291–300 of 404 posts
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…
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The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work. Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously cl…
This is one of the most fascinating comments I’ve ever read. Thank you so much! I was wondering, how does this all get funded?
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…
On "Do we have imagination" - I think you are being to hard too on humankind. The answer for me is "yes, certainly", because that's exactly what these researchers imagined and then did. Bravo to them!
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I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work. If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?
The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work. Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously cl…
Wonderful that all of this amazing technology exists
Wonderful that we used it to read these ancient scrolls
Thank you
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…
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Im sure that recovering fragments of text from 2000 year old charred embers would be absolutely incredible to them, but in general the ability to preserve books for thousands of years would not. Before the Gutenberg press, scribes were surprisingly efficient at copying manuscripts by hand. For many of the most significant works of the ancient world the oldest surviving manuscript was written hundreds or even thousand…
That's true, but then it's also a lot like comparing sex to cryonics. The scribes were actively copying the books, this is a continuous preservation process that's familiar to everyone, it's the same thing that talking about the bees and the birds covers. It requires expending continuous effort (and funding), and planning ahead. It's toil. And, as you noted in your last sentence, it not only allows for errors, it aff…
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…
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This could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts. It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again o…
I'm not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period. The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew. This period of time was already pretty well documented. Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle's lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them. Really the most int…
What dodecahedra were for.
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…
I bet they can, but the danger is that if it's too far away from what we can fathom right now, it's no longer sci-fi but esoterics or something - going from fun to weird. Most science fiction is written in concepts we can understand today.