Comment by verditelabs
1 day ago
In March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 of the 6 that they were given still in tact. I had to handle both of them. I have never felt more stressed in my life and have never and will probably never again handle such a priceless artifact.
I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished
I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work.
If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?
The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work.
Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.
A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.
Lots of great work that pioneered here (I wish the website did a better job showing that?)
e.g., Dr. Brett Seales and his decades of work: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1601247
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This is one of the most fascinating comments I’ve ever read. Thank you so much!
I was wondering, how does this all get funded?
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Where can we read about the xray setup? e.g the type of sensor, if/how the target and/or beam is scanned, any fancy gratings/etc, what kind of CT algorithms are used
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Just wonderful
Wonderful that all of this amazing technology exists
Wonderful that we used it to read these ancient scrolls
Thank you
> We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster.
What makes power relevent here? Obviously medical applications aren't particulary powerful, are quick, and are very useful. Is it harder to penetrate the material than the human body? Is the increased power due to increased resolution - i.e., increased pixels/cm^2 rather than increased watts/pixel? The latter would seem to risk damaging the artifact?
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