Today, a cyclotron warns us not to overspecialize.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Tony Bliss, a librarian at
Berkeley, shows me a paper he's written. It tells a
story about a manuscript book. The Latin
inscription at the end of the book says it was
written in 1328.
Before Gutenberg, before the plague, before the
horrors of the Hundred Years' War, this text (it
seems) was written out in a peculiar Gothic hand on
now-yellowed parchment -- a set of Gospel readings
in an odd French dialect, one for each Sunday of a
year.
Yet something about it is wrong. The inscription
has features that are out of place in medieval
Latin. A gold initial letter holds a miniature
portrait of a lady. She's too realistic for
medieval imagery. So scholars begin questioning
details.
Linguists offer theories for the anachronistic
Latin. Historians look for the source of the French
text. Meanwhile, Bliss does the most startling
thing of all. He takes the book up to Davis,
California, where the University has an old
cyclotron.
This decades-old machine has long since been
surpassed by bevatrons and linear accelerators. Now
it's found a new kind of service -- the
non-destructive analysis of paper and inks.
Here's how it works: When high-energy protons
strike atoms of the heavier elements, each element
emits a distinct X-ray pattern. When protons strike
ancient papyrus texts, we get nothing at all. The
organic papyrus and the ink are made of light
elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. But medieval
texts are another story. They have metallic
elements in them. They make the output of the
cyclotron light up like a Christmas tree.
So Bliss presents his book to the cyclotron. The
parchment shows heavy concentrations of calcium,
white lead, and iron oxide. That's not the makeup
of animal skin, but of early-20th-century
clay-finished paper -- with a yellowing agent to
make it look old. The story gets worse. The gold
foil in that ornate initial letter was made from
powdered brass.
What many people suspected suddenly becomes
obvious. This is not just a fake. It's a clumsy
fake -- maybe from a 1920s Italian cottage industry
in counterfeit books. "Now," Bliss says to me,
"Look what happened! Linguists were fooled; art and
language historians were fooled. How do you suppose
that could happen?"
Of course, highly specialized people are
vulnerable. When one expert fails to see the other
parts of the fake, his own part becomes an
interesting anomaly -- something to be explained.
This is more than just a delicious mix of old and
new. The cyclotron reminds us that we must see more
of the elephant than its trunk, tusk, or tail. It
makes a fine metaphor for the failure of
overspecialization -- which is the real culprit in
this story.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
