Science v. Religion: The perfect metaphor

The next time someone tells you that science and religion don't have to be at odds, remember this little news item. It is perhaps the perfect metaphor for the relationship of the two.

From the 12/26/06 LA Times comes the story of how modern science is reclaiming a lost work of Archimedes, which had been erased to accomodate use as a religious text:

The sheepskin parchment originally contained a 10th century Greek text, which was erased by a 13th century scribe who replaced it with prayers. Seven hundred years later, a forger painted gilded pictures of the Evangelists on top of the faded words.

Underneath it all, however, is an exceptional treasure — the oldest surviving copy of works by the ancient Greek mathematician and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse, who lived in the 3rd century BC.

Palimpsests such as this are fairly common, since parchment is both expensive and durable, able to be scrubbed clean and reused when the previous text is no longer wanted or valued. As a book conservator, I have seen and worked on a couple of these items.

But nothing like this one, which contains text residue from the original book. Again, from the LA Times article:

Knowledge of Archimedes' work is derived from three books.

Codex A, transcribed around the 9th century, contained seven major treatises in Greek. Codex B, created around the same time, had at least one additional work by Archimedes and survived only in Latin translation.

Codex C has been an enigma.

It was originally copied down in 10th century Constantinople, now known as Istanbul. Three centuries later, the manuscript was in Palestine. By then, it was no longer a precious vestige of ancient learning but an obscure text that could be put to better use as a prayer book.

So, the monastic scribe literally erased the words of Archimedes, in order to use the parchment for a religious text. The book was discovered about the turn of the last century, and a Danish expert on Archimedes by the name of Heiberg studied it carefully, using a magnifying glass. He was able to read about 80% of the original Archimedes text residual, under the religious text.

More recently (the book was 'lost' again for most of the 20th century), modern science has come to the fore again in order to try and recover an additional 18% of the text, using a combination of ultraviolet and then X-Ray imaging techniques, including text which had been completely lost previously:

Bergmann's X-ray work had produced a black-and-white picture of a page from "The Method of Mechanical Theorems," a text found only in the palimpsest.

***

The X-ray image also revealed a section of "The Method" that had been hidden from Heiberg in the fold between pages. It contained part of a discussion on how to calculate the area inside a parabola using a new way of thinking about infinity, Netz said. It appeared to be an early attempt at calculus — nearly 2,000 years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented the field.

So, there you have it. Early work in the science of mathematics, scraped away and covered over with religion, only to be reclaimed by science and scholarship again. Could there be a more perfect metaphor for the relationship between science and religion?

Jim Downey