探索頻道 Cosmos 宇宙的邊疆12

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(The) intricate and subtle way that the universe is put together. Genius flourished here. In addition to Eratosthenes, there was the astronomer Hipparchus who mapped the constellations and established the brightness of the stars. And there was Euclid who brilliantly systematized geometry who told his king who was struggling with some difficult problem in mathematics that there was no royal road to geometry. There was Dionysius of Thrace, the man who defined the parts of speech, nouns, verbs, so on, who did for language, in a way, what Euclid did for geometry. There was Herophilus, a physiologist, who identified the brain, rather than the heart, as the seat of intelligence. There was Archimedes, the greatest mechanical genius until the time of Leonardo da Vinci. And there was the astronomer Ptolemy who compiled much of what today’s the pseudoscience of astrology. His Earth-centered universe held its way for 1500 years, showing that intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong. And among these great men, there was also a great woman. Her name was Hypatia, she was a mathematician and an astronomer, the last light of the library, whose martyrdom was bound up with the destruction of this place 7 centuries after it was founded.

Look at this place. The Greek kings of Egypt who succeeded Alexander regarded advances in science, literature and medicine as among the treasures of the empire. For centuries, they generously supported research and scholarship. And enlightenment shared by few heads of state then or now.

Off this great hall were 10 large research laboratories. There were fountains and colonnades, botanical gardens, and even a zoo with animals from India and Sub-Saharan Africa. There were dissecting rooms and an astronomical observatory.

But the treasure of the library consecrated to the God Serapis built in the city of Alexander was its collection of books. The organizers of the library combed all the cultures and languages of the world for books. They sent agents abroad to buy up libraries. Commercial ships docking in Alexandria harbor were searched by the police, not for contraband, but for books. The scrolls were borrowed, copied and returned to their owners. Until studied, these scrolls were collected in great stacks called "books from the ships". Accurate numbers are difficult to come by, but it seems that the library contained, at its peak, nearly 1 million scrolls.