Reading the Ancient Papyri

quietglow points to this article at Discovery.com, writing: "See here for the story describing the use of some sort of spectronomy to read lots and lots of really important old books. Specifically, lots of Aristotle's lost texts, poems of Sappho etc. Did I mention they are using 'puters to do this? Jeeze."

Re:Other applications

[awa]

From the small amount of information on the release, it does not seem like it will be good for anything but superficial work.

They call it "multi-spectral imaging", so I guess they bounce different kinds (err... wavelengths?) of light off the surface and read the results.

I'm sure they will be able to use it a lot in forensics and evidence recovery, though. Anyhow, your guess is as good as mine :)

Re:Other applications

[dutky]

Yes, similar techniques are used to identify chemicals all the time (and have been for at least the past 30 years). In fact, identification of materials through chemical reaction is only the crudest manner of identifying materials. Try doing some google searches on the spectroscopy, spectrometry, spectral analysis, mass analysis, chromatography and chromotography (note the different spellings: chromo versus chroma). These methods make use of non-chemical atomic and molecular properties (the mass of atoms or molecules, absorbtion or emission of various frequencies of light by atoms' electrons or by certain molecular bonds, etc.) to identify the components of test samples and how the compenents are arranged.

Current Application

[martyb]

Scratch Tickets! :)

Like, come on! If they can do THIS, then they surely can read through that scratch-off coating they put on lottery tickets! Just think of the possibilities!

Amazing!

[ishrat]

Well, there's surely going to be intreresting material for all kinds of tatses.

"Among the works scholars hope to read using the new technology are Aristotle's lost 30 dialogues, philosophical work by Epicurus, erotic poems by Philodemus, Virgilius's lost eclogue, scientific work by Archimedes and lesbian poetry by Sappho."

Philodemus Texts

[xDe]

The homepage of the translation project for the Philodemus texts found at Herculaneum is here [ucla.edu]. No more details of the image enhancement techniques unfortunately, but some nice photos of some of the papyri.

Other applications

[influensa]

Is it possible that this technology could be used for other things besides text? The article says the technique has been applied to detecting chemicals patterns of ink that are undetectable by photography...

But... could a variation or extension of the technique be used to determine the chemical components of something more efficiently than breaking it open and submitting it to different chemical reaction tests?