Stanford Accelerator Uncovers Archimedes' Text 392
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."
Preservation (Score:1, Insightful)
Damn those Christians (Score:1, Insightful)
Proving yet again that Christians can't stand it when someone proves there's more to the world than God.
I kid though
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: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: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:So if I understand right... (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Archimedes employed rudimentary calculus... (Score:2, Insightful)
Thank you for spelling this one out. I agree, most of the losses of classical works were not due to a crusading fundamentalist attitude. Rather, it was a simple matter of recycling the materials which were of little or no interest to anyone. We can blame the organized religion for taking us into a cultural recession of the middle ages (in which the classical works became irrelevant), but that's a whole different matter. I'd say, what the monk did was actually prudent for what had known.
Re:Archimedes employed rudimentary calculus... (Score:1, Insightful)
As for taking the disk apart... that's not analogous. He did what he needed to do to reuse the medium he was working with. You're simply dumb if you can't understand that.
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.
It wasn't Archimedes' original writings. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Archimedes employed rudimentary calculus... (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for the details - that definitely would be a lot less work for a 12C monk than the destroyed transcription work plus the scraping.
Re:Coverup (Score:2, Insightful)
The "reality of the matter" is that an Archimedes text, that took weeks or months to tediously transcribe, was destroyed rather than spend a month of light labor and some goats [slashdot.org] to make new parchment. You can project whatever you want onto how they "felt" about it. The economics show that they had at least no regard for the economics, or that maintaining the Archimedes text was a cost in itself.
Re:Translating now... hold on.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And still no cure for cancer . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, if you want to donate your time and money to cancer research, great. But don't whine because others care about other causes.