Archimedes manuscript yields secrets under X-ray gaze

PhysOrg.com ^ | 20 May 2005 | Staff

[Doctor Stochastic]

I would like to recomment The Forgotton Revolution by Lucio Russo as another book presenting ancient science from a different perspective.

Quoting from the Introduction: "Those who engage in defending scientific rationality against the waves that buffet it from many directions would do well to be forearmed with the awarness that this is a battle that was lost once, with consequences that affected every aspect of civilization for a thousand years and more."

Perhaps the author really likes ancient studies. He makes good points though. Also, the book has lots of interesting information.

[PatrickHenry]

I would like to recomment The Forgotton Revolution by Lucio Russo as another book presenting ancient science from a different perspective.

Thanks. If I run across it, I'll get it.

[AmishDude]

If hundreds of thousands of armed men roamed across North American killing, raping, looting and pillaging, not just for years but for decades stretching on into centuries, how many books would be left in America?

As many as the Detroit public libraries?

[Ditto]

Archimedes hasn't had a good thread lately."

Now that you mention it, I guess he has been getting screwed.

[SouthParkRepublican]

"Obviously it was. The prayer book was oh so more important for posterity than the collected works of one of the greatest mechanical geniuses to ever to walk the Earth."

To be fair, during the period the manuscript was recycled, there was little interest in preserving classic texts other than within religious orders. During the renaissance, when people like Petrarch began to acquire and translate ancient works, the most common place to find them was in churches and monasteries.

Little merit or concern for it's preservation may have been the result of another extant manuscript on hand. (Let's remember that this copy was copied from yet another copy). It is also plausible that had this been kept intact as a work of Archimedes, it would have been sold off to some minor historian and lost forever.

[6SJ7]

Imagine if, for everything you want to write down, you had to handcraft the paper. In the case of vellum, that means killing and skinning a goat, tanning the hide, scraping off the hair, further scraping off all the fats, polishing the skin with pumice, bleaching it white if the goat had spots, and trimming it out. Now you have ONE page to write on.

Wouldn't it be easier to go to Staples and pickup some copying paper? ;-)

[dsc]

"The Aztecs told the people if priests didn't rip out human hearts daily...Error is the natural state of mankind."

That's a hughly series error, for sure, but it is only one error.

I get the sense that if the Aztec cognosphere was composed of X percent truth, Y percent error, and Z times infinity ignorance, our modern cognosphere may be composed of (arbitrarily, solely to illustrate my point) 100X truth, 1,000Y error, and Z times infinity minus 99X ignorance.

That is, it seems to me that the percentage of error in our cognosphere today is disproportionately large, compared to past eras. We have scratched away at the surface of ignorance, adding mainly to our store of scientific knowledge, while at the same time accreting a huge load of ideas (primarily in non-scientific fields) that are just dead wrong.

[SunkenCiv]

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