Saturday, May 9, 2020

Reading inside

With a hat-tip to me mum: Brent Seales from Kentucky proposes to read rolled-up leftover Dead Sea Scrolls with a particle-accelerator. The Herculaneum scholars want in on this action also.

Apparently Seales'd tested the method on Byzantine-era texts from Ein Gedi. ALSO a fascinating field. But those didn't seem to be, say, lost Jewish apocalypses or Hebrew chronicles or protoIslam or whatever; it was just MT Leviticus. And I don't count 600 AD as the oldest Torah post-Qumran; what would y'all call Masada? But boring texts are great for testing the method.

Reading old texts may end up being the true vocation for particle-acceleration, given the slow death of theoretical physics. That and transuranic alchemy.

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