Lost work by Archimedes discovered in prayer book

[charlie]

This is remarkable stuff. It looks like Archimedes was on his way to inventing calculus and had a very sophisticated grasp of the concept of infinity.

The dismaying part is that it was (again!) nearly lost forever to make way for Yet Another Fucking Book of Prayers. It's not the loss of Alexandria or the erasure of Mayan history, but goddamn, was there NO ONE around to say, "Holy shit dude, Archimedes. Leave this one alone"?

Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes' book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink, creating a palimpsest—fresh writing material made by clearing away older text. Then he wrote his prayers on the nearly-clean pages.
...

Two of the texts hiding in the prayer book have not appeared in any other copy of Archimedes's work, so no one but Heiberg had studied them until now. One of them, titled The Method, has special historical significance. It could be considered the earliest known work on calculus.

Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes' work has revealed "a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics."

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8974/title/Math_Trek__A_Prayer_for_Archimedes

[salvorhardin]

1. Man, can you imagine what the world might be like today

If calculus had been discovered and widely disseminated by 200BC rather than 1700AD?

[charlie]

2. No kidding

Unlike religion or woo, mathematical and scientific knowledge is cumulative, in the sense that it generally becomes more accurate, more refined, closer to physical reality. And its development is exponential when widely disseminated. Roman engineering was already a marvel, I couldn't guess where we'd be if more modern engineering principles were available then. Hell, just removing the megalithic speedbump of the Dark Ages could put us centuries ahead of where we are now. Imagine, peak oil and global warming being issues faced and addressed in history books.

[salvorhardin]

3. I have to wonder too if Christianity and Islam would ever have even gotten a foothold

200 years of science and mathematics seriously eroded religious influence in Europe (by 1900) and helped usher in the Enlightenment. If those 200 years of development had occurred between 200BC and 0AD, coupled with the Greek and Roman military juggernauts, I wonder if Christianity would have even spread beyond a mere fringe following? And if all that development was in the Mediterranean and Middle East instead of Europe, I wonder if it's doubtful if Islam could have even gotten started?

Of course, they wouldn't have had the printing press which is really what helped to ignite fires under both Christianity and science and mathematics. By the time Newton and Leibnitz were born, Europe had already had 200 years of the printing press. Could they have done it without the printing press to widely disseminate their ideas? If Alexandria hadn't burned, would it's sheer continued existence (and one hopes, continued expansion) create the right conditions for the state to fund the creation of the printing press? Would their metallurgy have been advanced enough by that time to create movable type?

[onager]

6. Well, if the last Ptolemy had survived in Alexandria...

Cleopatra VII, who reportedly spoke seven languages and studied math and science at the Alexandria Library.

Yep, if she had been more successful at keeping Egypt independent...it's hard to imagine what the world might have been like.

But fun. Her oldest child was the son of Julius Caesar. His younger half-siblings were the offspring of Marc Antony.

While its always hard to predict how people will turn out...well, those are not the genes of stupid or timid people.

Which unfortunately, many of the Ptolemies were. With a couple of notable exceptions, they were pretty much the Bush Dynasty of their day.

If Alexandria hadn't burned, would it's sheer continued existence (and one hopes, continued expansion) create the right conditions for the state to fund the creation of the printing press?

Maybe. And even without a printing press, the Library could have cranked out lots of copies from hundreds of scribes. One of the main purposes of the Library was the editing and correction of ancient manuscripts.

e.g., despite a lot of religious woo-woo from both Jews and Xians, the Biblical translation called the "Septuagint" was created to solve a practical problem.

For centuries, Alexandria had a large and productive Jewish population. In time, they lost their knowledge of Hebrew because their daily spoken/written language was Greek.

When they (probably) asked the Ptolemaic rulers for a translation of their holy book into Greek, the rulers were happy to accomodate them.

That's why we can turn on our TVs nowadays, and hear some shit-head evangelist in a $1000-dollar suit barking about the "miracle" of that translation.

[Odin2005]

13. IMO Greek science died because there was no mass literacy.

The average guy on the street didn't have a clue about much of this stuff. It was associated with the rich elite dilettantes, probably not liked by the poor inner-city Christians.

IMO it was the mass literacy allowed by printing that allowed the scientific revolution.

[realisticphish]

4. Here's one thing, though

a point which was made when this was discovered a few years ago. If it HADN'T been made into a prayer book, would it have survived? After all, a lot of major scientific texts and manuscripts were destroyed by the church and others

[salvorhardin]

5. Well, that's what I'm sort of getting at in my last comment

Were the conditions right at that time to spark the kind of revolution in science and mathematics that occurred around 1700 in Europe? Like I noted, by the time Newton and Leibnitz were born, they had already had 200 years of the printing press. Archimedes wouldn't have had that. That means his work couldn't have been easily widely disseminated which further means his work was all the more fragile because there would have been far fewer copies in existence. Would 200 years, without the printing press, have been enough time to prevent the rise of Christianity and thus the destruction of far more ancient texts?

[politicat]

7. I've often wondered if the palimpsests weren't created to preserve these works.

Medieval scholars knew about palimpsest. They knew that it was impossible to entirely scrape a parchment clean, and they also knew that it was possible to read the underlying text, though very difficult. This was especially true in the East -- modern Greece, Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

Much of the East's store of knowledge was lost during the early Crusades, when the Pope basically diverted tens of thousands of local barbarian warlords from killing each other thrice weekly to go make war on a technologically sophisticated, highly organized, wealthy enemy thousands of miles away from the home supply lines, in a climate hostile to the Crusaders. (A cynical part of me wonders if the Crusades weren't intended to fail as a military expedition, considering they mostly did, but to succeed as a social and economic restructuring policy, which they kinda did, and as an informational transfer policy, which was the biggest success.) Most of the surviving palimpsests come from that region and that time period.

We know that the arriving Crusaders didn't stop to ask if their victims were Christian -- they merely assumed that anyone dressed for the climate had to be an infidel. The first sack of Constantinople was by Christian Crusaders, not Muslim defenders. The Northern European Christian Crusaders were appallingly ignorant, astonishingly incurious, and brutal (in general. There are always exceptions.)

It seems likely to me that well-educated, scholarly monks and scribes in areas likely to be soon sacked might intentionally hide their more controversial books -- such as Archimedes -- under piety to protect them, knowing that in time, people would figure out how to read them again. They'd already seen enormous technological improvement -- the invention of the practical mirror, the lens, and some significant improvements in medicine -- and had faith the trend would continue. (It did.)

The senior monk in charge of the scriptorium didn't get the job by being disrespectful of knowledge, and even if brought into that position by a reactionary -- and reactionaries have always existed -- there have always been an equal number of subversives. Since they knew they couldn't entirely destroy a text, I can't help but think they used that when it became the last hope.

[Bolo Boffin]

8. And also when the palimpsest was made, there may have been plenty of copies of the Archimedes book.

You just never know.

[realisticphish]

9. well

it was my understanding that this was actually written by archimedes. This is pre-press, so I don't know how many copies a secular work would be getting; there weren't that many private scribes

[Bolo Boffin]

10. I think Archimedes would have written on papyrus - this was a copy of that

And my situation isn't anything I'm arguing for as the only thing it could be, just a possibility. It's possible that the monk just grabbed some old manuscript that no one had opened for a few hundred years and got busy, too.

[realisticphish]

11. true

I think you're right, that he pretty much grabbed an old one and got on with it.


This is why we need to build a time machine

[onager]

12. Archimedes worked at the Alexandria Library

So he would have definitely written on papyrus there. :-)

There's a whole fascinating history of how Egypt tried to keep papyrus-making a national trade secret, and pretty much succeeded until its competitor parchment came along. Fortunately, I don't know much about that history so I can't bloviate upon it.

Most people probably know this, but I will point it out again because I'm a repetitive and garrulous asshole: the term "Alexandria Library" is something of a misnomer. The ancient Alexandria Library was more like a combination of M.I.T., a modern think tank, and the Library of Congress.

Its founders/financiers, the Ptolemies, called it a "Museum" and it was exactly that, in the original sense of the word - a "temple of the Muses."

The high-powered scholars who worked there (by invitation only) were in the...care of a High Priest. This was not for religious purposes, but so the High Priest could keep an eye on the intellectuals and report back to the rulers.

Greek academics had some suspicious ideas about stuff like democracy, and the rulers didn't want those ideas getting loose. Especially since the rulers were paying the scholars' room and board.

[Odin2005]

14. Yep, "Library" is a misnomer, it was in fact a whole research university.

In fact, it is the earliest research university that I am aware of. It was a massive complex of which the library was only one part.