The Archimedes Codex

From time to time this blog will get into the thicket of where science and religion collide. By purest happenstance, such a collision has taken place that touches on the genealogical tour of the last several postings.

You will recall that Dick Holzworth was born on a farm near Eureka, South Dakota. You will also recall that Dick quickly learned practical applications for many of the physical principles discovered and applied by Archimedes, particularly those involving levers and pulleys. It seemed too obvious to me to point out earlier that the name of Dick's place of birth was conferred by someone who did know about Archimedes and also must have had a sense of humor.

As might have been taught by those eminent authorities on classical antiquity, Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman, if they had had a longer and well-deserved run Archimedes shouted out the word "Eureka!" Greek for "I found it!" All this noise he made because he discovered that a body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid while stepping into or out of a bathtub. As legend has it, he then went running and shouting naked into the street. He also invented various catapults, anticipated integral calculus, screws for moving water uphill, but the Greek baths were the only thing, apparently, that got him really excited.

Many scholars doubt the accuracy of the street scene, but it seems to me, based on the statuary that has survived, the Greeks were not all that particular about being clothed, quite unlike that statuary drapist, former Attorney General Ashcroft. And the Greeks also had that guy Diogenes, an odd duck who walked around dressed only in a barrel holding a lantern to look for an honest man. But I digress.

I say that the founder of Eureka must have had a sense of humor (shared no doubt by Brigham Young who looked at the Salt Lake Valley and said "This is the place") because neither locale looks much like paradise as ordinary mortals would imagine it. God's Country is actually further west from Eureka and further north from Salt Lake City.

Now to the point. The September October issue of Stanford, a publication of the Stanford Alumni Association, has this cover story:


What a gift! What delicious irony! I won't recount all the details of how this came to be. Suffice it say, like most people, I file most offerings from my Alma Mater in the circular cabinet next to my desk along with the carcass of my Four Bucks morning coffee hit and the crumbs left from lunch. I am especially suspicious of Greeks bearing gifts in the guise of a slick four color propaganda rag supporting the marketing efforts of an over funded institution. Nevertheless, the hook set and I flipped open the cover and learned a few things.

The prayer book turned out to be a palimpsest, a manuscript in Greek written over another manuscript also in Greek on parchment that had been scrubbed clean with a pumice stone and natural acid (citrus?). In the 13th Century a Greek Orthodox priest cut apart Archimedes's original parchment codex, turned it sideways to make the smaller prayer book, and wrote the prayers at a right angle to the original manuscript. Apparently writing medium was in short supply, otherwise why all the bother?

After much travel and long periods unread and unused in various libraries, the prayer book surfaced briefly after World War I when a Jewish book dealer living in Paris acquired it from someplace in Turkey. He tried to sell it, but without success, probably because the book was old, moldy and ugly and the price too high. Then Nazi tanks began to roll across Europe. Possibly to raise money to escape from the Nazi's, he "illuminated" four pages of the book with icon-like forgeries of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He then sold the book to the Nazis who were buying and/or stealing illuminated manuscripts.

Eventually the book resurfaced at a Christie's auction in 1999 and an anonymous benefactor known as "Mr. B" snapped it up for the very reasonable used book price of $2,000,000. Mr. B made additional funds available to restore and reveal the underlying Archimedean manuscript using some whiz-bang imagining technology and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. The SSRL revealed the residue iron in the ink underlying the icon forgeries. You can read all about this in the book The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel or a much shorter account in the on-line version of Stanford. (I cannot say if your bank account will be automatically debited and funds transferred to the Robber Baron trust fund if you click on the link.)

The Codex also reveals Archimede's fascination with a type of geometry game known as a stomachion, Greek for stomach-ache. Those who struggled with Euclid and his ilk will immediately get the idea from the name of the game. A square is divided up into number of geometrical shapes. The problem then becomes one of determining how many different arrangements of the shapes can also be formed into a square. A word of caution: don't try to figure this out at home. It took two Stanford mathematicians who teamed up with two unnamed colleagues from UC-San Diego. Independently, a Chicago-area computer scientist wrote a program to crunch the numbers. I am assuming that the Stanford led group did not win the prize because the article cryptically reports: "Several weeks later, Netz had his answer: there were 17,152 different ways of arranging the pieces into a square." As far as I can tell, unless Oliver Stone acquires the movie rights or Dan Brown writes a novel about this, Archimedes acted alone using only a reed stylus and parchment.

Coming full circle back to Dick Holzworth, you can see from the picture below that he had his own methods for divining the secret engines of nature, substantially less expensive than the synchrotron, but no less effective.