Unveiling the Secrets of Archimedes
- Office of Science, SULI Program, Norfolk State University, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, California (United States)
Progress has been made at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) toward deciphering the remaining 10-20% of ancient Greek text contained in the Archimedes palimpsest. The text is known to contain valuable works by the mathematician, including the Method of Mechanical Theorems, the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, and several diagrams. The only surviving copy of the text was recycled into a prayer book in the Middle Ages. The ink used to write on the goat skin parchment is partly composed of iron, which is visible by x-ray radiation. To image the palimpsest pages, the parchment was framed and placed in a stage that moved according to the raster method. When an x-ray beam was incident upon the parchment the iron in the ink was detected by a germanium detector. The resultant signal was converted to a gray-scale image. It was extremely important that each line of data was well aligned with the line that came before it. The objectives of this experiment were to determine the best parameters for producing well-aligned images and to reduce the scanning time. Imaging half a page of parchment during previous beam time for this project was achieved in thirty hours. Equations were produced to evaluate count time, shutter time, and the number of pixels in this experiment. On Beamline 6-2 at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), actual scanning time was reduced by one fourth. The remaining pages were successfully imaged and sent to ancient Greek experts for translation.
- OSTI ID:
- 21136831
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 991, Issue 1; Conference: 34. annual day of scientific lectures and 30. annual meeting: 2007 joint annual conference of the National Society of Black Physicists and the National Society of Hispanic Physicists, Boston, MA (United States), 21-24 Feb 2007; Other Information: DOI: 10.1063/1.2905135; (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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