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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: New technology reveals ancient math texts New technology reveals ancient math texts By Esther Landhuis, Mercury News It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi novel: Powerful X-ray beams are used to illuminate the long-lost theorems of ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, lifting them from faded 10th-century parchments. In fact, it happened last week at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Using state-of-the-art circular particle accelerators called synchrotrons, the scientists shone ultra-fine light beams onto three pages of the aged texts. Tuned to a specific energy, the light caused traces of iron in the ink to fluoresce, revealing for the first time the wispy outlines of Archimedes' 2,000-year-old ideas etched onto a goatskin document known as the "Palimpsest." Though much of its text has been deciphered over the years by visible or ultraviolet light, about a quarter of the 174-page document remains unread, said SLAC scientist Uwe Bergmann. Efforts have been hampered by a form of medieval recycling in which parchment pages were erased and written over, allowing the rare material to be reused -- in this case replacing mathematical theorems with prayers. Odd circumstances brought this ancient book into the realm of modern science and engineering. While attending a 2003 conference in Germany, Bergmann came across a magazine article that mentioned the Palimpsest and other religious texts whose ink contained iron. "I immediately thought it would be possible to use our X-rays to image the document," said Bergmann, whose own research uses synchrotron X-rays to detect extremely small amounts of iron within proteins. The intense beams -- generated by accelerating electrons around a circular track at close to the speed of light -- are used to probe the sub-microscopic world in a variety of fields, including materials science, environmental sciences and solid-state physics. Bergmann contacted the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which houses the Palimpsest, and convinced the curators that SLAC's X-ray system could penetrate the document's prayers to reveal Archimedes' hidden thoughts. The team plans to read the entire text and transcribe it onto a DVD -- a process that will take several years. "Reading the pages is very, very hard work," said Stanford classics and philosophy Professor Reviel Netz, who has begun decoding the Palimpsest pages analyzed at SLAC last week. "In one of the pages, it's a word a minute, in another page, it's a word an hour." It may be slow going, but in a strangely satisfying way, scientists say the project has allowed science to come full circle. Much of Archimedes' ancient work -- including the creation of calculus methods -- underlies present-day science, and now -- 2,000 years later -- physicists are applying some of their most sophisticated tools to get back into the head of this legendary mathematician. "We're like the great-great-grandchildren of his own mind," Bergmann said. ------ More technology news and opinion at www.siliconvalley.com
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