel to conditions that contributed to the collapse of Rome.

Re:Explain those "dark" ages

[maxwell demon]

You know that atheism was one of the building blocks of communism?

Re:The proper way to write this is:

[LocalH]

Fuck off, bigot. You're just as bad as Christians who try to force their religion on you, unlike the vast majority of them who don't.

Re:Your argument is not symmetric

[JonathanBoyd]

How shocking! Someone thinks that there is something more important than science! Clearly there must be a problem with them. After all, everything is inferior to science, isn't it?

Now that's possibly not how you intended to come across, but it's how it sounds. Do you really think that science is the be all and end all of life? And do you really think that the monk was writing over the only copy of that document? There were bound to have been others, but time, natural disasters and wars have put an end to them.

As one of my quantum mechanics tutors once said, 'Physics is what we do in our spare time, when there's nothing better to be doing.' Well, something very close to that. And before you decide he didn't care about science or was a nutjob, he was actually a researcher at Oxford and now has a chair at Cambridge, doing quantum computing. Great scientist, but he also had his priorities right.

interesting

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Interesting how the church is given credit for maintaining education and preserving knowledge through the middle ages. And in spite of the Christians burning the Royal Library of Alexandria.

Re:interesting

[zenhkim]

> It certainly is not commanded anywhere in the christian bible to destroy libraries, in fact such things are sinning, since a christian is not supposed to break the laws of the land as commanded by christ in the new testament. Any true christian would be following those commandments.

*Ahem* May I direct your attention to the following passages from the Bible?

Deuteronomy, 5:7 -- Thou shalt have none other gods before me.

Deuteronomy, 5:8 -- Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth

2 Corinthians, 10:5 -- Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ

1 Timothy, 6:20 -- O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called

Deuteronomy, 7:5 -- But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire

Okay, we have our Biblical material -- now let's do a little analysis, shall we?

Deuteronomy, 5:7
- This is the widely recognized First Commandment, as handed down directly from God to Moses and then to the Isrealites (assuming that we disregard the second, revised edition of the Commandments that Moses later received!) and is pretty much self-explanatory: worship Me and ME ONLY!

Deuteronomy, 5:8
- This is the equally famous Second Commandment, which Robert A. Heinlein pointed out has really only one purpose -- to reinforce the first. More specifically, it is a direct attack on pagan religions (read: competitors) which depend heavily on physical, sacred icons of their respective gods and/or goddesses.

2 Corinthians, 10:5
- A loose translation of this passage might read, "Condemning creative thought processes, and every abstract concept that stands in opposition of what is known about God, putting under complete control all [people's] thinking for the sake of worshipping Jesus [and God]."
This is a very shocking instruction to deliver to the faithful: one must abandon all free thought, shun any philosophical inquiry that contradicts Christian doctrine, and assume total domination of everyone's minds for the goal of swelling the ranks of the One True Religion. The most zealous Islamic fundamentalists probably couldn't express their life's mission much better than that [if we substitute "Allah" for "Jesus"]!

1 Timothy, 6:20
- This passage essentially reinforces the above verse: if there is science which is "profane" or "in vain" (read: disrespectful or disobedient towards God) then those who trust in God have to maintain opposition to such science.
For further reflection, consider that the word "science" in this passage was originally "knowledge." If we suppose that what the original scribes meant was "scientific truth" -- i.e.: that which is known to be true based on physical evidence or logical argument -- then divine faith trumps scientific truth every time! Therefore, the Roman Catholic Church should *never* have issued an apology for their persecution and permanent house arrest of Galileo!

Deuteronomy, 7:5
- Here, the word "them" refers to all heathens, heretics, infidels, pagans -- i.e.: the unbelievers. The orders on how to deal with such people (not to mention their sacred icons and holy places of worship) are self-explanatory.

From the Wikipedia entry on the Library of Alexandria:

> The Royal Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt was once the largest library in the world. It is generally thought to have been founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC, during the reign of Ptolemy II of Egypt, after his father had built what would become the first part of the library comp