I'm imagining a future 3,000 years from now when scholars and archaeologists attempt to put together the scattered fragments of our digital cuneiforms like we attempt to do today with the scant remains of Mesopotamian cultures from the past that were just as vibrant as ours. I wonder how far Google will get before the barbarians invade and the library is burned? As early as the third millennium B.C., ...
When I taught 8th grade science, we spent a considerable amount of time on Archimedes (machines, etc) and eventually Newton and the discovery of the calculus. This news makes my heart swell as we continue to realize that we 20-21st century westerners weren't the first to achieve such grand inventions as calculus or even a notion of grasping at the infinite... Two of the texts hiding in the prayer ...
They look stunning. Can't wait to visit. The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Works of Art: Greek and Roman Art
The main reason the ancient world has come out of the permafrost is precisely that we know so little about it, says Tom Holland, author of Rubicon. Whereas he had a traditional classical education, most of us now have little Latin and less Greek. The closest his seven-year-old daughter is likely to come to that world, he says, is a couple of weeks spent building the Parthenon from ...
Ancient Writings Revealed!After screenshotfiguring out the answer to a problem, the mathematician and engineer Archimedes once shouted "Eureka!" and ran naked through the streets. The enthusiastic Sicilian lived between 287-212 B.C., and is widely recognized today as one of the most important minds of ancient Greece. At some point along the way, the science whiz recorded some of his ideas on a papyrus manuscript. In the Middle Ages, ...
Why would anyone pay $2 million for a tattered book of Christian prayers from 1200 A.D.? The anonymous philanthropist who coughed up the sum in 1998 wasn't lured by the holy writings. He was after the faint ink beneath -- mathematical theorems and diagrams from the Greek scholar Archimedes, who lived more than 2,000 years ago. It's the oldest known copy of his work, but the writings were ...
Outlandish theories: Kings of the (hollow) world - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune Blogged with Flock
I love studying Archimedes. He's way up on my "I want to meet him some day" list. To decode da Vinci, you need a firm grasp of art. To learn from Archimedes, you need to get your hands on something a bit more sophisticated. Like a synchrotron that accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light to produce x-rays. At least, that’s what scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator ...
I love my Loebs. I've only bought a few (expensive little bastards), but I carry Diogenes Laertius everywhere. For a unit on the "history of matter" in my 8th grade class, I made copies of a section of DL and we talked about the Ionian scientists (like Democritus..."inventor" of the atom and Anaxagoras who said the sun was a star and the earth revolved around it) and those ...
I love the "Antikythera Mechanism" and wonder how anyone who hears about it is not instantly fascinated. Arthur C. Clarke wrote about the Antykthera Mechanism in his Mysterious World book (which I loved as a youngster): "Its very existence is a warning against the arrogant modern notion that sophisticated science was beyond the capabilities and the imagination of the people of the ancient world." That along with my love ...
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