NP but Archimedes/roots of gravity

[grladams at mail.teleport.com]

 Subject: archimedes' words article

 Scientists Find Archimedes' Words
 ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) - Scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology are
 restoring a 10th century manuscript - the only known copy in the original
 Greek of some of the writings of mathematician Archimedes. 
 The text, which scholars believe was copied in the 10th century by a scribe
 from Archimedes' original scrolls, was erased 200 years later by a monk who
 reused the parchment for a prayer book. It was purchased anonymously at a
 1998 auction for $2 million. 
 Using digital cameras and processing techniques as well as ultraviolet and
 infrared filters, the scientists captured images of the original words and
 drawings that were washed away and then covered with a new text. 
 ``There is always a residual, traces of what was there,'' said Robert
 Johnston, an archaeologist and RIT professor emeritus. ``It's amazing what
 can come out. Soon, nothing will be secret or hidden.'' 
 Archimedes lived from about 287-212 B.C. The manuscript is the only copy in
 the original Greek of Archimedes' theory of flotation of bodies, which holds
 that the buoyant force on an object immersed in a fluid is equal to the
 weight of the fluid displaced. 
 The text and diagrams also detail his mathematical treatises and mechanical
 theorems and contain the roots of modern calculus and gravitational theory. 
 The team is working on five pages from the text as part of a competition
 that will determine who will analyze the entire manuscript, which contains
 more than 170 pages. 
 ``This book is Archimedes' brain in a book,'' said William Noel, curator of
 the Walters Arts Gallery in Baltimore, where the manuscript is kept. ``What
 we need to do is X-ray that brain.'' 
 RIT's scientists plan to finish their work by September. The gallery expects
 to make a selection by the end of the year. 
 The text is on vellum, a writing surface made from animal skin. It was
 cleaned off in the 12th century and the valuable parchment was reused in a
 Greek prayer book. 
 The book disappeared from the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre in
 Constantinople in the 1920s. It resurfaced in the possession of a French
 family in the 1930s and was sold by the family in 1998.