Rubi Gatica, Italy Gatica, Danya Archilla
Laura Metzger
ENGL 1302
2/13/15
Modern Technology
Illuminates Ancient Texts Response 1
The
world has come so far in the past few years with the first colonization to
discovering new worlds in the giant abyss that is the galaxy. So much is needed
to be learned and taught, and so much to be discovered and analyzed yet so
little time the earth gives us. As years and centuries go by, we start to faintly
and slowly discover the world that existed before technology ruled. In this
fantastic article posted, it talks about how technology today helps find and analyze
old scripts that help give us a new perspective and a new vision of what the
old days used to be.
In
this article it talks about how these very old scrolls were found in a cave in
1947 by shepherds and are the most important discovery to modern archeology. The
scripts are said to have some information on the great city of Palestine and
that they were written around the time that Jesus was alive. They are named The
Dead Sea Scrolls. Though the discovery was great and everybody was very enthusiastic
to see what the old scroll held, as time went by since then many of the scripts
were deteriorating to the point where the scripts weren’t readable and the
parchment blackened. Scholars couldn’t read them and the information was going
to be lost. It would take years to try and study the scroll and at the rate
that it was going many of the scrolls would be to weathered and damaged that
they wouldn’t extract the information needed.
That
is when modern technology comes into place and saves the day. Technology is the
application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.
Technology has come very far in the past decade and has helped the world
modernize and keep the world going. Technology now can help discover new things
and learn so much in a few months than in the past decades where scientist and
scholars would find or discover something new and it would take them over a decade
to analyze thoroughly.
Gregory
Bearman, a physicist from the US Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), helped these
scholars to try and read the badly damaged scripts using modern technology.
Bearman used multi-spectral imaging to help and distinguish the black ink from
the black parchment. In other words, light reflects from different substances
which create different wavelengths. Bearman used this technique to help detect
the black inked words from the black parchment. It worked like a charm! Scholars
now were able to read the blackened parchment and the text that they couldn’t reach.
Now they could read and translate the words faster and easier without the fear
of losing the ancient text.
Technology,
without the doubt, helped these scholars job a little easier. If technology can
help these scholars with these very delicate ancient texts, imagine what else technology
can do? What if technology can help you
teleport and the gas situation was fixed? Or what if technology can help you live
longer? Technology still has a long way to go yet, but the future looks
promising.
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