WHEN some 12th-century monks in Constantinople needed to write a prayer book,
they found an old parchment and scraped it clean. Tragically, they scraped off
seven treatises by Archimedes, the 3rd century BC Greek mathematician. The
treatises had been transcribed by monks two hundred years earlier.
But now restoration experts at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore,
Maryland, has commissioned a team from nearby Johns Hopkins University and the
Rochester Institute of Technology to transcribe the complete work, including
lines that couldn’t be read before. The “Archimedes Palimpsest” was rediscovered
in 1907 and some of it was painstakingly transcribed with the help of a
magnifying glass. But the manuscript disappeared during the First World War, and
didn’t resurface again until 1998, when a collector paid $2 million for
it.
William Christens-Barry, a physicist at Johns Hopkins, is using confocal
microscopy, a high-resolution scanning technique more usually applied to cell
structures. Their laser technique has exposed traces of writing on different
layers of parchment under the surface, says Christens-Barry, so they can tell
old writing from new. The Rochester scientists are illuminating the work with
different wavelengths of light and using computer enhancement of the reflections
to read it.
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The first transcription revolutionised knowledge of Archimedes approach to
geometry and physics. Not only was it the earliest replica of some of his
writings, but it was the only known version of Method of Mechanical
Theorems, in which Archimedes discusses, for instance, how he derived a
mathematical formula for the volume of a sphere.