Humans love mysteries, and you need only look at the phenomenal popularity of “The Da Vinci Code” for proof. And when the solution requires science, math, technology and history, I’m all over it.

In a recent real-life mystery, the leading character is a combination Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones. He’s Dr. Bradley Schaefer, an Astronomy Professor from Louisiana State University. The main clue is a second-century Greek statue, tucked away in an Italian museum, which he happened to visit on his vacation.

Now, certainly any statue that’s nearly 2000 years old and still in good condition is remarkable, but this particular one wasn’t even an original. It was deemed a copy of an earlier Greek work, now lost to the vapors of antiquity. Still, it stands seven feet tall, and depicts the familiar figure of Atlas, shouldering the heavy burden of planet Earth.

If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you would miss all the clues.

As expected, Atlas’ globe doesn’t show the relief of the continents – two thousand years ago, humans were many centuries away from that. Yet, they could look out every night at the stars in the sky.

Remember that during the course of a year, the Earth makes a complete transit around the sun. That means that each night, the dark side of our planet Earth looks out away from the sun, into a slightly different part of the universe. And each night, the stars look somewhat different. After a year, the globe would reflect a 360 degree view of all the stars.

Art may be art, but to the eye of the trained astronomer, whoever created this globe of the night sky, did so with specific intent. No artistic license here – this work was directed by a scientist.

Dr. Schaefer knew that constellations don’t exactly appear in the same place year after year. In fact, because of the earth’s wobble, the positions only repeat themselves every 26,000 years or so. Which yielded the penetrating question: If the globe on this sculpture was created according to exact scientific measurements, could he compute backwards to the year of this night sky?

One can only imagine Dr. Schaefer murmuring, “Elementary, my dear Watson” at some point during this adventure. Perhaps it was when he took photos of the globe during his vacation in Naples, painstakingly positioning his camera with every shot, so that the mathematics would not be compromised. Perhaps it was when he simply printed out the photos and laid them flat on a grid. Or when the numbers started flowing out of his computer.

It doesn’t matter. When all the ancient astronomers were assembled in the library for the dramatic identification of the perpetrator, the professor’s finger pointed directly to Hipparchus, that famed and highly-respected astronomer, whose thousand-star catalog is actually referred to directly by Ptolemy. But the reference is all we have – the catalog was presumed lost forever in the fire which consumed the great library in Alexandria.

There had to have been one extraordinary moment when Dr. Schaefer knew what he had discovered, a truth that no one else yet knew. A scientist can live an entire lifetime, and only dream of such a moment. Yet somehow, this was even more special. While scientists work daily to expand its frontiers, the great body of scientific knowledge is carefully handed down from one generation of scientists to the next. What better example is there than the great hand of Hipparchus reaching out over two millennia to a scientist on a continent he didn’t even know existed.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.