s/thread/screw/
ROFL!!!!
Posted on 05/21/2005 4:14:32 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
For five days in May, the ancient collided with the ultra-modern at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), bringing brilliant, long-hidden ideas to light with brilliant X-ray light. A synchrotron X-ray beam at the Department of Energy facility illuminated an obscured work - erased, written over and even painted over - of ancient mathematical genius Archimedes, born 287 B.C. in Sicily.
Archimedes' amazingly advanced ideas have been lost and found several times throughout the ages. Now scientists are employing modern technology — including X-ray fluorescence at SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) — to completely read the Archimedes Palimpsest, the only source for at least two previously unknown treatises thought out by Archimedes in the third century B.C.
"Synchrotron light has revolutionized our view into the sub-microscopic world and has contributed to major innovations in fields including solid-state physics, materials science, environmental sciences, structural biology and chemistry," explained Keith Hodgson, director of SSRL. "Synchrotron light is created when electrons traveling the speed of light take a curved path around a storage ring — emitting electromagnetic light in X-ray through infrared wavelengths. The resulting light beam has characteristics that make it ideal for revealing the intricate architecture and utility of many kinds of matter—in this case, the previously hidden work of one of the founding fathers of all science."
Legend has it that Archimedes, upon displacing water in his tub and realizing he had found a way to measure volumes, leapt out of the bath and ran naked through the streets shouting 'Eureka!' (I have found it!). He also conceived a way to calculate pi, the mathematical equivalent of inventing the wheel. Archimedes did not just take steps toward calculus, as formerly believed; he actually created and used calculus methods, the basis for modern engineering and science. He is also credited with designing fearsome war weapons, such as claws that pulled attacking boats from the water.
The palimpsest is a 1,000-year-old parchment made of goatskin containing Archimedes' work as laboriously copied down by a 10th century scribe. Two centuries later, with parchment harder to come by, the ink was erased with a weak acid (like lemon juice) and scraped off with a pumice stone, and the parchment was written on again to make a prayer book.
One of the most intractable problems was seeing the original ink on four pages that had been painted over with Byzantine religious images, which turned out to be 20th century forgeries intended to increase the value of the prayer book.
An X-ray system recently showed it was possible to penetrate the paintings. At SSRL, the assembled team practically jumped with excitement as the original writing beneath one painting was unveiled on the computer screens. Archimedes' hidden text deals with floating bodies and the equilibrium of planes.
Three pages of the palimpsest recently traveled to Menlo Park because SSRL staff scientist Uwe Bergmann had his own Eureka moment in 2003. From a magazine article, he learned the inks used for both the Archimedes and religious texts contained iron pigment.
"I read that and I immediately thought we should be able to read the parchment with X-rays," Bergmann said. "That's what we do at SSRL — we measure iron in proteins — extremely small concentrations of iron."
The intense synchrotron X-ray beam induces X-ray fluorescence — X-ray light tuned to a specific energy causes the remaining traces of iron ink to fluoresce. A detector catches the fluorescence and renders the 2,000-year-old thoughts of the mathematical genius readable. Like an old dot-matrix printer, the detector builds an image dot by dot, mapping out each speck of iron-containing ink. Where the two texts overlap (they are written perpendicular to each other) the iron signal is stronger , which may allow researchers to separate the two texts.
"The Archimedes ink is only one to two microns thick — there's hardly anything there," said Abigail Quandt, head of book and paper conservation at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which is leading a broad public and private effort involving experts from diverse fields to study and conserve the manuscript.
"This is for broad public interest, to reveal the mind of the greatest mathematician of antiquity," said Will Noel, curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum. "There's nothing more important and more romantic in the history of ancient science and currently in the history of medieval manuscripts. We're discovering new readings of Archimedes."
Much of the manuscript has been read by visible or ultraviolet light during six years of painstaking analysis and restoration. For the rest, the main tools are X-ray fluorescence, optical character recognition (teaching a computer to recognize fragments of ancient Greek symbols) and multi-spectral imaging (using light of different wavelengths). Ametek-Edax of New Jersey makes an X-ray fluorescence system—which first revealed hints of text under the forged paintings — that could be installed at the museum to analyze pages that are too fragile to travel.
Another page studied at SSRL contains an introduction to the only copy of Archimedes' Method of Mechanical Theorems, where the genius showed how he arrived at his theorems. As ancient Greek cursive — mingled with the religious text — appeared on a screen, Stanford Classics and Philosophy Professor Reviel Netz began decoding the Archimedes text. He uses the four layers of text from the synchrotron images, which simultaneously register the scientific and religious texts from both sides of the parchment page, and multi-spectral images to build a picture of the 10th century pen strokes and rule out the curves and lines made two centuries later.
"I don't think X-rays will make invisible material simply visible," Netz said. "It will add a layer of information combined with others that will enable me to read the text."
An anonymous private collector who bought the palimpsest for $2 million at auction in 1998 has loaned the manuscript to the Walters Art Museum and is funding the studies. Researchers also come from RB Toth Associates, Rochester Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, ConocoPhillips and Rutgers University.
The team plans to decipher the entire text, catalog and transcribe it digitally, and create an interactive DVD. They will then exhibit a few pages in 2008 before returning the irreplaceable parchment to its owner.
It didn't take long before the mindset was established that doing things the Classical way was the right way. Any deviation from what the Greeks/Romans had done was considered in poor form. This was what renaissance men like Da Vinci sought to counter.
Those who hate religion often conveniently forget that it was the Church (and ironically the Moslems) that preserved the knowledge of the ancients. The Church was also the principal patron of those that today we would call scientists. You could fill a book with stupid things that were done in the name of religion but a fair assesment, I believe, would show that the Church aided rather than hindered the growth of knowledge during the dark ages.
The role of the Church in many areas was similarly two-edged. I have spent many years playing in semi-professional and professional orchestras. I know that the early Church squelched music for religious purposes and it took many years for it to embrace music. BUT, when it did it spawned great works, of course, especially Bach. All of our current clasical music heritage can be traced back to church origins. OTOH what would our music be like if the church had embraced it earlier? Maybe better and maybe worse. I wish that the Dark Age Church had allowed more musical expression earlier, even at the cost of losing Bach et al., because I think political artistic restriction is bad. What would things be like if there had been a Hildegard von Bingen 1000 earlier?
Of course it wouldn't have been the Dark Ages if there wasn't repression, would it?
(There are always things to contemplate).
But could either of them read Greek? Aquinas could not, although he had the benefit of particulary good translations.
In fairness to the claims being made on this thread, they are both a century after this particular book was apparently scrubbed. And the particular owner may have been in the situation you describe. But the idea that no one in the high middle ages was learned enough to appreciate it is simply a completely false prejudice of ignorant people in modern times, sneering at medievals as such.
There was plenty of ignorance in that day. There is plenty of ignorance now (look at history tests of college freshman if you doubt it - and the tabloids, and pop culture, and the third world, and Islamic nutjobs, etc etc). There were peaks of learning then as there are peaks of learning now.
"He preferred to take cold baths, then the whim hit him. "I think I'll take a hot bath." he found a missing appendage . . . and the rest is history. :-)"
By your logic, it must have been a cold bath, otherwise as this mysterious appendage began to grow his volume would have increased and he'd still be Eurekaless to this day.
s/thread/screw/
ROFL!!!!
Land of the Flea and Home of the Plague.
We have Hanta virus too.
So you could screw up enough courage to leverage this into a wedge document?
[probably a dead link, from the hard drive files]The Mystery of ArchimedesIn 1998, an anonymous collector bought the book at auction -- not for its looks, but for what's hidden inside: the mathematical genius of the ancient Greek Archimedes. It is believed that Archimedes wrote his original theories about 300 years before Jesus was born. Then, around the year 1000 A.D., his writings were copied into the book that the collector bought... [A]round 1200 AD, a monk took the book, scraped off the original ink and re-used the pages for a prayer book.
by Ned Potter
October 20, 2000
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
A Mummy's Bequest: Poems From a MasterWritten in the third century B.C., the poems on the papyrus appear to be 112 collected works of Posidippus of Pella, a prominent writer of epigrams, and constitute what scholars say is the oldest surviving example of a Greek poetry book... The papyrus scroll held one striking surprise: the absence of erotic verse. Judging by his previously known poems, mainly preserved in an anthology from about 100 B.C., Posidippus had a lusty interest in sex.
by John Noble Wilford
Nov 26, 2002
Google search worked better:
Archaeologists discover alma mater of Archimedes
The Los Angeles Times | May 9, 2004 | Thomas Maugh II
Posted on 05/09/2004 11:03:56 PM PDT by SteveH
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1132565/posts?page=2
Take out history's top 300 thinkers, and human society would become a liberal's dream -- ignorant tribes living marginally off the land, poor, hopeless victims of nature...
Exactly..then add Plague and colder weather on top of that to get an even better picture.
This is really great news !!
Who copied it out in the first place? Oh, that's right...
Wrong. Christianity has always been musical. See Ephesians 5:19.
OTOH what would our music be like if the church had embraced it earlier? Maybe better and maybe worse. I wish that the Dark Age Church had allowed more musical expression earlier, even at the cost of losing Bach et al., because I think political artistic restriction is bad.
What you're looking for is Gregorian Chant, and yes, it exists.
The 6000 year doctrine was created by correlating three widely separated sections of the Bible:
1. God created everything in six days and rested on the seventh (Genesis 1:1 - 2:3).
2. The Bible says a thousand years is like one day to God (Psalms 90:4 & 2 Peter 3:8).
Therefore, if creation occurred in six days (followed by a day of rest), then everything would wrap up in six thousand years (followed by the one thousand year millennial kingdom).
I'm not sure why anyone ever chose to make this correlation, but, as you said, it was a commonly held belief.
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