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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 rather doubt he did it because he had anything against science. But because back then materials were a bit scarcer than our modern 'go to the store' times of plenty.
"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days, bribery and corruption
are common, children no longer obey their parents and the end of the
world is evidently approaching." --Archimedes goatskin, 210 B.C.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
And besides as far as most were concerned at the time, this is old stuff from a dead civilization, make room for our new more modern method.
More likely, he simply didn't understand what was written there. The monks might have been better educated than most of the other folks, yet not that many of them knew Greek. Things get forgotten pretty fast if noone understands them.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Dude, the "monk" wrote in Greek, in Constantinople. Whether it actually was a "monk", or just a scribe, or a priest, who scrubbed and copied that thing, is a different story. Anyway, 1229 Constantinople was a pretty rough place, and the Greek clergy wouldn't have been terribly rich; they've never been very interested in pagan Greek literature in the Eastern Church anyway. Now, in Paris, at the same time, there are plenty of priests, monks and friars who would be very eager to see what that text said (at least in translation). And there were active centers of Greek-Latin and Arabic-Latin translation of scientific texts at the time, especially in Spain.
The dark ages were more a result of the collapse of the Roman Empire. The monks were among the few people who kept education going. The monasteries of Ireland were one of the few bastions of learning and knowledge during the Dark Ages.
If there's one thing that drives me nuts about science these days is that there seems to be such an effort to maintain a hard line between the academics and the "public"...
Admittedly, they could be buried deep in the website somewhere were I coudn't find them... or, maybe they are still working on official translations and don't want to put anything that's inaccurate on the site, but I doubt it- Instead, the passages the translated probably sound boring and so they'll publish it in obscure science journals- All the public will hear about (I fear) is "Look! We're so cool for recovering the pampliset!"
True, they are cool for translating this thing, I agree- But why not give the public a better pathway into understanding the meaning of this find by showing us the money? Would it really kill them? Maybe we, the public, can appreciate the inherent value of even some obscure, boring-sounding passages?
I have the same complaint about PBS and the recent special on "String Theory"- These science programs (which are admittedly better than nothing) work so hard to be accessible that they put a subconscious barrier between "average people" and "scientists" that I think becomes self defeating to the advancement of science- A PBS program on String Theory would be far more awesome if there was an attempt made to make the program a gateway into the science, giving a few basic formulas and some feeling for the real science. Sure, the formulas might seem a bit boring and basic and maybe some folks won't take the mental effort to try to follow along... but a small peek "under the hood" (even if you don't understand it) would still be far more interesting than a bunch of bland generalizations that just tells you they don't think people really care about the important details. </rant>
That would be a valid argument for not deleting a hard drive that had belonged to Stephen Hawking. In my own hard drive, any file I delete to replace with another leaves a message to the future about which things are considered important today.
The problem with religious people is that they consider that anything is inferior when compared to religion. A text written by one of the most outstanding scientists of antiquity being deleted by an unknown medieval monk is an excellent argument against religion in general. Think if some student of physics deleted the original manuscript of one of the books in the Bible to write a simple exercise in mechanics.
This period was well in the dark ages, saving old stuff wasn't the goal or even seemed that valuable.
As I mentioned in another post, that's exactly the reason why those ages were "dark". They had the wrong idea on which information is valuable. By ignoring this world and concentrating instead on another future life, they created a period of one thousand years of some of the worst suffering humanity has ever seen.
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. When religious leaders started killing scientists and burning their libraries, it's very hypocritical to call the churches "bastions of learning and knowledge".
One thing to keep in mind is that just because this palimpset is the only copy that we know about today, doesn't mean that there weren't other copies extant at the time it was reused; and at the time it was probably not such a unique text. Remember that Constantinople (now Istanbul) had just been sacked in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and things were still quite chaotic. At that time (1229) the city would still have been controlled by the Crusaders (it was not retaken by the Byzantines until 1261). In addition the city was sacked again in 1453 when it was conquered by the Turks, after which the Church and Byzantine civilization in general underwent systematic persecution and suppression. All of these disruptions have caused the loss of huge numbers of texts.
The Archimedes manuscript is not the only manuscript reused to make the prayer book - there are several other texts that were also used, including some others which are now also our only remaining copies. These include both pagan writers and other Christian texts. Again, we have little reason to think that any of these would have been considered particularly unique at the time.
Events have not been kind to ancient manuscripts generally; what we have left today is only a relatively small sampling of what was originally a vast ancient literature. The Church has often been blamed, and in the case of pagan religious texts there may be some justice in the charge; but what have doubtless been much bigger culprits for the bulk of the destruction have been marauding armies, fires, floods, and simply the ravages of time as old manuscripts decay without having been copied.
What you say is true, for the Catholic church, and (unfortunately) may churches today. However, there are many of us Christans who follow in the footsteps of those who were also burned at the stake, tortured and killed by this "Christianity" you speak of. Just remember, just because someone calls them self a Christian, does not mean they follow the commands and wishes of Jesus Christ.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
Atheism. When's the last time you heard of an atheist going to a church and opening fire?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's thanks to those "love letters to God" you disdain that the palimpset survived at all.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
The advance of Roman hegemony over the Hellenistic world in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC had a lot more to do with the stagnation of science in the west than the rise of Christianity 500 years later. In terms of the ancient scientists worth knowing about, most of them lived in the Hellenistic world in the 4th - 2nd centuries BC. There is a generation or three of Alexandrines worth knowing about from the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD (Heron, Ptolemy, Galen) etc, but for the most part, the western science died not from the mob, but on the swordpoint of the Roman legionnaire, which incidentally, was where Archimedes met his end. If necessity is the mother of invention, liberty is the midwife.
The governments of China and Russia (during the communist era) persecuted, imprisoned and killed many Jehovahs Wittnesses. Presumably, these athiests did the same with people of other religions.
Isn't the whole point of "sinning", that sometimes through Free Will people do things that God would have preferred them to do otherwise, or not do at all? In which case, you have no idea whether God wanted that monk to destroy mathematical knowledge or not, and it's only the deadly sin of Pride that makes you think you understand God's plans regarding this issue.
Umm, there's several theories on how the Library was destroyed. Julius Ceasar being the earliest, a Christian Emperor in the middle, and the Muslim Conquest being the latest. In other words, we don't know how it burned, or even when - so let's not blame whoever we happen not to like at the moment, k?
Then that is a problem with those particular people, and not "Christianity" as a whole. I'm not a religious person myself, but I've known many such people and none of them ever forced any belief on anyone. Your anecdote means nothing, and neither does mine. It just shows that you painting "Christianity" with that broad brush is just the same as "Christians" painting all of those who aren't "Christian" with the same brush.
FC Closer
Praising the Church for preserving ancient knowledges is like praising Hitler for preserving a few Jews. The destruction that the palimpset survived was the intentional destruction of ancient writing by the Church. It is completely ridiculous that the Church gets so much credit for saving the few classics that we have by over-writing them, which was meant as destruction, instead of any blame for the greater mass that were lost forever when the Church burned them. Anything from the ancients that survived the Dark Ages was not because the Church preserved them, but simply because they failed to complete their plan to burn all the ancient books, just as Hitler failed to complete his plan to burn all the European Jews.
Screw Godwin's Law. This is one of those rare times when the comparison is appropriate.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.