The Sun BabelFish Blog
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Archimedes Palimsest
An amazing story that starts with one of the greatest thinkers of humanity, Archimedes, born in 287 BC, a document of his that travelled through a thousand years of empire building and destruction, monks copying this document around the year 1000 in Constantinople onto a papyrus, then later overwriting it with a hymns to God, praying to it for another 800 years, until it was released to the library of Alexandria last century, someone painted a fake old painting onto it to increase its supposed worth, until finally it was recovered into the hands of a group of scientists who are now using the most advanced imaging tools at our disposal to recover the traces of the lost writing. This is not a crazy novel. This is reality. And you can see it unfold before your eyes on the San Francisco archimedes webcast, and read more about it on the Archimedes Palimsest page.
Something to meditate on at length.
Posted at 11:10AM Aug 08, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in General | Comments[1]
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Posted by Sivakumar Thyagarajan on August 29, 2006 at 01:48 PM CEST #