Linguistic Clue Pushes Back Origin of "World's Oldest Computer" 141
Calopteryx points out a piece at New Scientist which suggests that the Antikythera mechanism may be even older than previously thought; an ancient Greek word on of the device's dials suggests the device may date to the early second century BC. The article is accompanied by a great animation of its (deduced) workings, too.
Re:It it hadn't been for the Catholic Church .. (Score:4, Interesting)
They didn't actually do that, but don't let that get in the way of your prejudice. About the worst they can reasonably be accused of is encouraging bright people to remain celibate.
Either way, though, it wouldn't have changed much. The Catholics did not control the entire world, and there was plenty going on outside their reach -- particularly in the Islamic world, where massive progress was made in mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy.
Nice troll though.
Re:It it hadn't been for the Catholic Church .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing would have been changed, in the byzantine empire and the arabic world and china knowledge thrived, so basically
nothing was held back. I think technological jumps follow a cycle and currently we are at the height of such a development cycle which might slow down again for several decades.
The main root for modern science were some factors, call it the lazy well fed european together with the connection between mathematics and physics layed out by people like Decardes Leibnitz and Newton.
It could have been developed earlier in the arabic or byzantine world or in china, the foundations always were there and also the minds and some already did, but the theories did not stay long enough to have an impact.
For instance the first steam engine was designed in Alexandria, but it never had any impact due to inherent slavery being present, same goes for the connection of mathematics and physics and generally calculus which is the foundation of the connection, all done in greece to some degree but it had not any impact because mathematics were seen by the general public as being from a to esoteric angle and the people doing the connection did not make enough impact on society.
Same in the arabic world, they took the decade system with zero from india and developed it further again no impact.
Sometimes an apple is all you need to change the world.
And I dont think it would have happend earlier with or without the catholic churchs stance on things in the middle ages.
(Which were not that bad they preserved knowledge as well, but europe was piss poor and most people had survival in mind, things became bad later when the printing press was invented)
Re:It it hadn't been for the Catholic Church .. (Score:4, Interesting)
Happened all the way later, the funny thing is the so called dark ages the middle ages were not that dark, the witch burning happened way after the middle ages with their height about 300 years ago, but when that started to happen the genie in form of the printing press was already out of the bottle.
And even worse the catholics were not even the worst witch burners in fact in the later stages during the 30 years war in europe the offical roman view was even against it (the triggering books although were clearly catholic), but it was a mass phenomenon infesting the minds of the europeans at that time, and the protestants often being worse.
Also the stance of the catholic church towards science and the trial of galileo did not change anything and it would not have happened probably in the middle ages.
Re:Full res video and more info. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It it hadn't been for the Catholic Church .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny enough, it wasn't the RCC. As much as they're dogmatic about religious things, they were (and to some degree still are) pretty lenient and progressive towards research and science. The RCC are hardly Luddites, and quite a bit of progress that was possible in medieval times was helped by Popes who wanted better artillery and more sculptures.
The RCC was a good scapegoat for emperors, though, if they wanted a cheap and easy way to get rid of gripers. Much like a lot of "terrorist" laws are today. Heretic, witch, communist, terrorist... why do you think the times change? The terms change, their use stays the same. It's a tool for those in power to intimidate their subjects and gain support for their quest to weed out the malcontents that dare to raise their voice.
The RCC wasn't keen on keeping literacy down. In fact, they taught it. Most charges of heresy and witchcraft against scientists were not raised by the RCC itself but rather by powerful individuals that were threatened by them. The Roman Inquisition was one of the most advanced judical systems in those times, and many people accused of heresy hoped to be subjected to the RI instead of a "worldly" court because your chance for a fair trial (as far as fairness went in those times) was heaps higher. You had the right to a defender who was educated in Roman Law, you had the right to be sheltered, in such a way that it is possible to you to prepare for your trial, the judges were not under the direct control of the Pope (actually quite often they acted against the Pope's interests) and your chance to go out free was not too bad, compared to other trials of that times. Maybe the best example on how much these Inquisition trials were aiming at finding the truth rather than a 'desired' result was the trial of Martin Luther, who, after all, challenged the RCC itself.
The Spanish Inquisition is the one we usually think of when we think of the term "Inquisition", with fake trials and torture and predetermined verdicts. This was by no means sanctioned by the RCC and actually just a tool of the local authorities, not one of the Holy See.
Is it a 'computer' ? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read the comments, there is a hot but pointless discussion on whether this device is actually a 'computer'.
My father worked in RAE Farnbrough in the '40s and '50's. The first early 'Pilot-ACE' prototypes were developed by Manchester University and the National Physical Laboratory. Another less well known one was made for the Ministry of Defence and sent to Farnbrough for calculating things like air flow over wing profiles. The NPL director at the time seems to have had a deep distrust of computers, and the early versions were explicitly forbidden to execute conditional jumps ( IF..THEN..ELSE ). The computer would solve flow equations by shooting from the boundary conditions, and then stop. A human operator then had to press a key to instruct it to execute the jump back to the beginning of the loop to take the next iteration. I can only imagine how irritating Alan Turing must have found that - to go right to the edge of computational completeness, and then stop just short. Aaaaugh!
Arguments about who made the first computer tend to get rabid, fast, so people often define a computer as something that can make a conditions jump based on it's previous calculations, and not just like a player piano, rewinding its roll when it has detected the end. This is a nice, clear rule - either the machine can do conditional jumps or it can't - so it tends to get invoked when things get heated. The Antikythera mechanism had no need of a conditional jump. I have no doubt that the people who made it could have designed it to do so if they had wanted to, just as Charles Babbage could have done for the Difference Engine. However, in both cases, they did not, so in both cases, according to the narrow definition that requires a computer to do a conditional jump, this is a 'calculator' and not a 'computer'.
I suspect the Antikythera mechanism may have had immense value for calculating the tides and the safe dates for shipping. As such, you can imagine the ship's captain chucking it over the side in an emergency, like a U-Boat commander disposing of an Enigma machine, rather than let it be captured, and copied. Maybe this is why these devices have vanished so completely from known history.
Re:It it hadn't been for the Catholic Church .. (Score:5, Interesting)
I would not even say the arabs are the safekeepers, probably almost the entire middle age society with western europe being the dark spot only. The biggest gate was Constantinople with their book copy shops from there the books went into the arabic world and also to some degree into europe.
For those countries western europe must have looked like Afghanistan looks now for us.
This is one of the biggest mistakes tought in schools that the middle ages were some kind of age where knowledge was lost everywhere while only a small subset of the world lost its knowledge (which it never had in the first degree since france never went into this stage after the roman empire collapse neither did italy really nor spain)
So who is selling replicas? (Score:2, Interesting)
n/t
Re:Is it a 'computer' ? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you read the comments, there is a hot but pointless discussion on whether this device is actually a 'computer'.
Only because some people have unilaterally declared that "computer" always means "universal Turing machine" rather than "something or someone that computes".
Humptey-dumptey syndrome ("words mean precisely what I intend them to mean") and the pathological inability to accept that words can have multiple similar but different meanings seems to be an industrial disease amongst nerds.
Guys: if you want a new word to always mean something highly specific and techical then iether make one up or use something from Latin/Greek/Klingon/Elvish, don't overload an existing English word!
Re:fiction plot (Score:4, Interesting)
Hum. My english level is not good enough for me to take such a stance. Let's say I was happy to read his novels because they were easy enough for my poor understanding the moment I needed it. Now that I've improved a bit, I tend to read more mature books. Before you criticize me, just think for a moment how many fiction books you read in another language than your own (I don't need to know the answer ;-) ).
This said, I think there are wonderful novelists in the US at the moment, and this is pretty exciting. But even Clive Cussler is someone to be proud of, this is a kind of litterature we used to have at the end of the XIXth century in France, and in my opinion, we badly miss it. Alexandre Dumas was widely despised too, in his days, for plotting unrealistic stories, and lambasted for his "poor" style. Nevertheless, his books remains because they were bigger than life (and made better stories than historical accuracy would have produced alone ; Dumas used to say you could rape history, in order to produce beautiful offsprings).
Nowdays, most french novelists are writing about their own navel, and it's awfully boring. This is largely the product of the narrow minds of professional critics who value style over everything. Crafting a good story seems to be a lost art. Fear the day when you might think the same of your own country writers !