Is the synchrotron X-ray technique brand new?
Scientists have used X-ray fluorescence to read manuscripts, but synchrotron radiation is a new way to do it. The palimpsest would have been totally unrecoverable—without this new technique there would have been no way to do this. That juxtaposition of the most modern tools of physics and a very ancient document about physics felt kind of like time travel. Many people don’t know anything about Archimedes besides that he supposedly said “Eureka.” Were you familiar with him beforehand? Actually, geometry was one of my favorite subjects in high school—I was pretty nerdy that way—so I knew about his logic and proofs and basic mathematics. But what I didn’t know was how important and relevant he was to combining the abstract proofs and theorems that mathematicians do with real world applications. From the palimpsest, I’ve learned a lot about how relevant he is to scientists today. What did you think when you learned how the palimpsest was created? It sounded awful. Scraping off an original
