Herculaneum scrolls unlocked using photon beams | Hacker News Reader

Herculaneum scrolls unlocked using photon beams

bbc.com

68 pointsdiodorus17 comments

Here's the paper in Nature Communications:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150120/ncomms6895/full/nco...

"Revealing letters in rolled Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast imaging"

It's bizarre that BBC calls X-rays "photon beams," like something out of Star Trek. Maybe using X-rays to read rolled-up scrolls doesn't sound so amazing? (The details of how they did it are amazing; this is not your grandpa's X-ray imaging system.)

To be fair, X-Rays are photons, maybe its about the fine-grainness of the technique since they're not X-Raying it but looking for other minuscule changes

I think they were just trying the emphasize the giant scale of the operation. I feel like the average reader would associate x-rays with the machines found at hospitals. The synchrotron, of course, is a vastly different machine.

Well; as you point out, X-ray phase-contrast tomography and conventional X-ray photography are (nearly) totally different things, so their phrasing seems justifiable to me, if only on editorial grounds --think "the full name of the technique is too long, would cause viewers to get mixed up with conventional X-ray imaging, etc.".

Quibbles aside though, it's hard to overstate how significant this finding is: not only this is (apparently) the only extant library left from classical antiquity, but also these are freaking charred scrolls from a volcanic eruption that were considered beyond repair! I found ScienceDaily's article much more informative in this regard:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150122114405.ht...

> it's hard to overstate how significant this finding is

Let's not get too excited here, it's not like they've magically retrieved all texts; they've retrieved small fragments from a handful of scrolls and the process involved some luck and guesswork, not just software. For the technique itself to work, the scroll has to be slightly bumpy, and not all of them are like that.

It's a great step forward, but still, it will likely take decades to retrieve significant portions of text from a small number of scrolls -- and this assuming efforts will always be fully funded (Italy has a lot of old stuff to look after, and they're not exactly swimming in cash right now -- they're even thinking of re-burying several large archeological sites because they simply cannot protect them at this time).

If you ever get a chance to visit Pompeii, I definitely recommend also making the trip to nearby Herculaneum. Pompeii is grand and impressive in its size; Herculaneum (which was an upmarket, beachside town in 79AD) is boutqiue, compact, less touristy, and for mine a much better experience and view into both life in 79AD and life the day of the eruption.

'photon beams' seams like an unnecessarily complicated way of saying x-ray?

clickbait!

Yes. At first I thought it was a joke article, wherein someone had the brilliant idea of turning on a light in order to see a scroll previously unreadable because it was hidden in a dark cave. "How did you manage to read the scroll?" "Photon beams!" "Whoaaaa"

I thought the same thing, a joke. Then I read it as 'proton beam' for a few milliseconds...the brain does funny things when it's trying to make sense of something.

Thanks for making me chuckle today.

I thought they meant some kind of visible light laser and wondered why they didn't just say 'light beams'. After all, visible light is the most familiar form of photon to most people.

How about this: "Scientists couldn't see what was written on the scrolls until they turned on some lights." The connotation behind "photon beams" more accurately conveys the accomplishment than the roughly synonymous "turning on some lights".

Think the plural on beams refers to the beam splitting going on in phase-contrast x-ray imaging http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-contrast_X-ray_imaging

They didnt use the traditional x-ray imaging that has been around for a hundred years.

Man I wish they told me what they said.

Exactly! I was hoping to at least hear what those two words were, no matter how insignificant.

I thought Indiana Jones already did that.

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