Antikythera Mechanism

[phart]

Been following this since i knew about it a few years back, it's so interesting in what it reveals we do not know about history, we hardly know what the Greeks knew in respect to astronomy or mathematics as this predates algorithmic trigonometry, and appears to be using Babylonian techniques to predict ellipses in orbits etc.

It is something they found in a shipwreck back in 1901, basically a metal computer of gears and mechanisms to predict the motion of the planets precisely and accurately. Made in the 3rd century BC. Remarkable.

An ancient Greek astronomical puzzle now has another piece in place.

The New York Times reported the new evidence today in a story about research by James Evans, professor of physics at University of Puget Sound, and Christián Carman, history of science professor at University of Quilmes, Argentina.

The two researchers published a paper advancing our understanding of the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek mechanism that modeled the known universe of 2,000 years ago. The heavily encrusted, clocklike mechanism—dubbed the "world's first computer"—was retrieved from an ancient shipwreck on the bottom of the sea off Greece in 1901. The new work is published in the Archive for History of Exact Science.

http://phys.org/news/2014-11-antikythera-mechanism-clues-ancient-greek.html

Edited November 30, 2014 by phart

[Huddersfield]

I remember seeing this on 'Arthur C. Clark's Mysterious World' on TV many years ago & like you been fascinated by it ever since. It's a stunning piece of technology. I always thought probably used as much as a work of art as science, but who knows. I thought I'd read somewhere that someone tried to reconstruct it from the x-rays at some point (off to Google that one).

It's interesting I think as well for where it sits alongside theories of history; the Ancient Greeks had various technologies using steam for example that were of little use to their economy or their military so were lost for centuries until Capitalist-type economies created an imperative to trade goods and move people more efficiently & widely.

Interesting stuff.

[phart]

I remember seeing this on 'Arthur C. Clark's Mysterious World' on TV many years ago & like you been fascinated by it ever since. It's a stunning piece of technology. I always thought probably used as much as a work of art as science, but who knows. I thought I'd read somewhere that someone tried to reconstruct it from the x-rays at some point (off to Google that one).

It's interesting I think as well for where it sits alongside theories of history; the Ancient Greeks had various technologies using steam for example that were of little use to their economy or their military so were lost for centuries until Capitalist-type economies created an imperative to trade goods and move people more efficiently & widely.

Interesting stuff.

Plus a lot of Greek thinkers went on pilgrimage to Egypt for knowledge, which stopped when the Romans started having more influence in the area, obviously stopping with Caesar/Cleopatra and Marc Anthony et al.

[thplinth]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SYdqPB40Q

Love the boffin Peter(/) Wright.

[Armchair Bob]

That is pure steampunk - 2200 years ahead of trend!

[Armchair Bob]

Btw - whas like us - 'we' invented time as well as everything else...

http://www.gizmag.com/worlds-oldest-calendar/28468/

(what is amazing about this seasonal clock is that is was used by Aberdeenshire hunter-gatherers in 8,000BC - I had thought before, that the first seasonal markers were created by farmers to mark the correct time to plant crops, etc.

[phart]

Btw - whas like us - 'we' invented time as well as everything else...

http://www.gizmag.com/worlds-oldest-calendar/28468/

(what is amazing about this seasonal clock is that is was used by Aberdeenshire hunter-gatherers in 8,000BC - I had thought before, that the first seasonal markers were created by farmers to mark the correct time to plant crops, etc.

Gobekli Tepe is even older (a fairly recently discovered new site in Turkey) and it's still getting excavated (it's huge) it will probably have some sort of relationship to the movement of the planets/sun as well.

The Great Pyramids are aligned to True North 3 times more precisely than the Greenwich Observatory (9/60th of a degree for observatory and 3/60th for Pyramids) is, and that was as accurate as we could get it.

So much interesting accomplishments that maybe didn't get explored for one reason or another as alluded to earlier, truly remarkable.

[biffer]

I remember seeing this on 'Arthur C. Clark's Mysterious World' on TV many years ago & like you been fascinated by it ever since. It's a stunning piece of technology. I always thought probably used as much as a work of art as science, but who knows. I thought I'd read somewhere that someone tried to reconstruct it from the x-rays at some point (off to Google that one).

It's interesting I think as well for where it sits alongside theories of history; the Ancient Greeks had various technologies using steam for example that were of little use to their economy or their military so were lost for centuries until Capitalist-type economies created an imperative to trade goods and move people more efficiently & widely.

Interesting stuff.

My understanding of them knowing how to get steam to turn things is that the expertise in metallurgy didn't exist, so they couldn't build big boilers etc to produce the level of motive force required for anything useful.

[Armchair Bob]

That Gobekli Tepe looks incredible! It's amazing what archaeologists are finding these days.

[Orraloon]

I wonder if it would have been easier to build it if they had put the sun at the centre of our solar system? I think the ancient Chinese used a solar centric model of the solar system 1000s of years before Galileo thought about it.