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Transcript
September 26, 2003
NARRATOR: Although it's almost illegible, the writing in this
book contains extraordinary secrets—2,000-year-old ideas that
could have changed the course of history.
CHRIS RORRES (University of Pennsylvania): We could
have been on Mars today. We could have accomplished all of the
things that people are predicting for a century from now. You would
basically be raising the tide by increasing the knowledge of
mathematics several hundred years ago.
NARRATOR: Written by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, the
book contains the beginnings of the invention of calculus. But the
ideas were lost thanks to a medieval monk who ran out of paper for
his prayer book. As shown on PBS's NOVA, he took pages out of the
book, turned them sideways, washed away the ink, and wrote over it.
But there was still a faint trace of the Archimedes text. Some 900
years later, a team of scientists is using computers to process
images of the pages in different colors, and then combine them into
a final image where the different lines of text are easier to pick
out.
REVIEL NETZ (Stanford University): I was amazed by the
fact that now for the first time I can look at pages that look
hopeless with the naked eye and begin to use them as text from which
you just read.
NARRATOR: It turns out the book is valuable not just because
it contains the lost ideas of Archimedes, but because it also
details how he arrived at them in the first place. If the scholars
who followed him could have had this glimpse into the mind of a
genius, the world might have been a different place today. I'm Brad
Kloza.
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