One outstanding opportunity...

Something that fascinates me: "The public can watch the researchers as they reveal the glowing ancient text during a live webcast at 2300 GMT on 4 August"....TOMORROW! This report from the BBC caught my attention. It is one of THE "occasional (only once?) outstanding opportunities" to discover something that NOBODY really knows.

The manuscript was in private hands throughout much of the twentieth century, and was sold at auction to a private collector on the 29th October 1998.

“Baltimore — The Archimedes Palimpsest is considered by many to be the most important scientific manuscript ever sold at auction. It was purchased at a Christie’s sale on Oct. 28, 1998, by an anonymous collector for $2,000,000. The collector deposited the Palimpsest at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, for exhibition, conservation, imaging and scholarly study in 1999. Work has been ongoing ever since.”

"...there is no other surviving copy of On Floating Bodies in Greek [see below] — the language in which Archimedes wrote, and there is no version in any language of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and of this part of the Stomachion." ...focus on NO OTHER/ NO VERSION

"The bath anecdote does not give us the true measure of the man. In On Floating Bodies, [Eureka! and all that] Archimedes made the following, astonishingly subtle deduction: In a stable body of liquid, each column of equal volume must have equal weight; otherwise, liquid would flow from the heavier to the lighter. The same must hold true even if some solid body is immersed in such a column of liquid. In other words, if we have a column of liquid with a solid body immersed in it, the aggregate weight of the liquid and the body must be equal to that of a column of liquid of the same total volume. It follows that the immersed body must lose weight: it must lose a weight equal to the weight of the volume of water it has displaced. (This is why we feel lighter in the bath.)"

"The Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem sued Christie's earlier Wednesday in an effort to stop the auction. The religious entity alleged that the 174 pages of text were stolen. But Christie's argued that the current owners of the work were descendants of a Frenchman who legally bought the volume in the 1920s." Copyright © 1998 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

"The sale went ahead after a court battle Wednesday night in which the Greek Orthodox Church, claiming ownership of the manuscript, failed to stop the auction. A federal judge ruled that Christie's had the right to sell the work on behalf of a French family that has had it for 75 years." Copyright © 1998 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Doesn't it beg the question of just how many scientific, eye-opening, wonders are lying hidden, either by accident or by order of one religion or another?..and how much has been destroyed, lost forever because it may or may not have shed doubt on some "accepted" concept or belief?

S.O.