xray_imaging

38d

Archimedes Manuscript Yields Secrets under X-ray Gaze

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.

By Heather Rock Woods (from the archives)

https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2005-06-16-archimedes-manuscript-yields-secrets-under-x-ray-gaze

Archimedes at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=archimedes

#books #science #xray_imaging

One page of Archimedes Palimpsest, On Floating Bodies.

It despicts an opened ancient manuscript with two facing pages. The parchment is heavily aged, displaying a mottled yellowish-brown, golden-tan coloration with significant staining, discoloration, and deterioration throughout. The edges are darkened and worn, indicating centuries of age and handling.

This is a palimpsest, meaning the parchment was recycled—the original text was partially scraped off and written over with new content. You can see layers of text at different angles and in different states of visibility, which is characteristic of such manuscripts. The underlying Archimedes text runs in one direction, while later overwritten religious texts (Byzantine prayer book) run perpendicular to it.

The pages contain dense columns of Greek text written in dark brown or black ink. On the left page, there are visible geometric diagrams—line drawings showing mathematical figures and proofs typical of Archimedes' work on geometry and physics. These diagrams include straight lines, angles, and geometric constructions that would have accompanied his mathematical reasoning about floating bodies and buoyancy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest#/media/File:Archimedes_Palimpsest.jpg

ALT

0 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original