探索频道 Cosmos 宇宙的边疆13
The papyrus reed grows in Egypt. It’s the origin of our word for “paper”. And each of those million volumes which once existed in this library were handwritten on papyrus manuscript scrolls.
What happened to all those books? Well, the classical civilization that created them disintegrated. The library itself was destroyed. Only a small fraction of the works survived. As for the rest we’re left only with pathetic, scattered fragments. But how tantalizing those remaining bits and pieces are. For example, we know that there once existed here a book by the astronomer Aristarcus of Samos, who apparently argued that the earth was one of the planets that, like the other planets, it orbits the sun and that the stars are enormously far away. All absolutely correct. But we had to wait nearly 2000 years for these facts to be rediscovered.
The astronomy stacks of the Alexandria library, Hipparchus, Ptolomeus, here we are, Aristarchus. This is the book. How I’d love to be able to read this book! To know how Aristarchus figured it out, but it’s gone, utterly and forever. If we multiply our sense of loss for this work of Aristarchus’ by 100,000, we begin to appreciate the grandeur of the achievement of classical civilization and the tragedy of its destruction.
We have far surpassed the science known to the ancient world, but there’re irreparable gaps in our historical knowledge. Imagine what mysteries of the past could be solved with a borrower’s card to this library. For example, we know of a three-volume history of the world, now lost, written by a Babylonian priest named Berossus. Volume One dealt with the interval from the Creation of the World to the Great Flood, a period that he took to be 432,000 years, or about 100 times longer than the Old Testament chronology. What wonders were in the books of Berossus!
But why have I brought you across 2000 years to the library of Alexandria? Because this was when and where we humans first collected seriously and systematically the knowledge of the world. This is the earth as Eratosthenes knew it, it's a tiny spherical world float in an immensity of space and time. We were at long last beginning to find out true bearings in the cosmos. The scientists of antiquity took the first and the most important steps in that direction before their civilization fell apart. But after the Dark Ages, it was by and large the rediscovery of the works of these scholars done here that made the Renaissance possible and thereby powerfully influenced our own culture. When in the fifteenth century Europe was at last ready to awaken from its long sleep, it picked up some of the tools, books and concepts, laid down here more than a…
