How do they know anything about a ZPM?

[Avatar28]

Well Daniel knew ancient. That means he had to have enough of their writings to be able to learn it and translate it. (Yes, I realize it's similar to ancient latin but that doesn't mean it IS ancient latin.) I'm sure they found writings here and there that could have told them what a ZPM was too.

[Three PhDs]

Thing is, compare an understanding of basic tenth century knowledge to coming across a technical manual at Intel describing the architecture of a Pentium Processor. It'd take them as long to work out what it is they were actually reading about as to how it works.

[Pharaoh Atem]

they ran loads of scans on them and made assesments judging on the results

There also have the atlantis database

[Eoin]

Wouldnt there have been some info on the ZPM in the outpost on earth?

[Avatar28]

Thing is, compare an understanding of basic tenth century knowledge to coming across a technical manual at Intel describing the architecture of a Pentium Processor. It'd take them as long to work out what it is they were actually reading about as to how it works.

Yes, but there are, in some ways, more of a difference between the 10th century person and today compared to us and some of ancient tech. With the tech and science that we've discovered through the series we certainly stand a far better chance of understanding at least the basics of it. We may not understand exactly how it works, much less how to build one, but that doesn't mean we can't figure out what it is or how to use it.

[Gate Master]

A ZPM is millions of years beyound our tech. It was also said in the show that they figured it out as opposed to reading a manual from the wall.
It is unlikely to have any moving parts and for all intents looks like a hunk of crystal. If you could scan it which I find doubtful all you would likely get is interfereance from what ever containment field is in place or it would read as a hunk of crystal.
So the only way to figure it out is by measuring emissions since they never even took it apart which is where the problem lies.
I dont understand what emmissions could eminate that would give us all that information about it.
If there was energy eminating that we understood then that wouldn't tell us a great deal about how it generates the energy. On the other hand if it was emmitting particals that we had no idea what they were then we would understand it even less and would most-likely take years to analyse and given the time frames involved here from obtaining the first ZPM to describing how it works seems very unlikely.