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When most people hear the name Archimedes, they picture a gaunt
figure with a long beard screaming "Eureka!" and running around the
streets naked, dripping with bathwater. Whether such a scene ever
occurred is debatable, but what is certain is that Archimedes was a
man obsessed with numbers. In his lifetime he found a good
approximation for pi; calculated the areas of a circle and a sphere;
and developed a system for expressing large numbers. And on the
side, he found time to invent military devices and discover the
principle of buoyancy.
Although Archimedes was on the verge of inventing calculus around
250 B.C., it wasn't until nearly 2,000 years later that Sir Isaac
Newton published The Principia, a work in which Newton
developed the laws of both modern physics and calculus. Why the
delay? Unfortunately, much of Archimedes' work was lost until modern
times. The earliest known copy of his work—a manuscript
created more than 1,000 years after Archimedes died—was
"recycled" by Christian monks in the Middle Ages to use as a prayer
book. They scraped or washed the pages, rotated the manuscript 90
degrees, and wrote over the ancient text. This created a book known
as a palimpsest. In 1906, Danish scholar Johan Ludwig Heiberg
received word that the Palimpsest was located in a library in
Constantinople. After traveling there, Heiberg attempted to
reconstruct Archimedes' work, with only a magnifying glass to aid
him. The manuscript is being more closely examined today, with the
help of digital enhancement and ultraviolet light.
NOVA's "Infinite Secrets" program introduces the scientists,
translators, and curators who are deciphering and preserving
Archimedes' text. The program documents Archimedes' many
contributions to the fields of math and science and describes the
importance of the Palimpsest, the only copy of work by Archimedes
that describes how he made his discoveries. "Infinite Secrets" also
asks the question: If Archimedes' manuscript had not been lost, how
much further advanced would the fields of math and science be today?
What Is a Palimpsest?
A palimpsest is a book in which the original text has been erased
and the pages written on again. The word palimpsest is derived from
a Greek word meaning "scraped again." These books were usually made
out of papyrus or parchment (sheepskin). As illustrated in the
drawings to the right, the Archimedes Palimpsest was made by taking
the original manuscript apart, scraping off the text, cutting the
pages in half, rotating the pages, writing over the original text,
and rebinding the book.
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