How do you read a book that cannot be opened? Dr. Brent Seales has spent decades on that question. This summer his team showed they can unwrap and read a complete scroll, and presented results from three, without unrolling a single one. Two things made it work: a synchrotron that scans finer than a red blood cell, and machine learning that finds an ink signal the human eye cannot see. Out now on Infinite Loops, with guest host @nicktawil. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:50 Reading a Book You Cannot Open 5:20 Inside the Only Library From Antiquity 9:12 From Computer Vision to Ancient Scrolls 11:35 Synchrotrons & Seeing Inside a Scroll 14:57 Why He Open Sourced a Decade of Work 18:24 How the Contest Became a Recruiting Funnel 19:51 What Was Revealed in Naples 22:51 Why the Tech Improves With Every Scroll 25:39 AI Used to Look Backward 27:08 What Is Still Buried at the Villa 29:06 Original Works, Not Medieval Copies 31:24 The New $1 Million Prize 34:27 Bench Sources, Beamlines & Grid Scans 39:29 The Colleagues Who Said It Was Impossible 42:05 The Labeling Problem 2,000 People Solved 45:44 The En-Gedi Scroll & the Book of Leviticus 50:54 What the Lost Library Might Still Hold 56:00 Two ideas: be kind and seize the day