Where History and Science Meet

An article in the July 22nd-28th issue of The Economist entitled, "Reading the invisible," describes new developments in the science of reading historical documents damaged by forgers. The article focuses on the efforts to discover the actual contents of the oldest known manuscript of Archimedes' work, the Archimedes palimpsest, published in the tenth century A.D., the text of which was largely washed away and overlaid with gold images by forgers.

The technique that holds the promise of revealing the contents of the original text of this historically significant document is being developed by a group of Stanford scientists and is called "x-ray flourescence imaging." This involves recreating the images of the original ink script through x-ray technology, and is described as follows:

The ink contains iron, and traces of iron can be made to reveal themselves when bombarded with x-rays. Iron atoms have 26 electrons in different orbitals around their nuclei. An x-ray tuned to the correct energy can knock an electron out of the innermost orbital. This makes the system of orbitals unstable and an electron from an orbital further out rapidly fills the hole. As this replacement electron falls into place, it emits an x-ray at a second specific energy. A detector captures each x-ray having this energy, building up an image of the ink dot by dot.

An intriguing new tool, demonstrating the increasing nexus between historical and scientific analysis. It is also interesting to consider the additional historical tools that will emerge in the future, and the corresponding insights into the significant events in the history of the Bahá'í Faith they will provide, particularly when coupled with the perspective and context that the passage of time offers. In the words of Shoghi Effendi:

The historian of the future, viewing more widely and in fuller perspective the momentous happenings of the Apostolic and Formative Ages of the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh, will no doubt be able to evaluate accurately and to describe in a circumstantial manner the causes, the implications and the effects of these Divine Messages which, in their scope and effectiveness, have certainly no parallel in the religious annals of mankind.