9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The great texts of the ancient world 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 don't survive to us in their original form. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They survive because Medieval scribes copied them 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and copied them and copied them. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And so it is which Archimedes, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 the great Greek mathematician. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Everything we know about Archimedes as a mathematician 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 we know about because of just three books, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and they're called A, B and C. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And A was lost by an Italian humanist in 1564. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And B was last heard of in the Pope's Library 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 about a hundred miles north of Rome in [unclear] in 1311. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now Codex C was only discovered in 1906, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it landed on my desk in Baltimore 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 on the 19th of January, 1999. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And this is Codex C here. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now Codex C is actually buried in this book. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's buried treasure. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because this book is actually a prayer book. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It was finished by a guy called Johannes Myrones 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 on the 14th of April, 2029. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And to make his prayer book he used parchment. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But he didn't use new parchment, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and there were seven of them. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And Archimedes Codex C was just one of those seven. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He took apart the Archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He erased all of their texts, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and then he cut the sheets down in the middle, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 he shuffled them up, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and he rotated them 90 degrees, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and he wrote prayers on top of these books. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And essentially these seven manuscripts 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 disappeared for 700 years, and we have a prayer book. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The prayer book was discovered by this guy, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, in 1906. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And with just a magnifying glass, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 he transcribed as much of the text as he could. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that were unique texts. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They weren't an A and B at all; 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they were completely new texts by Archimedes, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and they were called "The Method" and "The Stomachion." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And it became a world famous manuscript. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now it should be clear by now 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that this book is in bad condition. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It got in worse condition in the 20th century 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 after Heiberg saw it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Forgeries were painted over it, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it suffered very badly from mold. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 This book is the definition of a write-off. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's the sort of book 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that you thought would be in an institution. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But it's not in an institution, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 it was bought by a private owner in 1998. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Why did he buy this book? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because he wanted to make that which was fragile safe. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He wanted to make that which was expensive free. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And he wanted to do this as a matter of principle. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because not many people are really going to read Archimedes in ancient Greek, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but they should have the chance to do it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So he gathered around himself the friends of Archimedes, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and he promised to pay for all the work. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And it was an expensive job, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but actually it wouldn't be as much as you think 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because these people, they didn't come for money, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they came for Archimedes. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And they came from all sorts of different backgrounds. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They came in from particle physics, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they came from classical philology, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they came from book conservation, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they came from ancient mathematics, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they came from data management, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they came from scientific imaging and program management. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And they got together to work on this manuscript. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The first problem was a conservation problem. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There was glue on the spine of the book. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And if you look at this photograph carefully, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 the bottom half of this rather brown. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And that glue is hide glue. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now if you're a conservator, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you can take off this glue reasonably easily. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The top half is Elmer's wood glue. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's polyvinyl acetate emulsion. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It doesn't dissolve in water once it's dry. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And it's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And so before we could start imagining Archimedes, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 we had to take this book apart. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So it took four years to take it off. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And this is a rare action shot, ladies and gentlemen. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 (Laughter) 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because this was used in the liturgical services 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 of the Greek Orthodox Church 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and they'd used candle wax. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And the candle wax was dirty, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and we couldn't image through the wax. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So very carefully we had to mechanically scrape off all the wax. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's hard to tell you exactly 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 how bad the condition of this book is, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but it came out in little bits very often. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And normally in a book, you wouldn't worry about the little bits, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but these little bits might contain unique Archimedes text. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So tiny fragments 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 we actually managed to put back in the right place. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Then, having done that, we started to image the manuscript. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And we imaged the manuscript 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 in 14 different wave-bands of light. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because if you look at something in different wave-bands of light, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you see different things. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And here is an image of a page 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 imaged in 14 different wave-bands of light. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But none of them worked. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So what we did was we processed the images together, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and we put two images into one blank screen. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And here are two different images of the Archimedes manuscript. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And the image on the left 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is the normal red image. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And the image on the right is an ultraviolet image. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And in the image on the right 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you might be able to see some of the Archimedes writing. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 If you merge them together into one digital canvas, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 the parchment is brightened in both images 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it comes out bright. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The prayer book is dark in both images 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it comes our dark. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The Archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And it'll come out dark but red, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and then you can start to read it rather clearly. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And that's what it looks like. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now that's a before and after image, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but you don't read the image on the screen like that. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You zoom in and you zoom in 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and you zoom in and you zoom in, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and you can just read it now. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 (Applause) 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 If you process the same two images in a different way, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you can actually get rid of the prayer book text. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And this is terribly important. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because the diagrams in the manuscript 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 are the unique source for the diagrams 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that Archimedes drew in the sand in the fourth century B.C. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And there we are, I can give them to you. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 With this kind of imaging -- 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 this kind of infrared, ultraviolet, invisible light imaging -- 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 we were never going to image through the gold ground forgeries. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 How were we going to to that? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Well we took the manuscript, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and we decided to image it in X-ray florescence imaging. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So an X-ray comes in on the diagram on the left 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And that electron disappears. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And as it disappears an electron form a shell farther out 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 jumps in and takes its place. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And when it takes its place, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 it sheds electromagnetic radiation. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It sheds an X-ray. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And this X-ray is specific in its wavelength 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to the atom that it hits. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And what we wanted to get 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 was the iron. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because the ink was written in iron. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And if we can map 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 where this X-ray that comes out, where it comes from, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 we can map all the iron on the page, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and theoretically we can read the image. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So we too it to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 in California, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 which is a particle accelerator. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Electrons go around one way, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 positrons go around the other. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They meet in the middle, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and they create subatomic particles 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 like the [unclear] quark and the [unclear] electron. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now we weren't actually going to put Archimedes in that beam. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But as the electrons go round at the speed of light, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they shared X-rays. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And this is the most powerful light source in the solar system. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 This is called synchrotron radiation, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it's normally used to look at things 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 like proteins and that sort of thing. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But we wanted it to look at atoms, at iron atoms, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 so that we could read the page from before and after. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And low and behold, we found that we could do it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It took about 17 minutes to do a single page. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So what did we discover? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Well one of the unique texts in Archimedes 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is called "The Stomachion." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And this didn't exist in Codices A and B. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And we knew that it involved this square. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And this is a perfect square, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it's divided into 14 bits. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But no one knew what Archimedes was doing with these 14 bits. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And now we think we know. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He was trying to work out 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 how many ways you can recombine those 14 bits 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and still make a perfect square. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Anyone want to guess the answer? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's 17,152 divided in 536 families. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And the important point about this 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is that it's earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The really astonishing thing though about this manuscript 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is that we looked at the other manuscripts 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that the palimpsester had made, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 the scribe had made his book out of 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and one of the was a manuscript containing text by Hyperides. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now Hyperides was an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He was an exact contemporary of Demosthenes. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And in 338 B.C. he and Demosthenes together 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 decided that they wanted to stand up 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to the military might of Philip of Macedon. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So Athens and Thebes went out to fight Philip of Macedon. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 This was a bad idea 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because Philip of Macedon had a son called Alexander the Great, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and they lost the battle of Chaeronea. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Alexander the Great went on to conquer the known world; 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Hyperides found himself on trial for treason. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And it's a great speech. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Best of all," he says, "is to win. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But if you can't win, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 then you should fight for a noble cause, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because then you'll be remembered. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Consider the Spartans. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They won enumerable victories, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but no one remembers what they are 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because they were all fought for selfish ends. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The won battle that the Spartans fought that everybody remembers 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is the the battle of Thermopylae 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 where they were butchered to a man, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but fought for the freedom of Greece." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It was such a great speech 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that the Athenian law courts let him off. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He lived for another 10 years, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 then the Macedonian faction caught up with him. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They cut out his tongue in mockery of his oratory, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and no one knows what they did with his body. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So this is the discovery of a lost voice from antiquity, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 speaking to us, not from the grave, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because his grave doesn't exist, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but from the Athenian law courts. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now I should say at this point 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that normally when you're looking 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 at Medieval manuscripts that have been scraped off, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you don't find unique texts. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And to find two in one manuscript is really something. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 To find three is completely weird. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And we found three. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Aristotle's "Categories" 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And we found a third century A.D. commentary on it, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 possibly by Galen and probably by Porphyry. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now all this data that we collected, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 all the images, all the raw images, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 all the transcriptions that we made and that sort of thing 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 have been put online under a Creative Commons license 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 for anyone to use for any commercial purpose. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 (Applause) 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Why did the owner of the manuscript do this? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He did this because he understands data as well as books. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now the thing to do with books, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 if you want to ensure their long-term utility, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is to hide them away in closets 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and let very few people look at them. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The thing to do with data, if you want it to survive, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is to let it out and have everybody have at it 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 with as little control on that data as possible. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And that's what he did. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And institutions can learn this. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because institutions at the moment 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 confine their data with copyright restrictions and that sort of thing. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And if you want to look at Medieval manuscripts on the Web, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 at the moment you have to go to the National Library of WISE sites 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 or the University Library of X's site, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 which is about the most boring way 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 in which you can deal with digital data. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 What you want to do is to aggregate it all together. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because the Web of the ancient manuscripts of the future 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 isn't going to be built by institutions. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's going to be built by users, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 by people who get this data together, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 by people who want to aggregate all sorts of maps 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 from wherever they come from, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 all sorts of Medieval romances 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 from wherever they come from, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 people who just want to curate their own glorious selection 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 of beautiful things. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And that is the future of the Web. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And it's an attractive and beautiful future, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 if only we can make it happen. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now we at the Walters Art Museum have followed this example, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and we have put up all our manuscripts on the Web 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 for people to enjoy -- 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 all the raw data, all the descriptions, all the metadata. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 under a Creative Commons license. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now the Walters Art Museum is a small museum 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it has beautiful manuscripts, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but the data is fantastic. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And the result of this 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is that if you do a Google search on images right now 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and you type in "Illuminated manuscript Koran" for example, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 24 of the 28 images you'll find come from my institution. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 (Applause) 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now, let's think about this for a minute. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 What's in it for the institution? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There are all sorts of things that are in it for the institution. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You can talk about the Humanities and that sort of thing, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but let's talk about selfish things. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because what's really in it for the institution is this. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now why do people go to the Louvre? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They go to see the Mona Lisa. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Why do they go to see the Mona Lisa? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because they already know what she looks like. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And they know what she looks like 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because they've seen pictures of her absolutely everywhere. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now, there is no need 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 for these restrictions at all. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And I think that institutions should stand up 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and release all their data under unrestricted licenses, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it would be a great benefit to everybody. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Why don't we just let everybody have access to this data 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and curate their own collection 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 of ancient knowledge and wonderful and beautiful things 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and increase the beauty and the cultural significance 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 of the internet. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Thank you very much indeed. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 (Applause)