William Noel: Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes

118,016 views ・ 2012-05-29

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The great texts of the ancient world
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don't survive to us in their original form.
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They survive because medieval scribes copied them
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and copied them and copied them.
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And so it is with Archimedes,
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the great Greek mathematician.
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Everything we know about Archimedes as a mathematician
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we know about because of just three books,
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and they're called A, B and C.
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And A was lost by an Italian humanist in 1564.
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And B was last heard of in the Pope's Library
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about a hundred miles north of Rome in Viterbo in 1311.
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Now Codex C was only discovered in 1906,
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and it landed on my desk in Baltimore
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on the 19th of January, 1999.
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And this is Codex C here.
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Now Codex C is actually buried in this book.
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It's buried treasure.
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Because this book is actually a prayer book.
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It was finished by a guy called Johannes Myrones
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on the 14th of April, 1229.
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And to make his prayer book he used parchment.
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But he didn't use new parchment,
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he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts,
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and there were seven of them.
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And Archimedes Codex C was just one of those seven.
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He took apart the Archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts.
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He erased all of their texts,
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and then he cut the sheets down in the middle,
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he shuffled them up,
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and he rotated them 90 degrees,
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and he wrote prayers on top of these books.
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And essentially these seven manuscripts
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disappeared for 700 years, and we have a prayer book.
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The prayer book was discovered by this guy,
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Johan Ludvig Heiberg, in 1906.
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And with just a magnifying glass,
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he transcribed as much of the text as he could.
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And the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript
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that were unique texts.
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They weren't in A and B at all;
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they were completely new texts by Archimedes,
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and they were called "The Method" and "The Stomachion."
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And it became a world famous manuscript.
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Now it should be clear by now
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that this book is in bad condition.
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It got in worse condition in the 20th century
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after Heiberg saw it.
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Forgeries were painted over it,
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and it suffered very badly from mold.
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This book is the definition of a write-off.
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It's the sort of book
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that you thought would be in an institution.
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But it's not in an institution,
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it was bought by a private owner in 1998.
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Why did he buy this book?
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Because he wanted to make that which was fragile safe.
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He wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous.
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He wanted to make that which was expensive free.
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And he wanted to do this as a matter of principle.
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Because not many people are really going to read Archimedes in ancient Greek,
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but they should have the chance to do it.
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So he gathered around himself the friends of Archimedes,
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and he promised to pay for all the work.
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And it was an expensive job,
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but actually it wouldn't be as much as you think
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because these people, they didn't come from money,
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they came from Archimedes.
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And they came from all sorts of different backgrounds.
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They came from particle physics,
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they came from classical philology,
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they came from book conservation,
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they came from ancient mathematics,
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they came from data management,
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they came from scientific imaging and program management.
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And they got together to work on this manuscript.
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The first problem was a conservation problem.
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And this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with:
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There was glue on the spine of the book.
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And if you look at this photograph carefully,
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the bottom half of this is rather brown.
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And that glue is hide glue.
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Now if you're a conservator,
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you can take off this glue reasonably easily.
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The top half is Elmer's wood glue.
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It's polyvinyl acetate emulsion
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that doesn't dissolve in water once it's dry.
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And it's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on.
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And so before we could start imaging Archimedes,
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we had to take this book apart.
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So it took four years to take apart.
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And this is a rare action shot, ladies and gentlemen.
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(Laughter)
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Another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax,
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because this was used in the liturgical services
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of the Greek Orthodox Church
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and they'd used candle wax.
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And the candle wax was dirty,
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and we couldn't image through the wax.
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So very carefully we had to mechanically scrape off all the wax.
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It's hard to tell you exactly
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how bad this condition of this book is,
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but it came out in little bits very often.
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And normally in a book, you wouldn't worry about the little bits,
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but these little bits might contain unique Archimedes text.
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So, tiny fragments
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we actually managed to put back in the right place.
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Then, having done that, we started to image the manuscript.
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And we imaged the manuscript
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in 14 different wavebands of light.
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Because if you look at something in different wavebands of light,
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you see different things.
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And here is an image of a page
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imaged in 14 different wavebands of light.
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But none of them worked.
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So what we did was we processed the images together,
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and we put two images into one blank screen.
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And here are two different images of the Archimedes manuscript.
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And the image on the left
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is the normal red image.
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And the image on the right is an ultraviolet image.
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And in the image on the right
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you might be able to see some of the Archimedes writing.
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If you merge them together into one digital canvas,
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the parchment is bright in both images
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and it comes out bright.
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The prayer book is dark in both images
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and it comes out dark.
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The Archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another.
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And it'll come out dark but red,
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and then you can start to read it rather clearly.
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And that's what it looks like.
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Now that's a before and after image,
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but you don't read the image on the screen like that.
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You zoom in and you zoom in
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and you zoom in and you zoom in,
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and you can just read it now.
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(Applause)
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If you process the same two images in a different way,
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you can actually get rid of the prayer book text.
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And this is terribly important,
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because the diagrams in the manuscript
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are the unique source for the diagrams
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that Archimedes drew in the sand in the fourth century B.C.
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And there we are, I can give them to you.
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With this kind of imaging --
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this kind of infrared, ultraviolet, invisible light imaging --
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we were never going to image through the gold ground forgeries.
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How were we going to do that?
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Well we took the manuscript,
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and we decided to image it in X-ray fluorescence imaging.
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So an X-ray comes in in the diagram on the left
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and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom.
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And that electron disappears.
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And as it disappears, an electron from a shell farther out
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jumps in and takes its place.
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And when it takes its place,
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it sheds electromagnetic radiation.
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It sheds an X-ray.
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And this X-ray is specific in its wavelength
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to the atom that it hits.
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And what we wanted to get
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was the iron.
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Because the ink was written in iron.
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And if we can map
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where this X-ray that comes out, where it comes from,
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we can map all the iron on the page,
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then theoretically we can read the image.
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The thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this.
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So we took it to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory
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in California,
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which is a particle accelerator.
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Electrons go around one way,
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positrons go around the other.
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They meet in the middle,
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and they create subatomic particles
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like the charm quark and the tau lepton.
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Now we weren't actually going to put Archimedes in that beam.
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But as the electrons go round at the speed of light,
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they shed X-rays.
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And this is the most powerful light source in the solar system.
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This is called synchrotron radiation,
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and it's normally used to look at things
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like proteins and that sort of thing.
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But we wanted it to look at atoms, at iron atoms,
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so that we could read the page from before and after.
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And lo and behold, we found that we could do it.
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It took about 17 minutes to do a single page.
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So what did we discover?
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Well one of the unique texts in Archimedes
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is called "The Stomachion."
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And this didn't exist in Codices A and B.
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And we knew that it involved this square.
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And this is a perfect square,
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and it's divided into 14 bits.
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But no one knew what Archimedes was doing with these 14 bits.
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And now we think we know.
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He was trying to work out
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how many ways you can recombine those 14 bits
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and still make a perfect square.
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Anyone want to guess the answer?
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It's 17,152 divided into 536 families.
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And the important point about this
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is that it's the earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics.
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And combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics.
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The really astonishing thing though about this manuscript
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is that we looked at the other manuscripts
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that the palimpsester had made,
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the scribe had made his book out of,
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and one of them was a manuscript containing text by Hyperides.
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Now Hyperides was an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C.
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He was an exact contemporary of Demosthenes.
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And in 338 B.C. he and Demosthenes together
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decided that they wanted to stand up
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to the military might of Philip of Macedon.
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So Athens and Thebes went out to fight Philip of Macedon.
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This was a bad idea,
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because Philip of Macedon had a son called Alexander the Great,
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and they lost the battle of Chaeronea.
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Alexander the Great went on to conquer the known world;
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Hyperides found himself on trial for treason.
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And this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial --
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and it's a great speech:
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"Best of all," he says, "is to win.
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But if you can't win,
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then you should fight for a noble cause,
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because then you'll be remembered.
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Consider the Spartans.
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They won enumerable victories,
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but no one remembers what they are
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because they were all fought for selfish ends.
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The one battle that the Spartans fought that everybody remembers
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is the the battle of Thermopylae
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where they were butchered to a man,
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but fought for the freedom of Greece."
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It was such a great speech
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that the Athenian law courts let him off.
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He lived for another 10 years,
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then the Macedonian faction caught up with him.
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They cut out his tongue in mockery of his oratory,
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and no one knows what they did with his body.
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So this is the discovery of a lost voice from antiquity,
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speaking to us, not from the grave,
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because his grave doesn't exist,
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but from the Athenian law courts.
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Now I should say at this point
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that normally when you're looking
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at medieval manuscripts that have been scraped off,
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you don't find unique texts.
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And to find two in one manuscript is really something.
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To find three is completely weird.
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And we found three.
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Aristotle's "Categories"
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is one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy.
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And we found a third century A.D. commentary on it,
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possibly by Galen and probably by Porphyry.
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Now all this data that we collected,
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all the images, all the raw images,
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all the transcriptions that we made and that sort of thing
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have been put online under a Creative Commons license
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for anyone to use for any commercial purpose.
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(Applause)
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Why did the owner of the manuscript do this?
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He did this because he understands data as well as books.
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Now the thing to do with books,
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if you want to ensure their long-term utility,
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is to hide them away in closets
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and let very few people look at them.
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The thing to do with data, if you want it to survive,
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is to let it out and have everybody have it
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with as little control on that data as possible.
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And that's what he did.
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And institutions can learn from this.
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Because institutions at the moment
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confine their data with copyright restrictions and that sort of thing.
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And if you want to look at medieval manuscripts on the Web,
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at the moment you have to go to the National Library of Y's site
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or the University Library of X's site,
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which is about the most boring way
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in which you can deal with digital data.
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What you want to do is to aggregate it all together.
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Because the Web of the ancient manuscripts of the future
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isn't going to be built by institutions.
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It's going to be built by users,
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by people who get this data together,
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by people who want to aggregate all sorts of maps
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from wherever they come from,
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all sorts of medieval romances
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from wherever they come from,
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people who just want to curate their own glorious selection
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of beautiful things.
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And that is the future of the Web.
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And it's an attractive and beautiful future,
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if only we can make it happen.
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Now we at the Walters Art Museum have followed this example,
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and we have put up all our manuscripts on the Web
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for people to enjoy --
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all the raw data, all the descriptions, all the metadata.
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under a Creative Commons license.
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Now the Walters Art Museum is a small museum
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and it has beautiful manuscripts,
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but the data is fantastic.
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And the result of this
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is that if you do a Google search on images right now
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and you type in "Illuminated manuscript Koran" for example,
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24 of the 28 images you'll find come from my institution.
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(Applause)
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Now, let's think about this for a minute.
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What's in it for the institution?
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There are all sorts of things that are in it for the institution.
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You can talk about the Humanities and that sort of thing,
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but let's talk about selfish things.
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Because what's really in it for the institution is this:
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Now why do people go to the Louvre?
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They go to see the Mona Lisa.
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Why do they go to see the Mona Lisa?
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Because they already know what she looks like.
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And they know what she looks like
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because they've seen pictures of her absolutely everywhere.
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Now, there is no need
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for these restrictions at all.
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And I think that institutions should stand up
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and release all their data under unrestricted licenses,
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and it would be a great benefit to everybody.
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Why don't we just let everybody have access to this data
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and curate their own collection
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of ancient knowledge and wonderful and beautiful things
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and increase the beauty and the cultural significance
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of the Internet.
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Thank you very much indeed.
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(Applause)
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