Techonology

One of the inherent weaknesses of Haibel's photographs was the inability to capture the text in the binding. One of the most important things that the Walters Art Museum did with the Archimedes rewrite to eliminate this deficiency was to disassemble the pages. This should have been easy since glue and the like did not exist in the days of antiquity. Surprisingly, however, many of the pages of Archimedes' rewrite were glued together with a type of wood glue that did not exist until after World War II. The experts at the Walters Art Museum showed great professionalism and patience, using a special solution to dissolve the wood glue bit by bit under a microscope. This work took four years to complete.

After removing and finishing the surface, Kuhnert and scientists at Johns Hopkins University took a series of images at different wavelengths between 250 nm (ultraviolet) and 1050 nm (infrared) in a process known as multispectral imaging. Although Archimedes' writings and prayers were made with the same ink, they were separated by 200 years and therefore had their own specific traces, responding differently to a given wavelength. This camera was connected to a specific computer, and with the help of software that analyzes satellite photos, Archimedes' "handwriting" was enhanced and everything else was diminished, producing images in black, gray, and white.

In order to hear Archimedes' "voice," they tried another approach: confocal microscopy, originally developed to study the different layers of human cells. It works like shining a flashlight through a dirty window at night and trying to see what's outside the window. Usually, the window reflects more light to the eye than it does to the outside; however, confocal microscopy only sees light reflected from a specific depth.

One day in 2005, Uwe Bergman, a scientist at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, was reading a magazine when he learned that the ink used to copy Archimedes' treatises and prayers contained iron, and he immediately realized that he could use the X-rays in his lab to read the "Archimedes' parchment. As a result, three pages of the Archimedes Parchment, which never left his home, were sent to Monroe Park, California, where the laboratory was located. Abigail Kuhnert, president of the Society for the Preservation and Study of Rare and Antique Manuscripts at the Walters Museum of Art, solemnly put the manuscript into the x-rays produced by the linear gas pedal.

This "high-tech" series of studies, completed in 2005, not only photographed much of the text that Hebert could not, but also included pages that Hebert mistook for pages that did not contain Greek because they were illegible to the naked eye and therefore were not photographed. Moreover, the illustrations in the Greek text that Hébert published were redrawn by him according to modern conventions, while the original illustrations were restored for this photograph. Also, this "high-tech" research shows that the base of Archimedes' manuscript was written in the 10th century AD, while the text overlaying it was written in the 13th century AD.

The x-rays used in the lab are different from those used in our medical examinations, called synchrotron light. This laboratory in Moorpark is one of the few in the world that uses synchrotron light. Although it is electromagnetic radiation, like the x-rays we are exposed to on a daily basis, it has become an irreplaceable tool for advanced research in all fields of science.