Physicists used a particle accelerator to uncover a lost manuscript by Archimedes. Here’s how this remarkable discovery unfolded.

It’s hard to imagine a connection between the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes and a particle accelerator. Yet, such a connection exists. Thanks to the particle accelerator, scientists were able to discover Archimedes' lost scientific works. This is one of the most remarkable stories, as noted by IFLScience.

The Beginning of the Story

The renowned ancient Greek scientist and engineer Archimedes (287 BC – 212 BC) lived in the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily. Throughout his life, he effectively invented mathematics, physics, and engineering as we know them today. He laid the foundations of these sciences, which were later utilized by scholars for many centuries after his death.

Despite having created many innovative inventions for his time and establishing the groundwork for modern mathematics and physics, very few of Archimedes' scientific works have survived. All of his original manuscripts have been lost forever, and only three copies and reproductions have made it to the present day. It’s possible that there were only two.

The Story of the Christian Monk

In 1229, 1400 years after Archimedes' death, a monk named Johannes Myronas, living in a monastery near Jerusalem, needed parchment. The monk aimed to create a copy of the "Euchologion," a liturgical book of the Orthodox Church.

The issue was that parchment was expensive and hard to find. Therefore, the monk took an old manuscript with mathematical notes that nobody wanted, scraped off the text, and used it as pages for the book. Such manuscripts are known as palimpsests. It turned out that while creating the copy of the liturgical book, the monk nearly destroyed one of Archimedes' most valuable scientific works. This was a copy created by Byzantine monks in the 10th century.

Archimedes and 2 Million Dollars

For nearly 800 years, the "Euchologion" was transported between various churches until the book ended up in one of the Orthodox churches in Istanbul. In 1906, Johan Ludwig Heiberg from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark suggested that the old pages of the book contained lines from Archimedes' lost work. After that, the palimpsest disappeared and reappeared for decades. Until it surfaced at an auction in New York in 1998, where it was purchased by an anonymous collector for 2 million dollars. Following that, the palimpsest was transferred to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, USA. Until 2005, an international group of scholars studied this document, which was believed to conceal a copy of Archimedes' scientific works. It was named the Archimedes Palimpsest.

Archimedes and the Particle Accelerator

During the study of the palimpsest, Nigel Wilson from the University of Cambridge realized that he had seen a similar fragment of Archimedes' rewritten work before. The scientist and his team used ultraviolet light to reveal individual lines obscured by the new text.

Subsequently, physicist Uwe Bergmann decided in 2005 to use a particle accelerator for complete visualization of Archimedes' original text. The idea was to bombard the manuscript with X-ray photons emitted at nearly the speed of light using a particle accelerator known as a synchrotron. Given that iron was found in the manuscript's ink, after the bombardment with X-ray photons, it began to glow. This led to the discovery of the original text of Archimedes' manuscript. The palimpsest revealed texts of Archimedes' scientific works such as "On Floating Bodies," "The Method of Mechanical Theorems," and "Stomachion."

If the Christian monk had not used Archimedes' manuscript to write the liturgical book, it is likely that the scientist's works would have been lost forever.