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October 2, 2003
Infinite Secrets
One of my favorite TV shows is "Nova" on PBS. I love history and science so for me they smacked one out of the park this past Tuesday with an episode called "Infinite Secrets". The one hour show delves into the amazing journey of the rarest of all works by Archimedes called "The Method". This book actually describes Archimedes' thought processes behind his work into solving for the volumes of complex 3D shapes.
No one knows how many copies of "The Method" were produced by the legendary genius who died in 212 B.C., but this particular one was transcribed sometime in the 10th century A.D. It ended up in a monastery that unfortunately had a parchment shortage around 1100 A.D. This prompted a well meaning monk to wash Archimedes' writings from the parchment and then re-use it to copy down a prayer book called a palimpsest. The dark ages finally gave way to the renaissance when interest in science and mathematics bloomed again. Unfortunately, the problems that renaissance scholars spent so much time on had already been solved by Archimedes centuries before and still "The Method" sat hidden in a Constantinople monastery ready to unlock these secrets if they had only known.
In 1846, a biblical scholar named Tischendorf discovered the faint writings of Archimedes underneath the palimpsest's religious text and stole a single page. In 1907, Johan Heiburg transcribed the text with a magnifying glass, but still did not grasp the importance of the find. The world wars ensued and the palimpsest was lost again until the late 1990s when a family in Paris contacted Christies auction house wanting to sell a rare prayer book. It was "The Method" and the book sold to an anonymous collector for $2 million. It is now in the midst of a painstaking complete translation and restoration using all the technology available to us in this modern day. Great stuff!!!! Set your TiVos.
Posted by Mitch in Popular Media
Comments
This is fantastic stuff! Thanks for posting this, otherwise I might have missed it... Wow!
Posted by: Sam at October 2, 2003 5:28 PM