Particle accelerator helping to uncover Archimedes’s words

Here’s another story on using modern technology to uncover the secrets concealed in an ancient manuscript. In this case the technology is a particle accelerator, and the document is the Archimedes Palimpsest, thought to be a 10th century copy of an original long-lost Archimedes manuscript which was copied over by a later scribe. I saw a Nova (I believe) episode on this Palimpsest a couple of years ago; this new technology may help scientists recover some of the 80 percent of the document that remains unreadable.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2005/05/particle-accelerator-helping-to-uncover-archimedess-words/

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