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Stanford Accelerator Uncovers Archimedes' Text
Posted by
timothy
on Sat May 21, 2005 11:49 PM
from the 2-quarts-olive-oil-1-bunch-grapes-goat-milk dept.
from the 2-quarts-olive-oil-1-bunch-grapes-goat-milk dept.
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."
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Being done (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Being done (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the idea seems to have started about 15-20 years ago, of using various attributes to read xsuch documents. A technique was developed in the UK - I believe it was called ESDA - which used magnetic fields and extremely fine iron dust to detect indentations left in paper when layers further up had been written on.
The technique hit the news during the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad fiasco, when it was demonstrated, by use of this technique, that "confessions" had been altered after they had been signed by the supposed confessee. It led to a lot of cases being thrown out on appeal, and a subsequent inquiry as to what had happened.
Other popular techniques include the use of various frequencies of light and/or UV, to reveal marks that wouldn't otherwise be visible, which is how some of the more "legible" parts of the palimpset of Archimedes were photographed prior to this.
Chemical techniques exist, but archaeologists are wary of anything that can damage an ancient find, unless it is so far beyond salvage that preservation of the original would be impossible anyway. Even then, they don't like it and try to avoid it.
May I Be the First ... (Score:5, Funny)
I for one (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I for one (Score:5, Funny)
Next thing you know someone will start trying to distribute the stuff on some website
Sad that he died. Good thing he reincarnated (Score:5, Funny)
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.
So if I understand right... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:So if I understand right... (Score:5, Funny)
Woudln't that be some crazy shit yo?
If Archimedes was alive today... (Score:5, Funny)
(Apologies to Pratchett fans)
X-Ray Fluroescence (Score:5, Interesting)
(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.
Re:X-Ray Fluroescence (Score:5, Funny)
M$Winblows is teh sux. The gummint is out to get us. Dumbya sux0rs. Gentoo is l337. Star Wars rules.
Yup, we appreciate it.
Re:X-Ray Fluroescence (Score:5, Funny)
I'll probably get modded down for this spelling nitpick, but I think you mean "palimpsests". I misspelled that word before a national audience in 1992, don't want you to make the same mistake in this international forum.
Archimedes employed rudimentary calculus... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Archimedes employed rudimentary calculus... (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of monks basically spent their lives copying and recopying texts. There wasn't anything else to do with them, really. Without them, a lot more information would have been lost. ALL of Archimedes works would probably be gone. With them would likely go Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, etc. etc. Only the rich Arab kingdoms preserved more knowledge through the Middle Ages than Christian Monks, and even there, it was religion at work, not society in general.
A lot was lost in that time. Libraries and monastaries burned down, taking God knows how much knowledge with them. Some books were lost, damaged by accident, and some were even destroyed intentionally, but imagine how much survived, and remember that it would all have been gone without the Christian and Muslim clergy that preserved them. The Rennaisance would have been a blank slate without them. We'd be lucky to have rediscovered all of it by now. Heck, we probably wouldn't even have realized it was lost yet.
I think this situation comes down to pure carelessness. A monk needed parchment, and the only way to get it was to erase something. Because they spend their lives copying text, many monasteries would have multiple copies of any given text on hand. I think it most likely that the monk assumed another copy existed, and that one could be sacrificed for the need at hand, and be replaced later when paper was available.
Think of it sort of like back in the old days when floppy disks served most people's removable storage needs, and there never seemed to be enough of them around. You needed an extra 250 kb on your hard drive (back when that was a lot of space), and you noticed an old document you hadn't touched in months. "Oh, yeah, I've got that backed up on a floppy disk, I can delete that." So you do. What happens later when you realize that you didn't have it backed up, but that you'd erased the disk you'd stored it on in order to back up some other file? You've just lost that file.
After this project . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Big Toys for Big Boys (Score:5, Interesting)
He developed the claim into The Claw [drexel.edu], 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.
As it turns out... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
NOVA torrent (Score:5, Informative)
You can grab a torrent from digitaldistractions [digitaldistractions.org].
Rambaldi (Score:5, Funny)
A website with detailed information (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Damn those Christians (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Damn those Christians (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Translating now... hold on.... (Score:5, Funny)
#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;
}
Re:Could it really have been that important... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Preservation (Score:5, Funny)
hey frank, STOP THE BEAM!!!!