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The great texts of the ancient world

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don't survive to us in their original form.

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They survive because Medieval scribes copied them

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and copied them and copied them.

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And so it is which Archimedes,

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the great Greek mathematician.

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Everything we know about Archimedes as a mathematician

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we know about because of just three books,

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and they're called A, B and C.

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And A was lost by an Italian humanist in 1564.

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And B was last heard of in the Pope's Library

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about a hundred miles north of Rome in [unclear] in 1311.

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Now Codex C was only discovered in 1906,

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and it landed on my desk in Baltimore

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on the 19th of January, 1999.

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And this is Codex C here.

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Now Codex C is actually buried in this book.

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It's buried treasure.

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Because this book is actually a prayer book.

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It was finished by a guy called Johannes Myrones

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on the 14th of April, 2029.

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And to make his prayer book he used parchment.

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But he didn't use new parchment,

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he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts,

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and there were seven of them.

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And Archimedes Codex C was just one of those seven.

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He took apart the Archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts.

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He erased all of their texts,

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and then he cut the sheets down in the middle,

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he shuffled them up,

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and he rotated them 90 degrees,

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and he wrote prayers on top of these books.

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And essentially these seven manuscripts

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disappeared for 700 years, and we have a prayer book.

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The prayer book was discovered by this guy,

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Johan Ludvig Heiberg, in 1906.

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And with just a magnifying glass,

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he transcribed as much of the text as he could.

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And the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript

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that were unique texts.

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They weren't an A and B at all;

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they were completely new texts by Archimedes,

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and they were called "The Method" and "The Stomachion."

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And it became a world famous manuscript.

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Now it should be clear by now

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that this book is in bad condition.

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It got in worse condition in the 20th century

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after Heiberg saw it.

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Forgeries were painted over it,

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and it suffered very badly from mold.

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This book is the definition of a write-off.

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It's the sort of book

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that you thought would be in an institution.

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But it's not in an institution,

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it was bought by a private owner in 1998.

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Why did he buy this book?

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Because he wanted to make that which was fragile safe.

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He wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous.

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He wanted to make that which was expensive free.

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And he wanted to do this as a matter of principle.

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Because not many people are really going to read Archimedes in ancient Greek,

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but they should have the chance to do it.

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So he gathered around himself the friends of Archimedes,

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and he promised to pay for all the work.

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And it was an expensive job,

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but actually it wouldn't be as much as you think

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because these people, they didn't come for money,

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they came for Archimedes.

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And they came from all sorts of different backgrounds.

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They came in from particle physics,

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they came from classical philology,

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they came from book conservation,

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they came from ancient mathematics,

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they came from data management,

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they came from scientific imaging and program management.

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And they got together to work on this manuscript.

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The first problem was a conservation problem.

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And this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with.

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There was glue on the spine of the book.

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And if you look at this photograph carefully,

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the bottom half of this rather brown.

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And that glue is hide glue.

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Now if you're a conservator,

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you can take off this glue reasonably easily.

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The top half is Elmer's wood glue.

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It's polyvinyl acetate emulsion.

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It doesn't dissolve in water once it's dry.

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And it's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on.

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And so before we could start imagining Archimedes,

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we had to take this book apart.

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So it took four years to take it off.

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And this is a rare action shot, ladies and gentlemen.

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(Laughter)

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Another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax,

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because this was used in the liturgical services

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of the Greek Orthodox Church

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and they'd used candle wax.

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And the candle wax was dirty,

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and we couldn't image through the wax.

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So very carefully we had to mechanically scrape off all the wax.

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It's hard to tell you exactly

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how bad the condition of this book is,

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but it came out in little bits very often.

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And normally in a book, you wouldn't worry about the little bits,

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but these little bits might contain unique Archimedes text.

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So tiny fragments

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we actually managed to put back in the right place.

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Then, having done that, we started to image the manuscript.

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And we imaged the manuscript

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in 14 different wave-bands of light.

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Because if you look at something in different wave-bands of light,

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you see different things.

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And here is an image of a page

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imaged in 14 different wave-bands of light.

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But none of them worked.

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So what we did was we processed the images together,

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and we put two images into one blank screen.

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And here are two different images of the Archimedes manuscript.

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And the image on the left

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is the normal red image.

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And the image on the right is an ultraviolet image.

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And in the image on the right

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you might be able to see some of the Archimedes writing.

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If you merge them together into one digital canvas,

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the parchment is brightened in both images

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and it comes out bright.

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The prayer book is dark in both images

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and it comes our dark.

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The Archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another.

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And it'll come out dark but red,

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and then you can start to read it rather clearly.

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And that's what it looks like.

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Now that's a before and after image,

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but you don't read the image on the screen like that.

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You zoom in and you zoom in

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and you zoom in and you zoom in,

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and you can just read it now.

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(Applause)

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If you process the same two images in a different way,

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you can actually get rid of the prayer book text.

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And this is terribly important.

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Because the diagrams in the manuscript

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are the unique source for the diagrams

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that Archimedes drew in the sand in the fourth century B.C.

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And there we are, I can give them to you.

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With this kind of imaging --

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this kind of infrared, ultraviolet, invisible light imaging --

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we were never going to image through the gold ground forgeries.

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How were we going to to that?

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Well we took the manuscript,

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and we decided to image it in X-ray florescence imaging.

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So an X-ray comes in on the diagram on the left

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and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom.

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And that electron disappears.

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And as it disappears an electron form a shell farther out

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jumps in and takes its place.

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And when it takes its place,

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it sheds electromagnetic radiation.

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It sheds an X-ray.

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And this X-ray is specific in its wavelength

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to the atom that it hits.

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And what we wanted to get

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was the iron.

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Because the ink was written in iron.

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And if we can map

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where this X-ray that comes out, where it comes from,

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we can map all the iron on the page,

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and theoretically we can read the image.

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The thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this.

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So we too it to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory

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in California,

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which is a particle accelerator.

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Electrons go around one way,

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positrons go around the other.

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They meet in the middle,

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and they create subatomic particles

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like the [unclear] quark and the [unclear] electron.