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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."
"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.
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.
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.
how can anyone really get a feel for the importance of this discovery if they don't post some of the translated texts? Oh, I forgot- We're supposed to accept the fact that it's important because they say so
Well, unless you have a background in Archimedes, mathematics, or ancient greek (all the domain of "they"), I don't think you're going to be able to understand the importance of even a translated work. Despite your protestations, all opinions on this kind of thing aren't equal. People who have these backgrounds are much more qualified to interpret what this stuff means (and no, that certainly doesn't include me by any stretch of the imagination). I find this attitude kind of strange. You don't actually want to learn any of these subjects, but expect to be able to just read a 2200 year old text and instantly understand the context of the work without listening to what other more qualified people have to say. Would you expect someone who doesn't know C++ to be able to instantly know what the source code of a program means without knowing C++?
It's more than a little funny that you're critisizing the researchers for publishing the raw scans of the data, (so anyone in the world can study them), but not instantly freely publishing the fruits of their labor. There is often a quite valid criticism of researchers hoarding the raw data of vitally important pieces for years. I believe the dead sea scrolls are a prime example of this. But that's not the case here. If you really wanted to you could learn greek and translate the thing yourself. That's the only "barrier" that exists here.
There's also another important point to make here. Have you seen the scanned texts? Even with the special x-ray enhanced versions it's a big mess. It's not as if this is a 20 minute job via google translation. This kind of thing is generally done very slowly with groups of people working together. It's also a competition between all these groups to make discoveries. There was a really good Nova special on the text a few months ago, and translating the texts was a very painstaking process.
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!"
Well, science has long used scientific journals to communicate polished ideas to other people in the field. The papers are written for a specialized audience, so the general public likely wouldn't understand the vast majority of them since it's assumed everyone has a general background in the area of expertise. The main barrier of these journals isn't the obscurity of them. With a little less laziness you could easily go and find the names of them. The main barrier is just expense. It costs a lot of money to subscribe to these journals, so your average Joe just can't afford them. There's a movement to change this because scientists don't like spending thousands of dollars on journals anymore than average Joe does, so many people are moving towards publishing on the internet.
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?
Science takes time, and research isn't free. At some point I'm sure that a concensus translation will be available. It might be even made available for free, but I would have no problem with charging money for it. Why should they be expected to give away thousands of hours of work for free? You seem to have this attitude that if it's not published on the front page of the New York Times, then the scientists are trying to hide something.
I have the same complaint about PBS and the recent special on "String Theory"- These science programs (which are admittedly better than nothing) work
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