tinyurl.com/9feoa -> www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/05/21/archimedes.manuscript.ap/index.html
BALTIMORE, Maryland (AP) -- A particle accelerator is being used to revea l the long-lost writings of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, work hid den for centuries after a Christian monk wrote over it in the Middle Age s Highly focused X-rays produced at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California were used last week to begin deciphering the p arts of the 174-page text that have not yet been revealed. "One of the delightful things is we don't know what it's going to say," s aid William Noel, head of the Archimedes Palimpsest project at the Walte rs Art Gallery in Baltimore. Scholars believe the treatise was copied by a scribe in the 10th century from Archimedes' original Greek scrolls, written in the third century B C It was erased about 200 years later by a monk who reused the parchment fo r a prayer book, creating a twice-used parchment book known as a "palimp sest." In the 12th century, parchment -- scraped and dried animal skins -- was rare and costly, and Archimedes' works were in less demand. The palimpsest was bought at auction for $2 million in 1998 by an anonymo us private collector who loaned it to the Baltimore museum and funded st udies to reveal the text. About 80 percent of the text has been uncovere d so far. "It's the only one that contains diagrams that may bear any resemblance t o the diagrams Archimedes himself drew in the sand in Syracuse 2000 year s ago," Noel said. Enter: the particle accelerator While reading an article on the text, Stanford physicist Uwe Bergmann rea lized he could use a particle accelerator to detect small amounts of iro n in the ink. The electrons speeding along the circular accelerator emit X-rays that can be used to cause the iron to fluoresce or glow. "Anything which contains iron will be shown, and anything that doesn't co ntain iron will not be shown," Bergmann said. Bergmann normally uses the accelerator, in which electrons are pushed to near the speed of light, to study the structure of water, and how water is split to create oxygen during photosynthesis. Most of the text has been revealed by scientists at Johns Hopkins Univers ity and the Rochester Institute of Technology who used digital cameras a nd processing techniques as well as ultraviolet and infrared filters dev eloped for medicine and space research. The so-called Archimedes Palimpsest includes the only copy of the treatis e "Method of Mechanical Theorems," in which Archimedes explains how he u sed mechanical means to develop his mathematical theorems. It is also th e only source in the original Greek for the treatise "On Floating Bodies ," in which Archimedes deals with the physics of flotation and gravity. Three of the undeciphered pages were imaged last week, and the rest are e xpected to take three to four years to complete, Noel said.
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