Slashdot Log In
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."
Related Stories
[+]
Slashback: New E3, Archimedes Webcast, Dell Wildfires 199 comments
Slashback tonight brings some clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including: a victory for evolution in Kansas, the Stardust Program launched, Lego Mindstorms goes live, continued backlash on the new E3, Archimedes gets a webcast, another Dell bursts into flame, and a possible RIAA silver bullet Read on for details.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Translating now... hold on.... (Score:4, Funny)
"What is Six Times... NINE?"
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;
}
Parent
Re:Translating now... hold on.... (Score:5, Funny)
"F1RSTUS P0STU5"
Parent
Re:Translating now... hold on.... (Score:5, Informative)
OK genius, let's hear your super-enlightened, non-american rendition of the joke. Latin is generally the only ancient language well known enough that one can appropriate a couple word endings, apply them to modern language, and still get the point across. Yes, it would have been more accurate if he'd had Archimedes writing ancient greek, you pedantic troll, but due to lack of greek characters on our keyboards, and the fact that almost nobody would be able to read it, it would no longer be an effective joke because no one would get it.
Parent
Translation, page two... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Translating now... hold on.... (Score:5, Funny)
It's probably more like:
Parent
Re:Translating now... hold on.... (Score:4, Funny)
And buildings and stonework so smart.
They distinguished with poise
The men from the boys,
And used crowbars to keep them apart.
Parent
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.
Parent
DCMA (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Being done (Score:4, Interesting)
The funny thing is, I use a synchrotron regularly to study protein crystals, and we're always freaked out about radiation damage to our proteins. All of our crystals are frozen in liquid nitrogen, and kept cool in a cryojet while collecting data. (At room temperature, crystals fry extremely fast.) I'm curious how they protected the document while doing this study. It wouldn't be hard to burn it, unless they're using extremely short exposure times or a very diffuse beam.
Parent
Re:Being done (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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
Parent
You laugh, but it's true... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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.
Parent
Will it contain the complete documentation on... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Obligatory "Half Baked" parody (Score:5, Funny)
"Well, yeah, uh I guess..."
"But have you ever read Slashdot -- on weed."
Parent
If Archimedes was alive today... (Score:5, Funny)
(Apologies to Pratchett fans)
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:X-Ray Fluroescence (Score:4, Funny)
This story deserves telling in the full, especially on a site like Slashdot where people have the background to appreciate the nuances involved.
You must be new here.
Parent
I just hope ... (Score:4, Informative)
Dead Sea scrolls [wikipedia.org]
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.
Parent
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)
Perspective (Score:5, Funny)
I am waiting for the announcement... (Score:4, Funny)
From the hidden writings of archmides to the hidden messages found in the back of euro notes. Ancient tunnels under ancient cities open up to reveal secrets nobody has seen for millenia...
Until NOW...
Coming soon to a theater near you,
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.
Parent
Re:Damn those Christians (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Damn those Christians (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of twelfth-century scholars in the West and in the Greek East who read and appreciated ancient Greek and Latin texts; and the vast majority of these were churchmen. Their reaction to a 12th-century monk scraping off Archimedes and copying down a prayer-book would be much like ours, as in "Hey Rube, WTF are you doing?" But well, not everybody is educated to the same degree, and a poor monastery may indeed find the parchment more valuable than the indeciphrable gibberish written on it.
For those of you who can't grasp the concept, it's like when ma threw out all the old baseball cards; you fought it at the time, and twenty years later you know the retail value of what you lost. Ignorance spans all periods; but in spite of what crap 19th-century progressivism may make you think about the middle ages, medieval people didn't hate and seek to destroy antique texts; quite the contrary, they liked them, and they found ancient science very useful. Remember this text was copied in the 10th century by a monk as well.
Parent
Re:Damn those Christians (Score:4, Funny)
Of course if most people's mums hadn't thrown out their baseball cards they wouldn't have been worth much.
Parent
Re:Damn those Christians (Score:4, Informative)
Second, you're assuming this is a western manuscript, when some of the other contextual marks suggest that in fact it was produced in Constantinople. Basilean monks did know Greek. And in the west, it depends on where you're talking about. Spain was an active center for Greek/Arabic/Hebrew -> Latin translation of texts, especially scientific ones. Southern Italy had large communities of Greek speaking peoples. Hell, even the bishop of Lincoln and not a bad scientist in his own right, Robert Grosseteste, knew and translated ancient Greek.
Something abstract such as "The Church" is not an historical agent; individual churchmen can be.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Could it really have been that important... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
a 12th century recipe for parchment (Score:5, Informative)
Take goatskins ( 1 ) and stand them in water for a day and a night. Take them and wash them till the water runs clear ( 2 ). Take an entirely new bath and place therein old lime (calcem non recentem) and water mixing well together to for a thick cloudy liquor. Place the skins into this, folding them on the flesh side. Move them with a pole two or three times each day, leaving them for eight days (and twice as long in winter) ( 3 ). Next you must withdraw the skins and unhair them ( 4 ). Pour off the contents of the bath and repeat the process using the same quantities, placing the skins in the lime liquor, and moving them once each day over eight days as before ( 5 ). Then take them out and wash them well until the water runs quite clean ( 6 ). Place them in another bath with clean water and leave them for two days ( 7 ). Then take them out, attach the cords and tie them to the circular frame ( 8 ). Dry, then shave them with a sharp knife, after which, leave for two days out of the sun...( 9 ) moisten with water and rub the flesh side with powdered pumice ( 10 ). After two days wet it again by sprinkling with a little water and fully clean the flesh side with pumice so as to make it quite wet again ( 11 ). Then tighten up the cords, equalise the tension so that the sheet will become permanent. Once the sheets are dry, nothing further remains to be done ( 12 ). Parchment, the recipe [dedas.com]
Parent
Re:Preservation (Score:5, Funny)
hey frank, STOP THE BEAM!!!!
Parent
Re:Coverup (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Coverup (Score:4, Insightful)
So what do you call all the Platonists and Aristotelian Catholic philosophers? St. Augustine was a definite Platonist, using it to explain Christian ideology in a manner that (attempted to be) rational. Same with St. Aquinas, who was an Aristotelian and hailed as the greatest philosopher of the Catholic Church. Whatever you might think of their Scholasticism, they were trying to be as hyper-rational and logical as one could imagine. Yes, they had definite agendas in mind (i.e. justifying Christianity), but you can't just dismiss them and say that Grecoroman learning and rationality "disappeared."
If you know any of your art history, Grecoroman culture was also preserved to a certain extent (hence, Romanesque art), but it was later pushed aside by more German and French styles (Gothic), which were in vogue because people liked windows (which Romanesque styles didn't really support) in their Cathedrals.
Parent
Re:Coverup (Score:5, Informative)
Although it's true that there does appear to have been periods when medieval society was relatively affluent - the 12th Century in particular - famine was never far away and the grinding poverty should not be underestimated. There are even accounts of periods where it is remarked by chroniclers that it was not uncommon for peasants to own just a single garment or even none at all. This cannot have been the norm as otherwise the chroniclers would not have remarked upon it, but nevertheless, in a society which is living as close to the edge as medieval europe managed to do it is not suprising that vellum for books was a costly and rare resource
Parent
Re:Coverup (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would scraped and dried animal skins be rare and costly in the 12th Century farming economy where these monks lived?
You start your post off by showing that your just making stuff up, this is good because it lets any reader who knows anything about 12th century Europe, and especialy anyone with a college degree (I'm pretty sure most schools require Medieval Lit as a GE requirement), know that you dont have a clue. Unfortunately some mod seems to have fallen into the "with out clue" category. You see parchment was incredibly expencive in the Middle Ages. To put it into perspective, it took around 200 sheep to make 1 bible. And while your right that it was a farming economy, the nobles owned all the land, and all of the cattle on the land. Only the wealthy could afford even a single book. Even into the 13th and 14th centuries the largest libraries had at most 1000 books.
I don't buy the "necessity" of erasing Archimedes' works, no matter how often they repeat that story to elementary schoolers learning the definition of "palimpset", or how many of us grow up to write stories for newspapers repeating it.
Sure it wasn't "necessary" to erase Archimedes work, but it was definately much cheeper. Imaginge a new notebook cost somewhere in the area of $5k, and you had to write a book, would you a) Buy a new notebook or b) Erase some less important writings. Of course you go on to suggest that the christian monk erased it because it was evil science. But considering every single work of writing that we have that originated durring or before the dark ages was writen by someone who had church sanctioned training? In fact, beyond that, just about everything from the Roman era and earlier can be attibuted to Irish monks who were very much religious. And then there is the the book in question that had Archimedes on it, and oh yeah, it was a monk who wrote that as well. Are you starting to see how your argument doesn't make much sense? The reality of the matter is, some monastery felt a prayer book was a more important use of the parchment than the writings or Archimedes, writings that no doubt existed in other places at the time. Writings that were probably all destroyed by fires and other natural causes.
Parent