Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes
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0:00 - 0:03The great texts of the ancient world
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0:03 - 0:06don't survive to us in their original form.
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0:06 - 0:10They survive because medieval scribes copied them
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0:10 - 0:12and copied them and copied them.
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0:12 - 0:14And so it is with Archimedes,
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0:14 - 0:16the great Greek mathematician.
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0:16 - 0:19Everything we know about Archimedes as a mathematician
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0:19 - 0:22we know about because of just three books,
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0:22 - 0:24and they're called A, B and C.
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0:24 - 0:29And A was lost by an Italian humanist in 1564.
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0:29 - 0:31And B was last heard of in the Pope's Library
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0:31 - 0:37about a hundred miles north of Rome in Viterbo in 1311.
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0:37 - 0:42Now Codex C was only discovered in 1906,
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0:42 - 0:44and it landed on my desk in Baltimore
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0:44 - 0:48on the 19th of January, 1999.
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0:48 - 0:51And this is Codex C here.
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0:51 - 0:56Now Codex C is actually buried in this book.
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0:56 - 0:57It's buried treasure.
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0:57 - 1:00Because this book is actually a prayer book.
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1:00 - 1:03It was finished by a guy called Johannes Myrones
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1:03 - 1:06on the 14th of April, 1229.
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1:06 - 1:09And to make his prayer book he used parchment.
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1:09 - 1:11But he didn't use new parchment,
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1:11 - 1:14he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts,
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1:14 - 1:16and there were seven of them.
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1:16 - 1:20And Archimedes Codex C was just one of those seven.
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1:20 - 1:25He took apart the Archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts.
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1:25 - 1:28He erased all of their texts,
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1:28 - 1:31and then he cut the sheets down in the middle,
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1:31 - 1:33he shuffled them up,
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1:33 - 1:35and he rotated them 90 degrees,
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1:35 - 1:37and he wrote prayers on top of these books.
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1:37 - 1:39And essentially these seven manuscripts
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1:39 - 1:43disappeared for 700 years, and we have a prayer book.
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1:43 - 1:46The prayer book was discovered by this guy,
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1:46 - 1:49Johan Ludvig Heiberg, in 1906.
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1:49 - 1:51And with just a magnifying glass,
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1:51 - 1:53he transcribed as much of the text as he could.
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1:53 - 1:57And the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript
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1:57 - 1:58that were unique texts.
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1:58 - 2:00They weren't in A and B at all;
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2:00 - 2:02they were completely new texts by Archimedes,
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2:02 - 2:05and they were called "The Method" and "The Stomachion."
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2:05 - 2:07And it became a world famous manuscript.
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2:07 - 2:09Now it should be clear by now
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2:09 - 2:12that this book is in bad condition.
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2:12 - 2:15It got in worse condition in the 20th century
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2:15 - 2:17after Heiberg saw it.
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2:17 - 2:18Forgeries were painted over it,
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2:18 - 2:22and it suffered very badly from mold.
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2:22 - 2:25This book is the definition of a write-off.
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2:25 - 2:27It's the sort of book
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2:27 - 2:30that you thought would be in an institution.
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2:30 - 2:32But it's not in an institution,
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2:32 - 2:37it was bought by a private owner in 1998.
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2:37 - 2:38Why did he buy this book?
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2:38 - 2:42Because he wanted to make that which was fragile safe.
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2:42 - 2:45He wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous.
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2:45 - 2:50He wanted to make that which was expensive free.
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2:50 - 2:53And he wanted to do this as a matter of principle.
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2:53 - 2:57Because not many people are really going to read Archimedes in ancient Greek,
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2:57 - 3:00but they should have the chance to do it.
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3:00 - 3:03So he gathered around himself the friends of Archimedes,
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3:03 - 3:06and he promised to pay for all the work.
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3:06 - 3:07And it was an expensive job,
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3:07 - 3:11but actually it wouldn't be as much as you think
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3:11 - 3:13because these people, they didn't come from money,
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3:13 - 3:15they came from Archimedes.
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3:15 - 3:16And they came from all sorts of different backgrounds.
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3:16 - 3:19They came from particle physics,
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3:19 - 3:20they came from classical philology,
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3:20 - 3:22they came from book conservation,
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3:22 - 3:25they came from ancient mathematics,
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3:25 - 3:27they came from data management,
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3:27 - 3:30they came from scientific imaging and program management.
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3:30 - 3:33And they got together to work on this manuscript.
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3:33 - 3:37The first problem was a conservation problem.
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3:37 - 3:39And this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with:
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3:39 - 3:42There was glue on the spine of the book.
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3:42 - 3:44And if you look at this photograph carefully,
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3:44 - 3:46the bottom half of this is rather brown.
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3:46 - 3:47And that glue is hide glue.
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3:47 - 3:49Now if you're a conservator,
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3:49 - 3:51you can take off this glue reasonably easily.
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3:51 - 3:54The top half is Elmer's wood glue.
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3:54 - 3:56It's polyvinyl acetate emulsion
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3:56 - 3:59that doesn't dissolve in water once it's dry.
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3:59 - 4:02And it's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on.
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4:02 - 4:05And so before we could start imaging Archimedes,
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4:05 - 4:07we had to take this book apart.
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4:07 - 4:10So it took four years to take apart.
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4:10 - 4:13And this is a rare action shot, ladies and gentlemen.
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4:13 - 4:16(Laughter)
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4:16 - 4:20Another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax,
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4:20 - 4:22because this was used in the liturgical services
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4:22 - 4:24of the Greek Orthodox Church
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4:24 - 4:25and they'd used candle wax.
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4:25 - 4:27And the candle wax was dirty,
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4:27 - 4:29and we couldn't image through the wax.
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4:29 - 4:32So very carefully we had to mechanically scrape off all the wax.
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4:32 - 4:34It's hard to tell you exactly
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4:34 - 4:37how bad this condition of this book is,
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4:37 - 4:39but it came out in little bits very often.
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4:39 - 4:42And normally in a book, you wouldn't worry about the little bits,
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4:42 - 4:45but these little bits might contain unique Archimedes text.
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4:45 - 4:47So, tiny fragments
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4:47 - 4:52we actually managed to put back in the right place.
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4:52 - 4:55Then, having done that, we started to image the manuscript.
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4:55 - 4:57And we imaged the manuscript
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4:57 - 4:59in 14 different wavebands of light.
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4:59 - 5:03Because if you look at something in different wavebands of light,
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5:03 - 5:04you see different things.
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5:04 - 5:06And here is an image of a page
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5:06 - 5:08imaged in 14 different wavebands of light.
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5:08 - 5:10But none of them worked.
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5:10 - 5:15So what we did was we processed the images together,
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5:15 - 5:18and we put two images into one blank screen.
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5:18 - 5:21And here are two different images of the Archimedes manuscript.
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5:21 - 5:23And the image on the left
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5:23 - 5:24is the normal red image.
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5:24 - 5:26And the image on the right is an ultraviolet image.
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5:26 - 5:27And in the image on the right
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5:27 - 5:29you might be able to see some of the Archimedes writing.
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5:29 - 5:32If you merge them together into one digital canvas,
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5:32 - 5:35the parchment is bright in both images
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5:35 - 5:37and it comes out bright.
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5:37 - 5:40The prayer book is dark in both images
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5:40 - 5:42and it comes out dark.
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5:42 - 5:45The Archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another.
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5:45 - 5:48And it'll come out dark but red,
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5:48 - 5:50and then you can start to read it rather clearly.
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5:50 - 5:53And that's what it looks like.
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5:53 - 5:56Now that's a before and after image,
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5:56 - 5:59but you don't read the image on the screen like that.
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5:59 - 6:02You zoom in and you zoom in
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6:02 - 6:05and you zoom in and you zoom in,
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6:05 - 6:07and you can just read it now.
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6:07 - 6:14(Applause)
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6:14 - 6:17If you process the same two images in a different way,
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6:17 - 6:20you can actually get rid of the prayer book text.
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6:20 - 6:21And this is terribly important,
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6:21 - 6:24because the diagrams in the manuscript
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6:24 - 6:26are the unique source for the diagrams
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6:26 - 6:29that Archimedes drew in the sand in the fourth century B.C.
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6:29 - 6:32And there we are, I can give them to you.
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6:32 - 6:34With this kind of imaging --
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6:34 - 6:37this kind of infrared, ultraviolet, invisible light imaging --
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6:37 - 6:40we were never going to image through the gold ground forgeries.
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6:40 - 6:42How were we going to do that?
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6:42 - 6:44Well we took the manuscript,
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6:44 - 6:48and we decided to image it in X-ray fluorescence imaging.
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6:48 - 6:51So an X-ray comes in in the diagram on the left
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6:51 - 6:55and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom.
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6:55 - 6:57And that electron disappears.
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6:57 - 7:00And as it disappears, an electron from a shell farther out
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7:00 - 7:03jumps in and takes its place.
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7:03 - 7:04And when it takes its place,
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7:04 - 7:07it sheds electromagnetic radiation.
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7:07 - 7:08It sheds an X-ray.
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7:08 - 7:11And this X-ray is specific in its wavelength
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7:11 - 7:13to the atom that it hits.
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7:13 - 7:15And what we wanted to get
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7:15 - 7:17was the iron.
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7:17 - 7:19Because the ink was written in iron.
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7:19 - 7:20And if we can map
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7:20 - 7:23where this X-ray that comes out, where it comes from,
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7:23 - 7:25we can map all the iron on the page,
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7:25 - 7:28then theoretically we can read the image.
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7:28 - 7:32The thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this.
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7:32 - 7:35So we took it to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory
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7:35 - 7:37in California,
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7:37 - 7:38which is a particle accelerator.
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7:38 - 7:40Electrons go around one way,
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7:40 - 7:42positrons go around the other.
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7:42 - 7:43They meet in the middle,
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7:43 - 7:46and they create subatomic particles
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7:46 - 7:48like the charm quark and the tau lepton.
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7:48 - 7:51Now we weren't actually going to put Archimedes in that beam.
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7:51 - 7:54But as the electrons go round at the speed of light,
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7:54 - 7:56they shed X-rays.
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7:56 - 7:58And this is the most powerful light source in the solar system.
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7:58 - 8:00This is called synchrotron radiation,
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8:00 - 8:02and it's normally used to look at things
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8:02 - 8:04like proteins and that sort of thing.
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8:04 - 8:08But we wanted it to look at atoms, at iron atoms,
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8:08 - 8:11so that we could read the page from before and after.
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8:11 - 8:13And lo and behold, we found that we could do it.
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8:13 - 8:16It took about 17 minutes to do a single page.
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8:16 - 8:19So what did we discover?
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8:19 - 8:21Well one of the unique texts in Archimedes
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8:21 - 8:23is called "The Stomachion."
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8:23 - 8:25And this didn't exist in Codices A and B.
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8:25 - 8:28And we knew that it involved this square.
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8:28 - 8:30And this is a perfect square,
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8:30 - 8:32and it's divided into 14 bits.
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8:32 - 8:34But no one knew what Archimedes was doing with these 14 bits.
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8:34 - 8:37And now we think we know.
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8:37 - 8:38He was trying to work out
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8:38 - 8:41how many ways you can recombine those 14 bits
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8:41 - 8:43and still make a perfect square.
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8:43 - 8:47Anyone want to guess the answer?
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8:47 - 8:52It's 17,152 divided into 536 families.
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8:52 - 8:54And the important point about this
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8:54 - 8:58is that it's the earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics.
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8:58 - 9:02And combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics.
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9:02 - 9:05The really astonishing thing though about this manuscript
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9:05 - 9:07is that we looked at the other manuscripts
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9:07 - 9:09that the palimpsester had made,
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9:09 - 9:11the scribe had made his book out of,
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9:11 - 9:14and one of them was a manuscript containing text by Hyperides.
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9:14 - 9:19Now Hyperides was an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C.
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9:19 - 9:21He was an exact contemporary of Demosthenes.
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9:21 - 9:26And in 338 B.C. he and Demosthenes together
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9:26 - 9:27decided that they wanted to stand up
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9:27 - 9:29to the military might of Philip of Macedon.
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9:29 - 9:33So Athens and Thebes went out to fight Philip of Macedon.
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9:33 - 9:34This was a bad idea,
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9:34 - 9:38because Philip of Macedon had a son called Alexander the Great,
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9:38 - 9:40and they lost the battle of Chaeronea.
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9:40 - 9:43Alexander the Great went on to conquer the known world;
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9:43 - 9:45Hyperides found himself on trial for treason.
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9:45 - 9:49And this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial --
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9:49 - 9:50and it's a great speech:
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9:50 - 9:52"Best of all," he says, "is to win.
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9:52 - 9:54But if you can't win,
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9:54 - 9:56then you should fight for a noble cause,
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9:56 - 9:58because then you'll be remembered.
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9:58 - 9:59Consider the Spartans.
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9:59 - 10:01They won enumerable victories,
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10:01 - 10:03but no one remembers what they are
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10:03 - 10:05because they were all fought for selfish ends.
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10:05 - 10:09The one battle that the Spartans fought that everybody remembers
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10:09 - 10:10is the the battle of Thermopylae
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10:10 - 10:12where they were butchered to a man,
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10:12 - 10:14but fought for the freedom of Greece."
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10:14 - 10:17It was such a great speech
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10:17 - 10:20that the Athenian law courts let him off.
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10:20 - 10:22He lived for another 10 years,
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10:22 - 10:25then the Macedonian faction caught up with him.
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10:25 - 10:28They cut out his tongue in mockery of his oratory,
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10:28 - 10:31and no one knows what they did with his body.
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10:31 - 10:34So this is the discovery of a lost voice from antiquity,
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10:34 - 10:36speaking to us, not from the grave,
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10:36 - 10:38because his grave doesn't exist,
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10:38 - 10:40but from the Athenian law courts.
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10:40 - 10:41Now I should say at this point
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10:41 - 10:44that normally when you're looking
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10:44 - 10:46at medieval manuscripts that have been scraped off,
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10:46 - 10:47you don't find unique texts.
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10:47 - 10:51And to find two in one manuscript is really something.
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10:51 - 10:54To find three is completely weird.
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10:54 - 10:55And we found three.
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10:55 - 10:57Aristotle's "Categories"
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10:57 - 10:59is one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy.
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10:59 - 11:04And we found a third century A.D. commentary on it,
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11:04 - 11:07possibly by Galen and probably by Porphyry.
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11:07 - 11:09Now all this data that we collected,
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11:09 - 11:11all the images, all the raw images,
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11:11 - 11:14all the transcriptions that we made and that sort of thing
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11:14 - 11:17have been put online under a Creative Commons license
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11:17 - 11:20for anyone to use for any commercial purpose.
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11:20 - 11:27(Applause)
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11:27 - 11:30Why did the owner of the manuscript do this?
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11:30 - 11:34He did this because he understands data as well as books.
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11:34 - 11:35Now the thing to do with books,
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11:35 - 11:37if you want to ensure their long-term utility,
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11:37 - 11:39is to hide them away in closets
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11:39 - 11:41and let very few people look at them.
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11:41 - 11:44The thing to do with data, if you want it to survive,
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11:44 - 11:47is to let it out and have everybody have it
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11:47 - 11:50with as little control on that data as possible.
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11:50 - 11:51And that's what he did.
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11:51 - 11:55And institutions can learn from this.
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11:55 - 11:57Because institutions at the moment
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11:57 - 12:00confine their data with copyright restrictions and that sort of thing.
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12:00 - 12:02And if you want to look at medieval manuscripts on the Web,
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12:02 - 12:06at the moment you have to go to the National Library of Y's site
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12:06 - 12:09or the University Library of X's site,
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12:09 - 12:11which is about the most boring way
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12:11 - 12:12in which you can deal with digital data.
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12:12 - 12:15What you want to do is to aggregate it all together.
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12:15 - 12:18Because the Web of the ancient manuscripts of the future
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12:18 - 12:21isn't going to be built by institutions.
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12:21 - 12:24It's going to be built by users,
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12:24 - 12:26by people who get this data together,
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12:26 - 12:29by people who want to aggregate all sorts of maps
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12:29 - 12:31from wherever they come from,
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12:31 - 12:33all sorts of medieval romances
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12:33 - 12:34from wherever they come from,
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12:34 - 12:38people who just want to curate their own glorious selection
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12:38 - 12:39of beautiful things.
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12:39 - 12:41And that is the future of the Web.
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12:41 - 12:44And it's an attractive and beautiful future,
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12:44 - 12:46if only we can make it happen.
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12:46 - 12:49Now we at the Walters Art Museum have followed this example,
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12:49 - 12:52and we have put up all our manuscripts on the Web
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12:52 - 12:54for people to enjoy --
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12:54 - 12:57all the raw data, all the descriptions, all the metadata.
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12:57 - 12:59under a Creative Commons license.
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12:59 - 13:01Now the Walters Art Museum is a small museum
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13:01 - 13:03and it has beautiful manuscripts,
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13:03 - 13:05but the data is fantastic.
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13:05 - 13:06And the result of this
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13:06 - 13:09is that if you do a Google search on images right now
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13:09 - 13:13and you type in "Illuminated manuscript Koran" for example,
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13:13 - 13:1724 of the 28 images you'll find come from my institution.
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13:17 - 13:23(Applause)
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13:23 - 13:28Now, let's think about this for a minute.
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13:28 - 13:30What's in it for the institution?
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13:30 - 13:32There are all sorts of things that are in it for the institution.
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13:32 - 13:34You can talk about the Humanities and that sort of thing,
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13:34 - 13:36but let's talk about selfish things.
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13:36 - 13:40Because what's really in it for the institution is this:
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13:40 - 13:43Now why do people go to the Louvre?
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13:43 - 13:46They go to see the Mona Lisa.
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13:46 - 13:49Why do they go to see the Mona Lisa?
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13:49 - 13:52Because they already know what she looks like.
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13:52 - 13:54And they know what she looks like
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13:54 - 13:59because they've seen pictures of her absolutely everywhere.
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13:59 - 14:03Now, there is no need
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14:03 - 14:05for these restrictions at all.
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14:05 - 14:07And I think that institutions should stand up
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14:07 - 14:11and release all their data under unrestricted licenses,
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14:11 - 14:13and it would be a great benefit to everybody.
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14:13 - 14:16Why don't we just let everybody have access to this data
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14:16 - 14:18and curate their own collection
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14:18 - 14:20of ancient knowledge and wonderful and beautiful things
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14:20 - 14:24and increase the beauty and the cultural significance
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14:24 - 14:25of the Internet.
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14:25 - 14:26Thank you very much indeed.
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14:26 - 14:31(Applause)
- Title:
- Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes
- Speaker:
- William Noel
- Description:
-
How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript that has been erased, cut up, written on and painted over? With a powerful particle accelerator, of course! Ancient books curator William Noel tells the fascinating story behind the Archimedes palimpsest, a Byzantine prayer book containing previously-unknown original writings from ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and others.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 14:53
Jenny Zurawell edited English subtitles for Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes | ||
Jenny Zurawell edited English subtitles for Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes | ||
RENE GUICHARDAN edited English subtitles for Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes | ||
RENE GUICHARDAN edited English subtitles for Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes | ||
RENE GUICHARDAN edited English subtitles for Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes | ||
RENE GUICHARDAN added a translation | ||
Jenny Zurawell approved English subtitles for Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes | ||
Jenny Zurawell edited English subtitles for Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes |