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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I do worry the problem is insufficient data. What other scanning techniques are there? Does PET and MRI or work on these things?

Is there any way to dope the structure to make the ink more visible? Something akin to immunocytochemistry marking via looking for chemical markers? Given the amount of innovation in immunocytochemistry binding methods, why couldn't they do something here for the ink?

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The science of archeology is a destructive one. Temples and tombs escavated in the late 1800’s could have largely benefitted from the rigour and advances made in modern archeology. How much information and narrative are lost to time due to their archeological mistakes?

The same applies here. Experimenting with chemistry at all runs the risk of destroying the information forever. During these tests, the artifact must be preserved. If you destroy the artifact but are able to read it, did you really come out ahead?

Yes, definitely you came out ahead in that case, but the problem is you’d likely have to destroy some amount of them without being able to read it before you got the method perfected.

I'll bite.

> If you destroy the artifact but are able to read it, did you really come out ahead?

Yes.

We think there's enough data.

There is a multi-century history of chemical methods destroying scrolls by the hundreds without reading them, so we're not eager to fund that work.

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