They say opposites attract: Magnets’ north poles are drawn to south poles; Aziraphale is best buddies with Crowley; the sweetness of caramel is complemented by a pinch of salt. Nothing exemplifies this odd couple trope better than Ancient Greek mathematicians and particle accelerators. No, we’re not kidding. Come with us through two millennia, three continents, and countless scientific advances – and read one of the strangest and most important stories in the history of science.
In the beginning
Unusually for a story involving a particle accelerator, this one starts in an Ancient Greek colony – although today we’d consider it part of Italy. Archimedes of Syracuse was born in around 287 BCE in Sicily, and in the roughly 75 years he was around he basically invented math, physics, and engineering as we’ve known them ever since.
“Here was someone who just changed how we look at the universe,” Chris Rorres, professor emeritus of mathematics at Drexel University, told the New York Times in 2013. “He just planted the seeds for so many seminal ideas that could grow over the ages.”
Consider, for example, the Archimedes screw: a simple contraption, consisting of a corkscrew inside of a cylinder, which is able to pump water uphill. For millennia, it’s allowed farmers to irrigate their fields; in the modern age, it’s been repurposed as an electrical generator, harvesting energy from small streams to power, among other things, a home of the British royal family.
He was a visionary physicist, coming up with the Archimedes Principle while sitting in the tub – such an inspiring realization that, according to legend, he jumped out of his bath and ran down the street naked, shouting “eureka!” when it occurred to him.
He was a mathematician nearly two millennia out of time: “Archimedes was the earliest thinker to develop the apparatus of an infinite series with a finite limit,” noted Alex Bellos in his 2014 book The Grapes of Math, thus “starting on the conceptual path toward calculus.”
“Of the giants on whose shoulders Isaac Newton would eventually perch,” Bellos wrote, “Archimedes was the first.”
While he probably never invented a death ray (though the jury is technically still out), he did come up with a gigantic ship-destroying claw that destroyed the Roman fleet when they invaded Archimedes’s home in 214 BCE. He was, to put it mildly, a man of many talents.
But for someone with such an incredible legacy, we have shockingly little evidence of it, at least from the man himself: all original scrolls have been lost in the centuries since his life, and of those that were saved through copies and reproductions, only three have survived to the present day.
Of course, it was almost two.
Destroying the evidence
It was 1229 CE in the monastery of St Sabas, near Jerusalem, and a monk named Johannes Myronas was in need of some parchment. He had evidently been tasked with creating a copy of the Euchologion – an important book of prayer and worship directions for Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches.
The problem was, parchment was expensive and hard to come by. Recycling was the name of the game, and Johannes had just the thing: a 200-year-old manuscript filled with old math notes that nobody was all that interested in anymore. Compared with the Holy Word, there was no contest: he pulled it apart, scraped the old text off, and used the pages for the new book – a technique known as palimpsesting.
You probably know where this is going. In creating his Euchologion, Johannes had – presumably unwittingly – destroyed one of the most valuable relics of Archimedes’s work. Not just some notebook or single treatise, even: the manuscript now known as “Codex C” contained multiple works from the ancient polymath, some of which now exist nowhere else in the world.
“You never get three unique palimpsested texts from the ancient world together in one book,” Will Noel, curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, told the BBC in 2006. “That’s just completely unheard of.”
Bringing Archimedes into the 21st century
For around 700 years, Johannes’s Euchologion more or less hung on, eventually ending up in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Istanbul. It wasn’t until 1906 that anybody noticed there might be something interesting about it, when Johan Ludvig Heiberg, a professor of the history of mathematics from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, identified a few faded lines as being the work of Archimedes.
The story then gets a little murky. The palimpsest spent decades disappearing and resurfacing – at some point, art forgers added some faux-medieval gold paint to the tome in an attempt to boost its value – and it eventually turned up for auction in New York in 1998. It was bought by an anonymous collector, known only as “Mr B”, for $2 million – and that’s where things got interesting.
“Fortunately, [the buyer] turned out to be both enlightened and generous,” reported New Scientist back in 2007. “He responded to an email from Noel asking to display the palimpsest at the Walters Art Museum. That simple request kicked off a new chapter in the saga: the Archimedes Palimpsest Project.” Mr B also funded the work of an international team of experts working on the prayer book, many of whom worked for free.
The breakthroughs came quickly – thanks in no small part to sheer luck. Nigel Wilson, a Cambridge scholar recruited by Christie’s auction house to examine the palimpsest, realized he had already seen a similar fragment of overwritten Archimedes’s work – it turned out to be a lost page from the palimpsest.
“I realized at once that if you could apply even an ultraviolet lamp to the manuscript, you’d be able to read a great deal more than was read in 1907,” Wilson told New Scientist.
He wasn’t wrong – but the technique didn’t work for every page. Then the team had another stroke of luck.
Everything old is new again
Uwe Bergmann was in Germany, attending a physics conference, when he first read about the Archimedes Palimpsest.
“I read that there is still some significant text missing, and that there are forgeries and that there’s iron in the ink,” he told NPR in 2006. “When I read the word ‘iron,’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, we are studying iron in spinach.’ I thought we should be able to use the same method and just then do imaging with it.”
His idea was simple: by bombarding the manuscript with X-ray photons fired at close to the speed of light using a particle accelerator called a synchrotron housed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, the iron in the parchment would fluoresce: “Anything which contains iron will be shown, and anything that doesn’t contain iron will not be shown,” Bergmann told NBC.
Like magic, the original text was revealed. “I wished I could read ancient Greek,” Bergmann told NPR. “Very beautiful looking characters all over the place.”
That may have been an understatement. Revealed in the palimpsest was not just Archimedean texts, but examples that had never been seen before: there was a Greek version of On Floating Bodies – the first known work on hydrostatics, containing the original statement of Archimedes’s eponymous Principle. There were excerpts of The Method of Mechanical Theorems, Archimedes’s groundbreaking mathematical treatise, which appeared to suggest that the ancient polymath had grappled with the concept of infinity – something that had previously been considered unknown in Greek thought. And there was the Stomachion – an exploration of a mathematical puzzle, similar to tangrams, which was only resolved in 2003.
No wonder, then, that Noel described the palimpsest as the “eighth wonder of the world” – telling the BBC that “it just doesn’t get any better than re-reading the mind of one of the greatest figures of Western civilization.”
And the strangest part of all? It probably wouldn’t have been possible if not for that monk back in 1229.
“What a gift he gave us,” Noel told NPR. “The great advantage of having them wrapped up in a Christian prayer book is that they were treasured and looked after for centuries.”
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