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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."
I heard an interview with one of the scientists on the CBC. He said that there was possibly some new stuff that we didn't know about. In particular, there seems to be a section which tries to figure out how many different ways there are to solve a problem. So it seems that Archimedes was wondering about combinotorics.
This is a fairly obscure term, so most non-specialists don't know it. A "palimpsest" is a piece of parchment that has been re-used. This particular palimpsest contains stuff by Archimedes; and so it is called "the Archimedes Palimpsest." It is not "a copy of Archimedes' Palimpsest," it is THE Archimedes palimpsest.
Finally I can use my LIS nerdiness on slashdot, bastion of computer, science, and math nerds.
The summary says "Nothing unusual there, except the parchment contained writings from a copy of Archimedes' Palimpsest," using the term palimpsest incorrectly. By calling it "a copy of Archimedes' Palimpsest," the summary implies that Archimedes wrote something--a Palimpsest--which was then copied and found on this random scrap of parchment.
In actuality, a palimpsest is a parchment already inscribed where the original ink was scraped off for reuse. Parchment, being the skin of a calf, sheep or goat, was in the Middle Ages very expensive (there is an argument that the Gutenberg revolution was fuelled more by cheap paper then by the printing press, but I digress). It was not discarded, but often reused by monks in Medieval scriptoria.
Many works from antiquity, once thought lost, are found serendipitously through palimpsest, many of them pagan works overwritten in favour of Christian ones. So, what we have found is a palimpsest of a manuscript copy of Archimedes, not a copy of Archimedes' palimpsest
a hard line between the academics and the "public"...
The hard line is in your head. Scientists are part of "the public".
The only thing stopping you from becoming a scientist is a few years of education. During this process you will not only learn the important stuff but also more importantly you will learn where and how to find the knowledge you need. There's no conspiracy to keep information from you, but it seems that you want to know things without actually having to learn them. No one is obligated to pour knowledge into your head. That stopped once mom and dad got fed up of answering your questions as a toddler. You can find all of those "obscure science magazines" at any decent library, or online. Perhaps you would also like to complain about scientists writing in "obscure technical jargon" in these magazines as well?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Preliminary translations will take months - once the have deciphered the images, this isn't just a case of running it through Bablefish.
The first step is character recognition - a human has to examine each character and determine what it is. Once that's done, entire words can be examined to see if they actually are words. (Foulups in the character recognition can pridace wgrds taat kjflas moue aljefh.) Once *that* is done, the words can be strung together and sentences roughly translated - if they orange bluebird, then they have to redo some of the earlier steps. Worse yet, the meaninings of the various Greek words don't map directly into English - so each of the words and possible meanings have to be compared and considered in context. (A single sentence can possible have anywhere from 2-3 to 5 or more possible meanings.) That process has to be repeated again at (what would correspond to) the paragraph level, and then again at the chapter and book levels.
I should point out that what I posted was my own incredibly rough translation from the Greek, not a translation by the Archimedes Palimpsest folks. There are good reasons they don't want to officially translate it yet - in classics, you tend to publish a complete transcription and a complete translation together (see the Oxyrrhynchus Papyri for hundreds of examples) months or even years after announcing what you *think* you've found. I tried reading those photos, and they are illegible to me - someone who, while not an expert at papyrology or paleography, knows even to usually get the gist of a text from a close reading.
The text I selected is very reminiscent of something by Archimedes we do have, his book on Conics. It may even be a passage we already had. Even if it is, though, it would still be important because it would help to establish the authorship of other texts bound in the same book (more or less, it's a lot more complicated than that), and provide another exemplar that may preserve superior readings to the MS tradition we have. Remember, by the way, that this is not a manuscript, but is rather a much later copy, probably used in a library that eventually came into the possession of a religious community that didn't have the money to buy their own vellum.
For the conics stuff, and more selections from Archimedes, see *Greek Mathematical Works II: Aristarchus to Pappus of Alexandria*, translated by Ivor Thomas: Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1941,1993. This selection also includes some of Archimedes' more theoretical stuff, like the *Sand-Reckoner* (method of expressing large numbers by a system somewhat, but not quite, like scientific notation). There was never any doubt that Archimedes was doing first-rate hard math; the scary thing the palimpsest texts seem to be teaching us is that he had a much firmer grasp of advanced mathematical theory than we thought was possible in the ancient world.