Archimedes Palimpsest reveals new secrets

NPR (audio) : The “Archimedes Palimpsest”, a 12th century prayer book that has the only known references to some of archimedes mathenmatical research hidden in its pages, has revealed a few more secrets thanks to Stanford physicist Uwe Bergmann’s interest in spinach. The palimpsest is extremely fragile and most of the Archimedes text can only be read by photographing the pages at different infrared wavelengths (see Physics Today June 2000 page 32 ). Bergmann realized that X-ray pulses produced by the Stanford Linear Accelerator should be able to pick up the iron in the ink, just as they pick up concentrations of iron in leaves of spinach. After placing the book in the accelerator, scientists and historians discovered a whole new batch of writings from Archimedes that were previously unknown. They also discovered the name of the scribe who over wrote the text: Johannes Myronas. Read Update: Science magazine says that although Stanford’s analysis hasn’t yet revealed any obvious revolutionary surprises, researchers did find a new geometric drawing as well as several previously missing passages.