- Good morning everybody.
This is a wonderful turnout on the Monday,
on the week of the fourth of July.
And I'm very please to
see you because I know
you'll be well rewarded.
I'm Nancy Gwinn.
I'm the Director the Smithsonian
Institution Libraries.
And it's my great pleasure
to start off our 2009 series
of speakers who are
co-sponsored with the libraries
by the Smithsonian Institution
Archives and the office
of the chief information officers.
So, I thank them both for
their help with our series.
Since 1997, Dr. William
Noel or Will to his friends
has been curator of
manuscripts and rare books
at the Walters Art Museum.
After receiving his PhD in
1993 from Cambridge University,
he's held positions at
Downing College at Cambridge
at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
He's a well regarded published
scholar and he teaches
at the Rare Books School at
the University of Virginia
and in the Art History
Department of Johns Hopkins.
But it's his journey since
1999 when he began to direct
an international program to
conserve, image, and study
the Archimedes Palimpsest
that is of interest
to us this morning.
Actually, I think the
journey started before 1999.
The Palimpsest is the
unique source for three of
Archimedes' treatises.
Archimedes, the Greek scientist called the
greatest mathematician of all time,
who lived from 287 to 212
B.C. and was at the same time
an astronomer, a
physicist, and an inventor.
Dr. Noel's journey is
recounted with co-author
Reviel Netz in a 2007 book titled
The Archimedes Codex, How
a Medieval Prayer Book is
Revealing the True Genius of
Antiquities Greatest Scientist.
Some of the reviewers
call the book ancient math
for the math non-lovers, interdisciplinary
and fascinating, an engaging
an intriguing account
of science and scholarship,
and a splendid story
splendidly told.
So, here to tell us
that story is Will Noel.
Please join me in welcoming him.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you Nancy, thank
you very much everybody.
It's a great pleasure to
be here and and it has
been a 10 year journey now.
So, each time I tell the
story, it gets a bit longer.
I now have to go through
it at lightning speed.
So, get ready.
I am going to talk about
the thing on the right.
- [Woman] Can we dim the overhead?
It's a tiny bit over (mumbles).
- I'm not sure, can dim
the overheads a tiny bit?
I will delegate that responsibility.
So, here's Archimedes, about
to get in the neck while
thinking about circles
instead of saving his soul in
Syracuse I Sicily in
the third century B.C.
An astonishing man.
But all that we really know
about him, what he wrote,
we know about just three books.
(Mumbles) codices A, B, C.
Codex A was lost by an
Italian humanist in 1564.
Codex B was last heard
of in the Pope's library
in Viterbo, about a hundred
miles north of Rome in 1113.
And that's Codex C on the right.
And it landed on my desk in 1997.
And it is the unique source
for on floating bodies
in the original Greek, the
only place in the world
where you can find Archimedes
method in mechanical theorems.
The only place in the
world where you can find
his treatise Stomachion.
It was made in Constantinople
in the 10th century,
and rather wonderfully.
Isidore of Miletus, who was
one of the two architects
of Hagia Sophia in 537,
was very important in the
transmission of Archimedes' works.
And one of the things
about the transmission
of Archimedes' works is that
very often the people who
saved him were the people
that applied and used him.
And one of the things about
Archimedes that makes him
so different from Euclid is
that the manuscript tradition
of Archimedes is so very thin.
When you think about ancient
texts surviving until 1455,
you've got to think of it as a race.
The good guys are the
scribes copying, and copying,
copying, and copying.
The bad guys are (mumbles)
and they're destroying,
and they destroying, and their destroying.
And Archimedes lived
absolutely in the Twilight Zone
and he still does.
Euclid made it reasonably
easily because he made it
into the Christian curriculum.
But Isadora is one of those
fundamentally good people
who we need to thank for the
fact that we have Archimedes
treatise today at all.
In the 13th century, something
that was standard procedure
in the Byzantine world
happened with this manuscript.
The book was taken apart.
All the text was scraped off.
Orange juice, knives.
If you imagine medical
manuscripts made as newspaper.
So, you take them apart,
then you cut them down the centerfold.
And you stack them in the corner.
And you don't just do this to
the Archimedes manuscripts,
you do it to seven manuscripts,
because you want to make
a bigger book than all the parts
that Archimedes could use.
So, you have seven leaves
from seven manuscripts
of all the text (mumbles)
stacked in the corner.
And then you write text at
90 degrees to the old text.
And you write a prayer
book and you rebind it.
So you have a book that's twice as,
that's half the size of the
height as the old manuscript,
but twice as thick.
And that's what happened to
Archimedes in 13th century.
And from then on, On
Floating Bodies in Greek,
and the Method of Mechanical Theorems, and
the Stomachion was buried
beneath Christian press.
And that's what the Archimedes
manuscript looks like now.
It's the only beautiful
picture I've ever seen
of the Archimedes manuscript.
(Mumbles) very pretty.
This one is nicely a little out of focus.
(laughing)
The manuscript eventually made it to the
Monastery of Saint Sabbas.
And it was at the
Monastery of Saint Sabbas
about eight miles east of
Bethlehem in the Judean desert
from at least the 15th
century to the 19th.
And we know that because when
it was cataloged in 1899,
there was an ex-libris
inscription in the book
that said it was from the
Great Library of Saint Sabbas.
Such has been mutilation of
the book in the 20th century
as we'll see, the ex-libris
is no longer there.
So, we must thank that 1899 cataloger.
The catalog was done here
at the Metochion of the
Monastery of the Holy
Sepulcher in Constantinople.
It's a small Greek Orthodox
community in Istanbul.
And we know it was there by
1846 because one of those
legendary people Constantine Tischendorf,
wrote about his travels
in the Orient in 1846.
And he says that he found
nothing of particular interest
in this monastery except a palimpsest
containing mathematics,
and that's all he tells us.
But one leaf from the
Archimedes Palimpsest is now
in Cambridge University
Library and it was given to
Cambridge University Library by the
heirs of Tischendorf's estate.
So, he obviously filched a
leaf from the book there.
The manuscript was discovered as a result
of its cataloging in 1899.
It was cataloged by Papadopoulos Kerameus,
who didn't have tenure.
So, he was paid by the page for his work.
So, he decided to translate a
bit of the under text as well.
And this was Greek mathematics
that he couldn't identify.
But Johan Ludvig Heiberg in
Copenhagen had already done
a critical edition of Archimedes.
And he read the catalog and
he said this is Archimedes
(mumbles) seen it before.
And he went to Constantinople in 1906
and discovered something truly miraculous
which is two whole new
treatise by Archimedes,
and On Floating Bodies
in the Original Greek.
He was a professor.
He did most of his work
over the summer vacation.
And he also took photographs
of the Archimedes Palimpsest
which were lost but we
tracked them down in 1998.
And so this is a photograph
of the book in 1906
when Heiberg found it.
And you can just make
out some Archimedes text
going like that at right
angles to the prayer book text.
And Heiberg did a wonderful
job and did a completely
new edition of the works
of Archimedes, largely from
photographs, which was a
phenomenal achievement.
He didn't have any of
the modern technology
that we have today.
And his discovery made big
news in the New York Times
on July the 16th, 1907.
You would have thought
that a manuscript that
had been established as the
unique document for one of
the founders of the western
scientific tradition
would now be safe.
It wasn't safe.
The First World War I happened.
(Mumbles) founded the
modern state of Turkey.
The Greek Orthodox monks in Constantinople
were not in a very good position.
So, they surreptitiously
moved all their manuscripts
to the National Library of
Athens, very smart move.
And they had to do it very quietly.
And when you move manuscripts
quietly, funny things happen.
And several of the
really great manuscripts
of the Metachian disappear.
Most of them were beautiful
there was beginning to
be the flourishing art
market for beautiful books
particularly in America.
And lo and behold, Walters Manuscript 526
is a beautiful Byzantine
Gospel book from the
Metachian of the Holy
Sepulcher that's now in the
collection of Henry Waters.
The Archimedes manuscript
somehow left the collection
at this time as well.
And we don't know how.
We have made some progress on this.
And this is a letter
discovered by Georgi Parpulov
who's now at the University of Oxford.
But this is a letter from
Reginald Berti Haselden
who was the curator of manuscripts at the
Huntington Library.
And he's identifying the
Archimedes Palimpsest
because a leaf of it has
been sent to him, leaf 57.
He's identified it for
Professor Harold R. Willoughby
who was offered it to
sale from a man called
Solomon Garcon, who was
a book dealer in Paris.
So, in 1932, even it fell
of the lorry from the
Metachian of the Holy Sepulcher,
even if it fell off as
an accident, by 1932,
it was discovered again and identified
and in the hands of Solomon Garcon.
Willoughby never bought it.
The manuscript came up for auction.
It stayed in the French
private collection.
And it came up for auction
on the 28th of October, 1998.
And it's opened to folio 105, 110.
And it's made of parchment.
And there you can see
the armpit of the goat.
I like to think of this
as the most important goat
in history of western mathematics.
(laughing)
It actually contains on
its back, Archimedes'
Method Proposition 14.
And it was sold for two million to an
anonymous private collector.
And at the time of its sale,
it didn't have many champions.
There were three people
interested in buying it.
The Greek government,
'cause Archimedes was Greek,
the Greek patriarch who
decided the day before the sale
that it had been stolen
from one of his libraries,
and a private American collector.
And a private American
collector bought the manuscript
and promised to allow
scholars access to it.
But no one knew who this man was.
I actually did manage to
find out who this man was
and I wrote him a rather
cheeky email saying
that I could exhibit
it and display for him,
and wasn't it a wonderful thing.
And to cut a long story
short, he said fine.
And he left it on my desk
on January the 19th, 1999.
One of the reasons that
scholars weren't particularly
interested in the manuscript
at the time of the sale
is that Heiberg was clever.
A, he got out of it nearly
everything that needed
to be got out.
And B, the manuscript is
now in such bad condition,
that we're not going
to get more out of it.
This is a Heiberg photograph of 1906.
And you can see an M16 on its side there.
It's on its side 'cause
Heiberg is reading the
photograph like that because
Archimedes' text is like that.
An M16 means that it's the
16th page of the method
that he came across.
This is the same page now.
It has a forgery painted over it.
And I know that that
forgery dates after 1938
because it contains phthalocyanine green,
which is a pigment that
only became commercially
available in Germany after 1938.
This forgery is based
on a one to one scale
from reduced black and
white images in Ormont's
Manuscrits Grecs de le
Bibliotheque Nationale of 1929.
At the time of the sale,
these forgeries were
wrongly blamed on the monks.
Not so.
The monks don't need to make forgeries.
They just don't do it that way.
Another thing that happened
to the manuscript between
its discovery in 1906 and
when it arrived on my desk
is all the mold damage.
This is the unique surviving page of the
Archimedes Stomachion as it
was seen by Heiberg in 1906
and he's marked S.T. there.
This is the same page today.
And you can see that it's been subject to
a very bad mold attach, with holes in it.
Not good news.
And however good our imaging
techniques are going to be,
we're not going to be able to
read through that tragic loss.
In 1998, this manuscript was a write off.
And here it was at the Walters Art Museum.
And that's what it looked like
when it arrived on my desk.
And since then I've been
working with now a large
number of other people to
try and do our vest best
to this book, and all
of the work is paid for
by the private owner.
When the book first arrived on my desk,
there was an article
in the Washington Post
that said "Will Noel has a big problem,
"here is important book."
And we got lots of replies
saying we can help you.
The one that was really
helpful was from Mike Toth.
And it went something like
"Dear Dr. Noel, read with
"interest your article
in the Washington Post.
"It certainly puts our
work into perspective.
"We here at the National
Reconnaissance Office
"might have some equipment
that might be able to help.
"Do get in touch.
"Otherwise, good luck
with your endeavors."
And it turns out that actually
the government can't help
with the imaging of the
Archimedes manuscript
because it's a private object.
And we can't spend
American tax dollars on it.
But Mike's been volunteering
as program manager
for the project ever since.
And totally invaluable he is too.
He's the guy who tells
me about costs, schedule,
and performance and there he is relaxing,
but most of the time, he's
drawing up Gantt charts
with which some of you might
be familiar, but I'm not.
He just tells me when to go and I do.
The critical path was the conservation.
This is Abigail Quandt,
she's Senior Conservator
of Manuscripts and Rare Books
at the Walters Art Museum.
And the task that fell
to her was a tricky one.
With the help of the Canadian
Conservation Institute,
we did lots of research.
This is a tiny cross
section through a tiny bit
of a diagram, and you can see the remains
of the Archimedes in here.
But this is the collagen
and it's breaking down.
And now, normal parchment
manuscripts, those of you know
them know them as quite tough things.
This isn't tough, this is tissue paper.
It's really, really bad.
The worst problem is the spine.
Now, the Archimedes text runs
through the spine of the book.
Medieval manuscripts
weren't glued together.
Gluing is a post medieval practice.
This is hide glue, that's not so bad.
This is PVAC, this is Elmer's wood glue
for all intents and purposes.
It's much tougher than the
parchment than it's on.
It was done in 1960s, 1970s.
So, Abigail had to take that glue apart
before we could even begin to image
and to do it without damaging
the Archimedes text below.
So, you will understand
that it took her four years
to take the book apart.
And this is a very rare action shot.
Even the pages that look
reasonably okay are not okay.
You backlight them and they look fragile.
This is the first page of the book here.
And when Abigail took it
apart, one of our scholars
had an ultraviolet on it
and identified it as a
previously unrecognized
page of On Floating Bodies
in the Original Greek.
And that was when we
realized that we were dealing
with something rather extraordinary.
This was the first page of the book.
It was the first page that was disband.
And with modern technologies,
we could get whole new
pages that Heiberg hadn't identified,
however clever Heiberg was.
So, Abigail documents
everything that she does.
Here's she's got a Mylar sheet
on top of one of the pages
and is documenting all the
damaged areas of the parchment.
One of the problems that she
faced or the images faced
was that it was a liturgical manuscript.
So, it was used in church
services from the 15th century
to the 19th century.
And of course, they
used dirty wax candles.
And imaging through dirty
wax is very difficult.
So, ultimately, Abigail had
to take off as much of the
wax as she possibly could
before we imaged it.
A whole bunch of the triotus.
Lots of glue.
Very careful work.
The problem with the PVAC
is that we couldn't find
a solution that really
worked to take it apart.
So, it was a little bit
of isopropanol and water.
And day after day after
day and gentle mechanical
getting rid of it.
All the fragments of
course are documented.
You can reconstruct the fragments of
where all the Archimedes stuff came from.
And this became very
important because there are
three leaves missing from
the Archimedes manuscript
from when it was taken apart in 1906.
And from getting rid of the
little bits of the triotus
in the gutter, Abigail
realized that those three bits,
they had pigment in them.
And therefore, those three
pages had forgeries on them.
And they were cut out
from the book and sold
and never returned to the book.
So, somewhere out there,
are three pages of forgeries
containing unique
Archimedes text on the back.
So, if you ever see
something that looks like
a Byzantine forgery, turn
it over, see if you've got
two texts on the back,
(laughing)
and I'd love to hear from you.
This is Abigail taking apart
a little strip of parchment
that had been stuck to
one of the forged pages.
It doesn't actually belong there.
It belongs there.
That little tab looks
like it's a medieval tab.
You take it apart, and actually,
it was cutout from there
and just put there to be
made to look medieval.
All this is 20th century damage.
Some of the fragments are tiny.
You save all the fragments.
You image them with ultralight.
You've realized that some
of them have text on,
possibly unique Archimedes text.
And then you can put them back in place.
You know, conservators know
that most of their work
is on a scale and on a level that
only other conservators truly know.
And that's true of Abigail's work on the
Archimedes Palimpsest.
But here's a rather dramatic one.
You can see the Archimedes text here.
And we have this problem in the gutter.
So, Abigail is here unfolding the gutter.
And this is a before,
and this is an after.
And this is a little
low resolution UV jpeg
that we sent to Reviel Netz in Stanford.
And he circled that and
sent back an email saying
this is the earliest symbol of a circle
in the history of the western
mathematical tradition.
Well, this was a good day.
I mean at this stage,
(laughing)
at this stage in the program, you know,
there were lots and lots of bad days.
We were just slowly getting to know
just how bad and brutal,
how bad the condition was
and how brutal it had been
treated in the 20th century,
knowing that it was Archimedes.
And our early imaging
efforts as you'll see in
a minute weren't good.
If you speak to Abigail now,
she'll tell you that her
conservation work on the
Archimedes Palimpsest hasn't begun.
All she's done is prepare
the leaves for imaging.
The owner is a patient man.
It's been 10 years.
You might have thought
that he would want to
you know, have his
manuscript back before the
22nd century begins,
but anyway, here we go.
This is a leaf prepared for imaging.
And you see it in one of the mats.
And now I'm moving on to the
imaging part of the story.
The story's quite long.
And one of the things I
should say is that I'm going
to talk about the conversation
first, and then the imaging,
and then the scholarship.
But what actually happens
is that it's a totally
integrated program largely
planned by Mike Toth.
And so, there's a real
feedback loop between the
processes of conservation, imaging,
and scholarship all the time.
And it didn't really
matter that it took Abigail
four years to take a book apart.
Because during that time,
we were learning how to
image the manuscripts.
Most of the manuscript was done with
multi spectral imaging.
Bill Christens-Barry
from Equipoise Imaging.
Kieth Knox from the Boeing
Corporation in Hawaii,
and Roger Easton who is Professor
of Imaging Science at RIT.
And they've been imaging
the manuscript now for
approximately eight years I think.
And it was clear from the
start that what they would be
doing was using multi
spectral imaging, light,
whatever wave, it comes
from different wave lengths.
Radio waves, visible light.
This is visible light.
This is the range of the
electromagnetic spectrum
that we've been evolved or intelligently
designed to receive.
But cameras can capture
all the way from there
up to that just depending on your camera.
So, you see things at
different wavelengths of light.
You see different things.
And the idea of multi
spectral imaging is that you
capture images at different
wavelengths of light
and then you stack them
together in a data cube.
You have an awful lot of information.
And you write algorithms
or recipes to bring out
the material that you want to bring out.
So, this is a page, a little detail
of the Archimedes Palimpsest.
This is in UV light.
And you can see the
Archimedes text as well as the
prayer book text rather easily.
This is in infrared light.
You can't really see the
Archimedes light at all,
which I thought was a bad thing.
It's not necessarily a bad
thing as I'll show in a second.
The early results looked
absolutely spectacular.
I thought we cracked it sort of overnight.
But as soon as you show
something like that to a scholar,
(laughing)
they tell you that it's
of absolutely no use.
And there are three
reasons for those of you
that are interested in
multi spectral imaging,
why this is of no use.
Perhaps the most interesting
is that the spectral
characteristics of the two
are actually very similar.
So, to get a result like this, it required
a lot of processing.
And every time you process
something, you introduce noise.
And noise when you're
imaging a cocoa field in the
Amazon rain forest is not a problem.
But when you're trying
to read Greek cursive,
it is important.
The other thing is that
our whole operation
was entirely misconceived.
We thought that our job was
to get rid of the over text.
Now if you read 19th
century letters and I'm
sure many of you do,
reading through over text
isn't a problem.
You get use to it very quickly
because they wrote letters
and they ran out of space,
and they wrote it 90 degrees
and you can get the hang
of it quite quickly.
And we don't have to get
rid of the over text at all
for the vast majority of what we're doing.
We just have to make the
under text come out more.
So, we've got rid of the over
text here but in doing so
actually, we just made
the process of reading the
under text more complicated.
'Cause in reading the under
text, you couldn't tell
whether you couldn't see
it because of the over text
or because of the parchment.
They now look the same.
So, we thought we were giving
people more information
and actually we're giving them less.
And we had to really
rethink what we were doing.
This is an image taken in
ultraviolet fluorescent light.
And you can see an
Archimedes diagram here.
And you can't see much there.
And you can see Archimedes text there.
But you can't see much there.
There are a few problems
with the ultraviolet light.
It's a bit soft.
And it's monochromatic,
it was no color contrast.
But what we did, that's what
the imaging scientists did
and what Keith Knox did in particular,
was to create a blank new digital canvas
and pull both these images into it.
So, if in these two
images, something is light.
So, here the parchment
is light, and here the
parchment is light, it's going to come out
light in a digital canvas.
If it's dark, and here
the over text is dark,
and here the over text is dark,
it's going to come out
dark in the new picture.
But if it's dark here and light here,
it's actually going to
come out with a red tint.
And then it looks like that.
You can see the diagram
more clearly and you can
make a clear difference
between the Archimedes text
and the over text underneath it.
And sometimes this technique,
which is the technique
by which we've imaged an awful lot of the
Archimedes Palimpsest
is remarkably effective.
I've just pulled a few that
show the contrast quite well.
We used to image once every six months.
Abigail would liberate 16 bi-folio
and then we would image those 16 bi-folio.
And we'd come back 16 months later
and we'd get better at it.
And then in the summer of 2007,
with Stokes Imaging System
from Austin, Texas, we
re-imaged the entire manuscript
in two weeks in 16 different
wavebands of light.
The lights were developed by
Bill Kristens Barry from Equipoise Imaging
and they're a wonderful,
easy relatively cheap way
to do multi spectral imaging.
They're very portal as well.
And when you do that,
here's the armpit of my goat
in 16 different colors.
Each of those 16 different
colors by the way
on its own is no use.
You have to merge them
and write algorithms
to bring out what you want.
Obviously what that means
is an awful lot of data
for those of you that
are in the data business.
And I'll talk about the data in a minute.
So, that's what one of
our images looks like now.
But of course, as a scholar,
what you do is you drill in,
and you drill in, and you
drill in, and you drill in,
and you drill in, until
you can just read it.
What scholars like to do
is to look at the images
processed in different ways.
In particular, it's
important with the drawings
in the manuscript.
And the drawings are the
unique source for the drawings
that Archimedes did in
the sand in Syracuse
in the third century B.C.
And Heiberg didn't pay much attention.
But here you can see a drawing.
And it's nice to get an
overall shape of the drawing.
So, if you process the same
data in a different way,
you can actually bring
the drawing more clearly.
So, by about 2002, we
were producing images
that the scholars could
read for a quite a lot of
the Archimedes text.
We had a major problem.
No optical imaging was
ever going to read through
the gold ground forgeries.
And so on April Fools Day
2005, we had small conference
to try and decide the
way forward what else
we were going to do.
And we came up with three different ideas.
One was LED imaging which we
used and which was successful.
One was optical character recognition.
We had a guy called Garret Valvood at the
Rochester Institute of Technology
who developed a rather good OCR,
which actually Reviel Netz
did actually find use for
in corroborating his readings.
But for the forgeries, we
found that X-rays were probably
the way to go.
And so I show you three of
the people who were at the
conference who helped us with the X-rays.
One is Bob Morton who does a
lot of work with fossils now.
And he works for ConocoPhillips in
Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Gene Hall is the Professor of Chemistry
at Rutgers University, does a lot of work
on detecting forgeries through
XRF analysis of pigments.
And Uwe Bergmann who's
the star scientist at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
He was doing a lot of work
on spinach for the molecular
structure of photosynthesis
and on the molecular
structure of water.
And spinach had a lot of
iron in it which becomes
rather important because
the iron in the palimpsest,
the ink in the palimpsest is iron gall.
X-rays are just like visible
light but they have a far
shorter wavelength and
they're much more energetic.
So, instead of interacting
with the out electrons
in an atom, which ultimately
comes back to your head
through your eye has color information.
And you interpret as color information.
They interact with a much
more energetic electrons
on the inner shell of a bohr atom.
So, an X-ray comes in,
an electron bounces out.
And another electron makes a
quantum jump from the L shell
to the K shell as it were.
Now, what you want to capture
is the X-ray that is now given off
by an X-ray that comes back out.
So, we're not looking
at transmitted light.
It's not like at the dentist
where you get a negative image.
We want to capture the
electrons that bounce back
from the atom.
And because atoms have, what
makes an atom an atom is
that it has its own atomic structure.
You can identify the atom that you've hit.
So, if you can identify
the iron atoms on the page
and map them independently of
the gold atoms on the page,
the idea is that you can
make an iron map of your page
and you can read the ink on the page.
So, we tried in a small
X-ray machine called
the EDX, (mumbles) probe
to identify the pigments in
the Archimedes Palimpsest,
I mean the atoms in the Palimpsest.
There's a lot of calcium
from the parchment
in the way that it was portrayed.
Of some chlorine, some
sulfur, some copper,
some zinc, some magnesium
but there's a nice iron peak.
So, we think we've got the
chance to get some iron.
But the trouble is that scanning the iron,
scanning on this level, you
need to cover a lot of ground
with a very, very thin prick of light.
So, you're going like
across the page with a tiny,
tiny light source and it's
going to take you a long time,
unless you've got a powerful X-ray machine
and moving quite quickly.
So, we needed to go to
the Stanford synchrotron
radiation laboratory in California.
Now, the Stanford Synchrotron
Radiation Laboratory
is the place, it's a particle accelerator.
So, they send electrons around this way,
and positrons around that way,
and somewhere in the middle
they smash together and you
discover the (mumbles) electron.
That's not really what
we wanted to do with the
Archimedes Palimpsest.
But now they don't use the
Synchrotron for that all,
for atom smashing at all.
They use it for the energy
that the electrons give
as they go around the
corner 'cause they're not
traveling in a straight line.
And they give out synchrotron radiation.
And synchrotron radiation
is a very, very powerful
light source for X-rays.
So, yes, not valid in Kansas.
Use of this device with
substance may require,
imply, and or endorse
the existence of one or
more of the following.
Chemistry, evolution,
electromagnetism, gravity,
mathematics, thermodynamics,
and education.
(laughing)
Dually warned, we thought
that Archimedes would be
urging us to proceed, and so we did.
And here is Abigail placing a leaf of the
Archimedes Palimpsest into an XY stage.
And the energy comes out through this tube
and onto the parchment.
And the reflected X-rays get
picked up by this detector.
And this device I should
say, this experiment
was all drawn up and thought
through by Uwe Bergmann.
And 17 hours later, we
could read through the gold.
I mean you have to be
a nutcase to read it.
But if it's a unique Archimedes text,
the nutcases are out there,
they're charming people.
They're called Nigel
Wilson and Reviel Netz
and we'll meet in a minute.
(laughing)
Here's Nigel at Lincoln College Oxford.
He wrote Scribes and Scholars,
Scholars of Byzantium.
He's just published the
critical edition of Aristophanes
and he is without peer
in the transmission of
the classical heritage
through the middle ages
to the modern day.
Nigel is a very distinguished gentleman.
And so I was determined to
generate him some very, very
powerful images of a community.
So, here I am introducing
him to a computer.
(laughing)
And he's very excited.
But actually, he just
uses photos that we make,
we just print out, which
is kind of crazy if you
know about images on computer screens.
But he does very well with it.
He mainly works in the
summer when the light's good.
This is Reviel Netz who is
much more computer savvy.
And this is an early
attempt to read Archimedes
Method Proposition 14.
So, here you have the armpit of my goat.
Do you see, just visible down here?
And Reviel is writing what he thinks
he can see on the page.
And he's getting down here at this stage.
And there's a whole in
the parchment just there.
And so this there in the
margin is a question to
Abigail Quandt, asking if the
tear is possibly original.
'Cause if the tear's
original, then of course,
he doesn't have to put a
letter there, 'cause the
scribe didn't put a letter
there in the 10th century.
So, he was just trying to
get a shape of the landscape
of the page at this stage.
This was before we
developed our pseudo color.
Eventually we developed our pseudo color.
And this is a little
detail from that page.
And you know occasion, you can
make the invisible visible.
And then, on Friday the
April the 13th of 2001,
I got this nice email from Reviel.
In a couple of months the
first intellectual fruits
of our labor will be published,
together with a complete
transcription of one
crucial side of one page,
most of which is unknown
to modern science.
I send you the final lines of the article
as it stands in draft form.
It is understated.
It reads as follows.
To sum up, then the new
reading from the Archimedes'
Indivisibles Proof, which
is Method Proposition 14,
should call for some
reconsideration of the position of
Archimedes in some key areas
of the history of mathematics,
especially the two
related conceptual fields
of the calculous, and of infinity.
Now, especially on the
web cast audience, hello,
I am not standing up here as
an expert in Greek mathematics.
But what I would say and I think
that this is basically true
is that the ancient
world, everyone knew that
the Greeks knew about potential infinity.
And Archimedes used it a lot.
So, you think of a
number and you can always
think of a higher number.
How high a number?
As high as you'd like.
So, think of another number.
And you can go on and you can bring
things down ad infinitum.
But they never thought of
infinity as the sum of all
numbers bang all together.
And they never thought of infinite sets
as potentially two different
types of infinite sets.
And Reviel's argument is I think that this
is what they were doing
in Method Proposition 14.
Which indeed would completely rewrite the
prehistory of the calculous.
So, we have a very learned
article in a journal
called Sciamys, which
can be interpreted as
we know in Latin.
Actually, we don't know.
There are only about 10 copies
of this journal in existence I think.
(laughing)
And it's written by three people and yeah,
probably read by five, of
the wives of Reviel and Ken
might have read it.
(laughing)
But anyway, we also
advocated it in the press.
And the press sort of got the picture.
The Eureka Page, exclusive,
it's just a few lines
of scrolled Greek text but new
technology has identified the
hand of Archimedes and the
results are rewriting history.
I'm a great advocate for this program,
but I don't actually say that.
But one of the things
about the press is that
they have been very helpful us find the
people to do the work.
And I think it's probably
one of the reasons
if we've been successful,
one of the reasons
for our success is the name of Archimedes.
'Cause scientists are interested in it
as well as humanists.
And so, yeah.
The other treatise is unique
to the Archimedes text
in the palimpsest.
It's called the Stomachion.
And everyone knew that in some sense
it concerned this diagram.
This diagram is a square
and it's made up 14 pieces.
But non one knew what Archimedes was doing
with this diagram.
What about these 14 pieces?
And by largely through rereading
the Archimedes manuscript
with our pseudo color images, Reviel Netz
came to a new thought which
was perhaps what Archimedes
was doing recombining
all those pieces in a way
that still made a perfect square.
And finding out how many
ways you can still make
a perfect square with those
pieces in that combination.
Anyone wanna guess the answer?
17,152.
There are 17,152 ways in
which you can recombine
those pieces into a perfect square.
How do we know this?
We don't know this
because we've only got the
first page in palimpsest.
The rest of the Stomachion is lost.
So, we don't know that
Archimedes, you know,
we had to work it out.
So, how do we work it out?
Well, we get a computer
scientist to do it in one room.
And in another room,
and Bill Cutler did it
through software.
And in another room, we got combinatorics,
the guy called Persi Diaconis.
He's the guy that told you
that when you flip a coin,
it doesn't actually land 50-50.
51% of the time it's
going to land on the side
that it was up when you flicked it.
So, if you've got kids in little league,
remember that, you'll give
your kids an advantage.
I believe that's important.
(laughing)
And they came to the same answer.
So, this is more than a game.
This makes the Stomachion
the earliest treatise
in western science in
the mathematical branch
of combinatorics, which is
important if you play poker.
It's also important if you
design modern computers
and how they interact.
There we are, 14 pieces, 17,152 solutions.
And one of the ugliest
photos ever to appear
on the front page of the New York Times.
Because our images might be
useful, but they're not pretty.
If you were paying attention
earlier when I said something
very quickly about the fact
that this palimpsesting process
in this prayer book it
happened to more than
the Archimedes text.
There were six other books
that this happened to.
And normally, the
palimpsest are quite often.
And finding important text in
palimpsest is quite unusual.
Some Euripides has been
found in a palimpsest.
Cicero's Republic exists
entirely in palimpsest.
But normally palimpsested text,
you can find them elsewhere.
I'm not saying they're unimportant.
They can be very useful in establishing
a text or tradition, but normally, not so.
But I got this email
from Natalie Tchernetska
who was working on the
non-Archimedes pages
in the palimpsest, that had
never really been looked at.
But we decided we wanted
to find out who kept
Archimedes company in this prayer book.
And I got this email.
It says, "Dear Will, in the
course of further exploration
"of a the non-Archimedes
folios, I recently deciphered
"the text of a Greek
orator, unknown otherwise.
"I could identify parts of
lost speeches by Hypereides."
Now, Hypereides is not
a household name now
but he was in the fourth century B.C.
He was a contemporary of Demosthenes
and he wrote 77 treatise.
He's one of the 10 canonical
orators of antiquity.
But unlike Demosthenes, he
didn't make the transition
from scroll to codex,
which happened in the
first century to the fourth century A.D.
And this is the only Hypereides
ever to have been found in a codex.
He was discovered in papyrus scrolls
in Thebes in 1847 and 1898
but this os a codex, and
it's about one third of the
entire Hypereides corpus.
There are two speeches.
The most important of which
is Hypereides defending
himself in Athens after
the battle of Coronea.
He advocated for resistance
against Phillip in Macedon
and Alexander the Great
which was a bad idea.
Alexander the Great beat
up Athens and Hypereides
found himself on the wrong side, so he was
accused of treason and here
he is defending himself.
He talks about some of the
great events in Greek history,
Solomos to (mumbles).
It's a very elegant
speech, and he got off.
Eventually, they tracked him
down and they killed him,
and they cut out his tongue.
But when I get emotional
about it, then I like to think
that we've give Hypereides'
voice back in the
21st century, and that's very exciting.
This work has been published.
And we move on.
And on June the 11th, 2005, I
got another email from Nigel.
And it says, "Dear Will, excellent news.
"The hard drive and photos
came safely this week.
"A first glance suggests
there's no more Hypereides
"but several leaves of a
philosophical text on one of
"which I found the name
Aristotle clearly enough."
Clearly for Nigel isn't really
clearly for the rest of us.
(laughing)
But it's there in natural light
and it's sort of there
in a pseudo color image.
So I've just highlighted it for you there.
With the Archimedes
text, it was essentially
the work of Nigel Wilson and Reviel Netz.
But when it came to the
Hypereides text and the
Aristotelian text, they
were previously unknown.
So, you didn't even have
an edition work from
as well as images to work from.
And they were far more obscure.
And it took a whole team of
people working on the text
collaboratively which they
have been doing since 2005.
And a lot of this stuff is done virtually.
So, here is a forum.
And if you're a member of the
public, you could have joined
a general discussion and
that was the bit of a forum
that you saw.
And you could argue ad
infinitum about the rights
and wrongs about
Christianity against science.
It was very interesting
actually because it started out
as a rather corse discussion
and ended up with the
public finding a wonderful
balance of whether the guy
who had palimpsested this
material had done us a favor,
or whether he was against science.
And the balance that he'd
done us a favor which was a
rather nice conclusion
for them to draw I think.
The scholars are working down here.
Archimedes news, Hypereides
news, Aristotle commentary news.
And so they're working in a
digitally remote environment
and rather a clunky one.
And it's still now
difficult to come up with
a remote working
environment for the scholars
that's satisfactory.
But nonetheless, you can
trace all their work.
There's David Whitehead from
Queens University, Belfast
and Chris Carry from the
University College London
working together to try and
read the Hypereides text.
Here's Nigel Wilson and Bob Sharples from
University College
London trying to read the
Aristotle text.
We blew things up on a
screen for Nigel to see
if that helped him to
read them a bit better.
And as far as I know, the
Aristotle text, which turns out
to be, I think, we think,
Alexander of Aphrodisias'
third century lost commentary
on Aristotle's Categories.
It's the only text I know
that's been started from
scratch on a wiki.
And these are the early days of the wiki.
As scholarly interest in the folios
got bigger, bigger, and bigger,
so the emphasis on the need
was there to work harder,
harder, and harder.
This is an iron map of the first page
taken at the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center.
So, this is an iron map
of the first page of text
there which is On Floating
Bodies in the Original Greek
that Heiberg missed.
And now we can read it.
Again, you have to be a nutcase
to read it because of course
if you take an X-ray, you
take images, the X-rays don't
distinguish between the front
and the back of the folio.
So, you've got four layers
of text to try and decipher.
But if you're Reviel Netz and
Nigel Wilson, you can do it.
We're still discovering new text,
sometimes in unexpected places.
And then after seven years
working on this manuscript,
we finally found out he did
it on the bottom of page one.
Just in the bottom here, you
can make out the beginnings
of a color faun and it says that this book
was written by Johannes Myronas
on the 14th of April, 1229.
So, in the months before
the 14th of April, 1229,
Johannes Myronas had
created this palimpsest.
And he'd done it Jerusalem
because the prayers that he
were copying are Jerusalemite texts.
14th of April, 1229 is
about eight weeks after
Frederic the Second Stupor
Mundi liberated Jerusalem
from muslim control.
So, this was an environment
in which probably
Johannes didn't have access to parchments,
so he used old parchment.
It was a time of celebration.
And he was pleased.
And on the 14th of April,
1229, it was Easter Saturday
in the Greek Orthodox church.
It was a time for giving gifts.
So, he'd finished his prayer book
and he was giving it to someone.
The scholars transcribed
their text in word format.
And we have to turn that out
into TEI P5 compliant XML.
Some of you in here know what that means.
And we found students in
Worcester, Massachusetts Holy Cross
under the direction of Neil
Smith, and at Furman University
under the direction of
Chris Blackwell who turned
Reviel Netz and Nigel Wilson's text into
TEI P5 compliant XML.
So, it looks like that.
And can be transformed into
that so that Nigel Wilson
can read it and correct it.
But ultimately it's all data.
And our data has been
managed by Doug Emery
who's an independent consultant
working in Baltimore.
And that's what the
data looks like to him.
It's not transcriptions, it's not images.
It's just thousands and
thousands and thousands
of metadata fields.
And we consulted with many
of you, many in the field
about how to put our metadata together.
So, some of you might
have met Mike and Doug
and thank you for your help.
It's now all on the web and all of it,
all the raw data is on the web.
The transcriptions for the
Hypereides', the Archimedes',
16 different wavebands of lights,
the processed images, everything.
README files, I hope you can read them.
And it's all published a
creative commons 3.0 copyright.
So, anyone can take it.
It's a commercial copyright.
You can even make money
out of it if you can try
ane make money out of Archimedes.
And we are working on graphic
user interfaces for this data.
But very much driven by
the owner of the manuscript
who knows an awful lot
about data and an awful
lot about the internet.
We concentrated on getting
our raw data right.
And we think we have
got our raw data right.
And it's out there for anyone to use.
So, you know, all 16
different wavebands together
with the transcriptions,
both of the Heiberg XML
and the Archimedes XML.
And there are geographic
links so you can map
it to the line, to the images in the book.
So, what was in 1998 unread,
unknown private in a book,
unappreciated and immensely
expensive is now known,
legible, published, and available
on your desktop computer
if you have a good internet connection.
On 2:00 p.m. on October the 29th, 2008,
it was 10 years to the day
after the owner bought the book,
we put up a PDF of our
results on Google Books.
So, this is Method
Proposition 14, diagram one.
We're still working on
our data, the Alexander
of Aphrodisias data, the images.
We're still processing and
the scholars are still working
to transcribe them.
And when they're done we'll
put that up on our data set.
So, this is Tuesday the
27th for January, 2009
from Marwin Rashad in France.
"Dear all, it's appeared
clearly in the last days,
"that the new images on the
website are in comparably
"better than anything we had until now.
"Contrary to my first
impression, it seems somewhat
"miraculous to now be able
to read portions which
"seemed lost forever.
"I thus pray images of
this type for the rest
"of Alexander's commentary."
And if you go onto our website,
Archimedespalimpsest.org,
and you look at the image
bank, you can see that
we're still providing them.
So, the owner is passionate, very clever,
very involved in the project,
and he has lots of money.
(laughing)
And we're immensely grateful to him.
That was us 1997 before treatment.
That's us now.
(laughing)
And we're still going on.
We're going on to do new things.
This is a Syriac palimpsest
that we managed to image.
And it contains an
early Syriac translation
of Galen on Simple Drugs.
There are very very few
Syriac medical manuscripts
from the eighth, ninth, and
tenth centuries of Ivan.
This is a palimpsest of 210
pages of Syriac medical text
that we're now beginning to work on.
I briefly want to talk
quickly about a project
that we're now doing at the
Walters, which is to create
digital surrogates of
our Islamic manuscripts
from start to finish in
two years from an NEH grant
and we're on our way.
Here we are entering data.
Here we are imaging a
machine from a Stokes imaging
machine from Austin, Texas.
It allows us to image
carefully with great quality
at a reasonable production rate.
We can take 53,000 images in two years.
And as with the Archimedes,
we're putting up all our data
in the raw for free under a
creative commons copyright.
And we're also looking
at interfaces for it.
So, there's our raw data
at the digitalwaters.org.
For gurus, for graphic user interfaces,
we are using easy commercial applications.
So, this is a commercial
application called Issuu
which is a page turning
software that you can just
load up your PDFs on.
So, we load up PDFs of our
Islamic manuscripts on Issuu.
And I just started a site
called Medieval Manuscripts,
digital surrogates of
medieval manuscripts on Issuu.
So, if you're in the
position of getting hold of
manuscript surrogates that you
can leaf through page by page
and load up on PDF, please
do add them to this site.
Because I think in some
ways, it fulfills some of the
promise of the digital revolution.
Rather like the world digital
library, but user generated,
you can have complete surrogates
of medieval manuscripts
and turn through the pages.
And they're not collection specific.
So, you can actually
merge manuscripts from
one institution to another.
And you get very good image
manipulation, page manipulation.
And the metadata standards
are very small and yet
they work, the bar is
very low, it's just a PDF.
So, that's potentially quite
fun I think for the future.
Thank you very much indeed.
(audience applauding)
I'm happy to take questions
if people have them.
Yes sir.
- [Man] (Mumbles) text
in any interest as other
Collegian forum?
- It is of some interest.
I mean any 13th century
Byzantine manuscript
is of some interest and
there is a scholar called
Stefano Pareti who's
preparing an edition of it.
It's very closely related to a collegian
at Mount Sinai St.
Catherine's which was written
by the scribe Abscentios in 1153.
It contains some very
unusual Jerusalem prayers.
So, yes, it is of interest.
It's just not unique Archimedes.
Yes.
- [Woman] The use of the synchrotron.
- Yeah.
- [Woman] One that
especially from (mumbles)?
- No, it was for pages
that had a lot of staining
or a lot of forgeries on them.
So, it was for seven pages I think.
And on pages, if they were
particularly important,
we might have tried some (mumbles) out.
But no, it was just pages
where we thought that
chemical differences
would make a difference
when optical differences
were probably obscured.
- [Woman] And the 17th hours you said,
is that the amount of time
exposed or is that the (mumbles)?
- We got it down from 17 hours.
By the we finished, it was
about 10 hours per page.
No, that's the amount of time exposed.
But that's because
it takes 17 hours for a pin prick to cover
all the space on a page.
So, only you know, a pin
prick is exposed at a time
for a millisecond.
Yes sir.
- [Man] So, related to that.
How does the manuscript hold up against UV
and everything else?
Is there any damage that you have to,
is that a consideration?
- It's a consideration in
every single thing that we did.
So, when you expose anything
to energy of any sort,
you're going to degrade it.
So, yes we degraded the palimpsest.
We didn't keep it in a safe.
We used our talents.
We undertook incredibly
exhaustive tests on what
synchrotron radiation would
to parchment before put
the Archimedes' Palimpsest in there
and there is no visible damage.
We also actually, I mean one
of the nightmares that we had
was that the beam would
stop halfway through.
And you'd just drill a hole in it.
(laughing)
So, we had all sorts of
procedures to immediately
stop by the beam if there
was any problem like that.
Yes sir.
- [Man] I'm wondering
if Mr. B has any other
collecting interest.
- Great books, great books.
But that's his main collecting interest.
He's got a great library.
Yes sir.
- [Woman] What's the status
of the conservation (mumbles)?
- Gosh, well the pages have been imaged.
And we're now preparing to,
Abigail is now preparing
for their longterm survival.
And I think that her main
concerns are what to do
to support really mold damaged
areas and how to encase
each individual leaf.
We've made the decision not
to rebind the manuscript.
Yes sir.
- [Man] I know you had an
exhibition at the Walter
shortly after it was sold.
Have there been any further
plans to another exhibition
now that so much more is known.
- Yes, we are planning an
exhibition for the fall of 2011.
And we're also planning hard
copy publications, complete
facsimiles of the most legible
text we can do together
with transcriptions, a book
on the project as a whole,
and then critical editions
on the unique text
in the manuscript, the
Archimedes manuscript,
the Hypereides manuscript, and the
Alexander of Aphrodisias commentary.
So, five books.
I don't know when the critical
editions will come out
but we're still pretty busy
on the project in general.
Yes sir.
- [Man] (Mumbles) text
that you've uncovered,
would you say it's (mumbles)
incomplete or a 100% complete,
or is a significant fragment?
- We only generate images
that are good enough
for a scholar to put together
a text that he is 90% sure of.
'Cause otherwise you can go on forever.
So, I think that there
are plenty of places
in the palimpsest where
you can't see anything.
But where you found enough
context so that the scribe,
I mean a modern scholar
can fill in the gaps.
For the Hypereides, I
think that we are 99%,
we have a 99% complete text.
But that doesn't mean that
we have a 99% complete
viewing of the text on the page.
Does that answer your question?
- Yes, so if you're an
expert, you can construct
something that's quite likely
to filling in the gaps.
- Right.
And with Archimedes, this
is particularly helpful
because he had a rather small vocabulary,
and he was a mathematician,
so he was formulaic.
So, if you're Reviel Netz,
you can construct lines
out of nothing, which is handy.
(laughing)
Yeah.
Yes sir.
- [Man] (Mumbles).
- One and half terabytes
for the whole data set,
which we're adding to.
But it's one and half terabytes now.
And it's hosted by the
Internet Software Consortium
which is great.
And there are, each
large image is 240 meg.
But there are JPEGs, so don't
click on the large image
until you know that you want it.
Check on the jpeg first.
Yes.
- [Woman] Are there any
English translations available?
- There are.
There are English
translations available of the
Hypereides text in the
(speaks in foreign language).
For the Diondes and
the Timandios speeches,
there are translations
available for Archimedes
Sphere and Cylinder together
with editions of the diagrams.
We are still working on
translations of the other stuff.
But then we're still
working on transcriptions
of the other stuff.
Yes sir.
- [Man] To get the manuscripts (mumbles).
- Yeah.
- What of the (mumbles) the originals?
- We were careful.
(laughing)
But we don't actually
discuss how we traveled.
Okay, well, yes sir.
- Were these Greek texts
all done by the same scribe?
- No.
They were all written
over by the same scribe.
Actually, for about six
pages, he had some help.
But they were all
basically written over by
Johannes Myronas.
But the Archimedes texts were
originally in a separate book
and a separate scribe in a
completely separate endeavor
from the Hypereides text, from
the Alexander of Aphrodisias
text, and that other texts in the book.
So, you have to imagine that
these wonderful unique texts
were in a library in
Jerusalem and that somehow
they were all used for recycled parchment
at roughly the same time.
- [Man] Any speculation
about what the scribe
would have been copying
from, how far removed
that might have been the original?
- The Archimedes scribe do you mean?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, there is some
speculation about that.
Archimedes wrote in a
particular dialect of Greek
called Doric and this text has traces
of that Doric dialect in it.
So, Nigel Wilson would say that you know,
it's four or five times removed.
Not much more than that,
which is kind of remarkable.
For Hypereides, probably even less.
There is no manuscript
tradition of Hypereides
except this one.
So, it's a book that
was hardly ever copied.
- Okay, well I think we've
finished the questions.
(audience applauding)
I don't think we have our
next one scheduled yet.
But watch your email.
You'll hear about it.
And hopefully everyone
will (mumbles) as this one.
Thank you for coming.
(audience applauding)
