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Technology

Examining the Antikythera Mechanism 183

Posted by michael from the ancient-orrery dept.
Mr. Droopy Drawers writes "An ancient piece of clockwork shows the deep roots of modern technology. Found in 1900 off the coast of Antikythera, Greece, a clockwork mechanism was found to be a device for calculating the motion of the earth and planets. In an article in The Economist, Michael Wright, the curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, says the device demonstrates mechanical principles that were thought not devised until the 17th century. The article quotes research done by Derek Price. Here's Mr. Price's article from Scientific American. Also found some quicktime movies of the mechanism at The University of Macedonia. Very interesting reading."
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Examining the Antikythera Mechanism More

Examining the Antikythera Mechanism

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  • Naturally. (Score:4, Funny)

    by QuantumWeasel ( 606327 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @05:13PM (#4308215)
    Well, sure. The Atlantans needed that clock to coordinate their rendezvous with the Mothership.

  • coincidence?? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Pretzalzz ( 577309 )
    Isn't it entirely possible to make a device that demonstrates some principle, but have no understanding of the underlying principle? There is also the comparison of people 'discovering' the Americas before Columbus. Sure, people might have been here before him, but Columus is the one that got the ball rolling as far as Western civilization is concerned and made things happen because of his 'discovery'.

    • Re:coincidence?? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rgmoore ( 133276 ) <glandauer@charter.net> on Sunday September 22, 2002 @05:27PM (#4308274) Homepage

      It's not so much that the people don't necessarily have the understanding of the technology as it is that they don't have a use for it or the support network to take advantage of it. Columbus's discovery of America was significant not because he was the first person to do it but because it was the first time that America was discovered by a society that could exploit the discovery. Similarly, movable metal type printing developed when it did because there was finally a set of enabling technologies that let it work- comparatively cheap paper, appropriate inks, metalury that could make movable type, presses that could be adapted to printing, etc. Many discoveries and inventions are like that; people made false starts toward them a number of times but they didn't catch on until there was an appropriate technological network surrounding them.

      • And civilizations have been coming and going for at least 30,000 years. That's a lot of time in which things can happen...lots of metals rust. Well, not in this case.

        Has anyone heard the story of the group of geology students who found a geode with a sparkplug-like object inside of it? True story, I believe they found it in the arizona desert. Those things take a long time to form. Maybe some visitors dropped a bubbelgum wrapper while on tour.

      • Re:coincidence?? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by d.valued ( 150022 )
        There are myriad examples of 'lost science' and lost innovations from the past. A chemical battery has been discovered c. 100 AD which was used as a theraputic. There were plans drawn up for a temple which would have its doors open automagically when the cauldrons were lit, as the heat from the flames would boil water and cause the doors to open. The reason it wasn't implemented? "We have slaves to do that." Atomic theory can be traced to the ancient Greeks, as is the heliocentric view and the KNOWLEDGE (not theory) that the world was a sphere.

        There were two main reasons that these advances in science in technology were stunted. The first was the cheap availability of manpower. Why use a steam engine when twenty slaves work as well? And remember, slavery in ancient times wasn't too bad a state to be in, relatively speaking. So long as you did your job, you were expected to be fed, sheltered, treated decently. Even the Torah has guidelines for indentured servitude and the care and feeding of slaves.

        The other reason (flames coming) is christianity. Christianty's worldview is one of a flat earth, where Man was created separate from all other creatures. Evolution, heliocentrism, science in general is eschewed by the Western Church with such a passion it's amazing. If it didn't have such a historically strong, pervasive influence, it would be funny.
        • The other reason (flames coming) is christianity. Christianty's worldview is one of a flat earth, where Man was created separate from all other creatures. Evolution, heliocentrism, science in general is eschewed by the Western Church with such a passion it's amazing.

          When a British school casually mentioned that its science curriculum included Creationism, there was a huge furor. When it died down, Richard Dawkins commented that the clerics were doing a better job of promoting evolution and destroying creation than the Atheists were, and that they (the Atheists) were better off standing back and watching the masters at work.

          Christian belief has never held that the Earth is flat. Neither has the Medievel Church, AKA Roman Catholicism, counted that assertion among the very many things that they got wrong over the years. IRL, the furor was over whether the Earth was the center of the universe or not. The RCC said yes, science said no.

          Depending on your perspective, they were both right. Earth seems to be within 100 million lightyears of the centre of the universe, a cosmic stone's throw, whereas the science (IRL, the religion of Naturalism) which espouses a Big Bang doesn't admit to a universe with a centre (or edges) at all.

          Science as we know it doesn't propose helicentrism. The situation described in the previous paragraph is galactocentrism, and science doesn't like that too much either.

          Science in general, at least science as we know it, was started by Christians. The founder of Scientific American, for example, was a Christian and a Creationist. Pasteur, Paley, Newton were all Christian Creationists, along with many, many others. The idea of classifying animals doesn't make much sense from an Orthdox Darwinistic point of view, because you'd be expecting great randomness (many intermediates), little systematism; and a pagan point of view, all warring gods or mischevious spirits, wouldn't be oriented toward constancy or systematism either.

          Christians, including Creationists, are still very strong in science despite centuries of propaganda war against the idea and the extreme difficulty of gaining or holding tenure while admitting Creationist ideals. For an example of such a scientist, the author of the world's most effective geodynamics modelling program, Terra, is a Creationist; another Creationist accurately predicted, from Creationist principles, what the magnetic fields of Neptune and Uranus would be like (quite different to everyone else's ideas) long before we put a suitably equipped probe past them to do measurements.

          If you can be bothered looking, you will discover that many ancient civilisations weren't as primitive as they seemed. But because it speaks against orthodox Naturalistic science, the evidence which clearly shows this is treated as Winston Churchill describes: `Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.'

          Do be sure that you have some idea of what you're on about next time. (-:

          • Of note, though, is that "creation science" is a pseudoscience. An infallible or religious source is indisputable by the definitions in the scientific demense, and therefore inadmissible.

            Yes, the gentlemen you mention were creationists; the reasonbeing, of course, that evolution theory hadn't been devised yet. The origins of classification of species, in a crude form, can traced back to Aristotle, who can also be blamed for the flat earth theory as well.

            As far as heliocentrism, I was referring to the solar system. Before the viral spread of Christianity, it was an at least known belief that the sun was in the middle and the earth was a sphere which rotated around it. Afterwards, even the wisest men had to profess to a flat earth because that knowledge was lost in the Dark Ages.

            A good scientist will put aside their personal views and look at the available evidence before coming to a conclusion. The problem is that there is a stereotype of creationists as bible-beating hicks from the South unwilling to look at the factual evidence or viewing analytical proof as fabrication, effective fact as conspiracy.

            It's obvious that most ancient civs weren't nearly as archaic as is perceived by the masses. Look at the the artifacts which survive: the Acropolis, the Puramids, the great temples, all the megaliths and sculptures and artifices which are unimaginable today. I mean, it took until last year to decipher the secret of Damscus steel. There are secrets lost to time which will remain mysteries until we can travel there (and screw everything up for shits and giggles).

            The Catholics only recently admitted that they got it wrong about the earth, though. Galileo was de-excommunicated (the actual term escapes me) in '92. That's ten years ago.
            • Actually, as it turns out, there is *no way* to say for sure whether the earth, the sun, or my left ear is the center of the universe. In fact, if you'll do a little checking up, you'll find it was exactly this issue that got Einstein thinking about relativity - someone has asked him to "prove" whether or not the earth was the center of the universe. He came up with the theory of relativity, but failed at the primary question: there is simply no way to know.

              For all we can prove, the earth *could be* the center of the universe, and rotating around us every 24 hours. Ultimately, any arguments against this position boil down to one of two forms: 1) I don't belive this because my worldview has problems with possible implications of that, or 2) it violates Occam's razor. Neither is absolutely compelling. We simply don't know, and never will, that's what Dr. Einstien told us...
    • I'm not totally sure Western civilization was an improvement. I think the original inhabitants (the tiny fraction who are left) might agree. On the other hand, we wouldn't have Slashdot without Western civilization... hmmm. -R-
    • Yes it is possible: case in point, the Ancient Egyptians are known to have used mouldy bread (which contains penicillin) to treat wounds, yet they had no knowledge of germ theory.

      Once you understand about germs however, you can figure out how penecillin works, and can start to manufacture better antibiotics.

      • The Egyptians also made "beer" (really about 0.5% or 1 proof) for normal drinking from the waters of the Nile. It is an interesting question whether their civilization was really based on the inadvertent discovery of the astringent property of ethanol.
        • The Egyptians also made "beer" (really about 0.5% or 1 proof) for normal drinking from the waters of the Nile. It is an interesting question whether their civilization was really based on the inadvertent discovery of the astringent property of ethanol.

          Hardly unique to the ancient Egyptians. Beer (and wine) have been used throughout Europe, North African and West Asia for this purpose. So much so that whilst Europeans evolved the ability to detoxify alcohol people from parts of the world such as China often cannot tolerate alcohol at all. Because the ancient Chinese made water safe to drink by making tea.
      • Yes it is possible: case in point, the Ancient Egyptians are known to have used mouldy bread (which contains penicillin) to treat wounds, yet they had no knowledge of germ theory.

        Which shows that an empircal "engineering" approach can be highly sucessful.

        Once you understand about germs however, you can figure out how penecillin works, and can start to manufacture better antibiotics.

        You have to be careful to avoid overuse of antibiotics however. Otherwise the result is to breed antibiotic resistance bacteria.

    • Lost Knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)

      by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @06:56PM (#4308549)


      Isn't it entirely possible to make a device that demonstrates some principle, but have no understanding of the underlying principle?

      Even when the underlying principle of a technology is fairly well understood, and put to substantial use, there is no guarentee that the techology will survive the ravages of time. Concrete is a good example.

      The Romans had perfected concrete and used the substance to great effect. Many of the surviving Roman ruins today are concrete structures. Yet at the fall of the Roman empire, the knowedge of concrete was largely lost. It took several hundred years to simply begin regaining that knowledge. It took over a THOUSAND more years for the technology to reach simular levels as when it was used by the Romans.

      Keep in mind that this was a technology with very obvious and... concrete... examples to demonstrate that the technology had existed and would provide considerable bennefit if rediscovered. This is very unlike tales of "greek fire", ancient batteries, or a piece of clockwork burried at the bottom of the sea.

      History has shown many times that knowledge can be a precarious thing. It is little wonder that sometimes mankind has to redisover past discoveries. And I would think it takes little away from those inventors to have discovered simular technology had existed, unknown to them, elsewhere on the face of the earth in a very different time.
    • If I were ever to write a sci-fi story, it would be about a race of aliens who are the perfect engineers, but the universe's crappiest scientists. After several thousand years, they finally got to space, but don't understand a damn thing. Big rockets, built by trial and error. Some type of computer, but probably still using some oddly sophisticated form of vacuum tube (since they don't understand QM well enough to build a transistor; they probably completely missed the whole semiconductor bit).

      Just because you can build it doesn't mean you MUST understand it. Just look at the aquaduct system build without any particular conception of gravity or potential energy; just "it works".
      • We search for things to make us go.
      • Now that i have stolen your idea, i must sell the rights to disney!!! Mwahahahaha.

        Seriously, that is an interesting idea. Niven and pournelle had aliens that were almos the exact opposite of that, they had been bred to intrinsically understand science and engineering.
    • "It's a widely accepted principle that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: 'We discovered it, we discovered it...."

      Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick

    • Columbus ambled upon a new continent and didn't even know it. He died believing it was the landmasses of the known east. This is why we don't live in "Columbia" but instead in "America" (the dude that got it right). As one of my professors put it: "Columbus: he didn't know where he was going on his way there; didn't know where he was when he got there, and when he left, he didn't know where he'd been." Columbus was a lot of things. Clueless was one of them....
    • What was different about Columbus as compared to all the other people who had discovered America was that the recently invented printing press was used to make his discovery widely known.

  • Ancient Battery? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @05:14PM (#4308217)
    I saw a thing on the History channel that covered the mechanical solar system device. In that same ep, they also had an ancient battery (as in a container with acids etc to store electricity) that was found in Iraq. If memory serves, it dated back to... I want to say 100 AD, but I warn you all my memory's very fuzzy on that #. Suffice it to say, it was several hundred years ago.

    They believe the electricity was used to ease pain. Running light amounts of current through pained areas cause it to dissipate. They even talked of people walking into ponds containing eletric eels to ease their aches.

    Okay, this isn't really on-topic. It's still interesting, though. There were lotsa cool technologies several hundred years ago that haven't survived to our century. It's amazing!

    • Re:Ancient Battery? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Sirch ( 82595 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @05:23PM (#4308254) Homepage
      A quick Google search finds this [smith.edu].

      The page basically says they believe the battery to have been used for electro-plating gold onto silver, a technique which is still used today.

      The Romans used electric eels to treat arthritis and gout.

      • Although it has been some time since I watched it, there was a History Channel show once that mentioned the belief that the Ark of the Covenant may have been a battery. (Or had electrical storage capacity of some kind) This would explain some of the biblical (age) stories of people who layed hands on it dying on the spot.

        http://www.khufu.org/Ark/Arkpower/Techark.html

        Was the only article I could find about it now, but it explains the basics.

        I an convinced that as time goes by we will finally get it through our heads that humans have always been pretty smart and crafty people. To believe otherwise would simply be arrogant.

        From the Babylonians and Sumarian star charts, to the great pyramids lining up with constellations, to the south american temples being in alignment to an eclipse our *current* technology would have had problems predicting the penumbral path of, people of the past (generally speaking) were much more in tune with the natural world than we seem to give them credit for.

        Our ancestors would probably shake their heads in shame to know that 85% of the population no longer knows the times of lunar cycles, solstice dates, and the like. I guess the more you know, the more you forget, but sometimes I really wonder how "smart" we are at all.
        • humans have always been pretty smart and crafty people
          Humans have not always had:

          The scientific method
          Generally-accessible calculus
          Machine tools (lathes, etc.)

          The first led to the explosion in scientific inquiry; the second, to the quantification of those inquiries; the third to what we generally think of as our technological society.

          The Greeks were very inquisitive, but much of what they did was speculation without confirmation. Democritus is considered the fathre of atomic theory, because he thought that there was a smallest possible piece of matter. HOWEVER, when you consider all the ideas that were floating around in Greek times, at least one of them had to be correct about the nature of matter, no matter what the reality eventually turned out to be. Democritus had no ability to experimentally confirm/reject and refine his ideas.

          Calculus - well, without it, you'd need people of the caliber of Archimedes to find the area under curves or the slope of curves (Archimedes is widely regarded as being one of the three greatest mathematicians of all time, the other two being Newton and some other guy I can never remember).

          A machine tool can make itself - you can use a lathe to make another lathe, a mill to make another mill, etc. This gives you exponential growth in your ability to produce machined items such as gears or parts for other machines. With machine tools, mass production really came into its own.
    • Some batteries also were used to gold-plate brass figures.
    • 2 conductors separated by a non conductor.

      Google Search Results [google.ca]

    • I saw a thing on the History channel...

      But it's the History Channel ferchrissakes. Let's just all agree to refer to the History Channel, the Discovery Channel and TLC as "science lite".

      There may have been facts in there somewhere, but they are well obscured by the hyperbole and breathless presentation.

      • "But it's the History Channel ferchrissakes. Let's just all agree to refer to the History Channel, the Discovery Channel and TLC as "science lite".

        There may have been facts in there somewhere, but they are well obscured by the hyperbole and breathless presentation."

        You mean like that post? heh.

  • Let it be known that the U of Macedonia... (Score:5, Informative)

    by karji ( 114631 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @05:45PM (#4308338)
    ...is greek and doesn't belong to the country-with-similar-name, namely FYROM (former yugoslav republic of...).

  • a nice account (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22, 2002 @06:00PM (#4308383)
    A detailed account of the mathematics of the mechanism, along with java animations, can be found at the American Mthematical Society: The Antikythera I [ams.org] and The Antikythera II [ams.org].

    • Re:a nice account (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It seems I messed up the link in my previous post.
      The second article is here [ams.org] instead. Oops.
  • ... we've just slashdotted Greece.

    Now thats gotta be a new record...?

  • What is all this talk about an Antikythera Mechanism? The Kythera Mechanism has never been a problem for anybody. I think we should leave things just as they are!
    • I'll have you know, sir, that some people are not satisfied to leave things as they are. CERN has carefully combined and measured the products of the collision of an Antikythera and a Kythera. They hope to duplicate the experiment after fundraising and equipment adjustments. Results of the first experiment will be in the December issue of Antikythera Journal.
  • Interesting indeed, shows how little we knew about
    the greeks/ancients - although we should not assume/extrapolate too much after finding just one device. (one clock != mechanized greek civilization != "ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology" ;^)

    Unfortunately, a whole bunch of ppl are going to read about this clock and use it to claim that Atlantis existed and that aliens visited the ancient Greeks every friday-afternoon :o

    Expect the book in stores near you any day now :D

    • A civilization can be said to be "mechanized" when it builds mechs.

      Ancient Greeks in big mechs would have made the Peloponesian War a shitload more interesting.

      graspee

    • "(one clock != mechanized greek civilization != "ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology" ;^)"

      Undoubtedly true, however, the fact this knowledge once existed in the ancient world, and then disapeared, is very interesting.

  • META: Slashdot styleguide-- choosing anchortext (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RobotWisdom ( 25776 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @06:35PM (#4308480) Homepage
    (Another episode in my ongoing campaign to bring enlightenment to Slashdot blurbs...)

    Usually on Slashdot when a blurb-er links 'The Economist' or 'Scientific American' they're linking the magazine's homepage, and they also link the individual article separately. In the current blurb, I had to doublecheck that the links went to the articles instead.

    I'd like to see a Slashdot styleguide that recommends against linking the magazines' homepages at all (because it just adds confusion, and if you really want to get there, you're sure to find a link via the article).

    For linking the article, my recommendation is that the least ambiguous anchortext is the word 'article'. (The W3C says the anchortext should be descriptive, out of context, but I think this is more work than anyone really needs.)

    This is about my eighth 'META' comment, and almost all of them have been moderated down as offtopic, but I think the Slashdot community needs to become more sensitive to these usability issues.

    • Rock on. Agree completely. I would also like to add that it's ridiculous to include a link to the root page of the story source e.g. wired.com or microsoft.com, or whatever. Even more annoying is when this type of link is the first in the submission. The first link should be the actual article, OR, it should have the link text of "story" or "article". Stop trying to make your submission look better by putting a bunch of common sense links.

      Now if we could get people to start actually summarizing the story instead of cutting and pasting the first paragraph, we'd be half way to being able to call this "journalism." The other half would come when the editors actually edit.
    • Maybe you should put this stuff in your journal, where it belongs. The offtopic mods are completely justified. How this got modded up is beyond me.
    • What do you think this is, K5 [kuro5hin.org]? ;-)

    • and it is considered good design factor [useit.com], but it is also of questionable legality [wired.com], at least in some major parts of the world (the EU, for instance). I still much prefer it, but attempting to make people do stuff that has questionable legality is ... not a good idea.


      PS. I know that both the links in my posting are deep links - go figure :-)

  • I don't know about anyone else, but I found the account of Ancient Greece's terracentric solar system model interesting:

    ...using elaborate models based on epicycles, in which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth.

    Basically, the epicycle is centred on the Sun, which the Earth orbits. But their model seems preposterous now, because, to a person with a heliocentric view of the solar system it is overly complex, as all you have to do is think of the Earth circling that point as well, and you remove an order of complexity from the problem. I wonder if this seems simple just because of my heliocentric upbringing, or because the Greeks of the time were so convinced that the Earth was the center of the universe that they were blinded to the truth and missed the more simple explanation? Who first proposed the heliocentric model? I doubt it was really Copernicus, if this epicyclic model existed first!
    • The problem the Greeks would've had was "why don't they 'fall' just like objects on the Earth do?" The answer they came up with was that the bodies in the sky were "ethereal" (essentially massless in modern parlance) and were moved about in regularity by the gods (or the planets' Ideals if one were a Platonist). Thus they wouldn't have imagined the bodies in space to be like the matter on Earth, making, by default, the Earth the center of the cosmos.
    • Actually, Aristarchus, a Greek aroud the early part of the 3rd century BC, came up with it. Copernicus basically rehashed what Aristarchus said, improved on it a bit, and now most people believe that Copernicus came up with the idea.
    • Well, even the heliocentric model presented by Copernicus contained epicycles. Not quite as many as the Ptolemaic system (which was a mathematical mess by the 16th century as the general model was continually appended rather than torn down and rebuilt), but there were still definitely some. Copernicus created a heliocentric universe that had circular orbits for all of the bodies. Coming from the knowledge that planetary orbits are elliptical, we can see how this leads to problems. For example, if the position of Mars is charted nightly against the background of the stars, there will be instances where it appears to move one direction for a few nights, then stop, turn around, start moving backwards for awhile, then stop, turn around, and then proceed on its usual course!

      The way to explain this sort of oddity and yet preserve your blessed circular orbits is to insert epicycles. The planets are traveling in circles while orbiting a central body (the sun, or the earth). With some tinkering, an epicyclic system can be constructed that fits fairly well with observations taken from the vantage point of earth, at least most of the time. Not all the time, mind you, which is why it too had some (in hindsight, again) rather pathetic attempts to patch it up, epicycles on the epicycles and rot like that. Heliocentric theories had been proposed before, as another poster mentioned, by Aristarchus in ancient times, and then Nicholas de Cusa in the 15th century. Both of these models suffered from the same type of complexity that the one put forth in De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.

      What made Copernicus different is that he worked out a real mathematical basis for his solar system. Copernicus also correctly realized that the system could be made simpler if the inner planets moved faster than the outer planets, and thus completed their orbits even faster than distance of the circle they covered alone would predict. This seems obvious now- inner orbits must move faster, because gravitational forces varies with the inverse square of distance, but Copernicus lived before Newton, so he wasn't operating with that knowledge. His system was incorrect, yes, but it was at least based on something more concrete than aesthetic value. It then fell to Kepler to divine the true mechanics of the Solar System. His calculations showed that if the orbits of the planets were ellipses, with the Sun at one focus (he introduced the word "focus" in this context, btw), then the whole epicycle thing wouldn't be necessary at all to fit experimental observations. Moving on ellipses meant that the planets did not move with constant velocity- they moved faster when closer to the sun, and slower when farther away. Combined with Copernicus's concept of the inner planets moving faster, bolstered with mathematical properties of ellipses to become Kepler's Third Law, the whole epicycle thing became pretty much unnecessary.

  • Allan Bromley (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GoogolPlexPlex ( 412555 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @06:56PM (#4308550)
    The Economist article mentions that research on the Antikythera mechanism was carried out with Allan Bromley from the University of Sydney. This recent eulogy [smh.com.au] in the Sydney Morning Herald presents the life and achievements of this remarkable identity.
    • Allan taught me how to write my first assembly code (and to have an appreciation of how things work under the hood). He was an awesome teacher and a good guy.

      He will be missed.
  • Economics is the key. When you are limited by the amount of money you have, you can't do any research. And yet money is just a piece of paper now, and yet it'll still lead us to the next depression. Looks like we still haven't learned anything this past 2000 years. (Most Greek scientists are either rich themselves or are supported by the rich...)
    • Well, it would be like someone finding a Linux distro 2500 years from now - and wondering how such an advanced piece of technology could exist when every other OS 'artifact' unearthed until that date had been a buggy, crash-prone piece of shit with a 'Windows' label on it. 'Why, this technology shouldn't have existed until Microsoft released the service pack that finally secured Windows 4000 in 4005!'

      Hell, the greek government of the time probably discovered these guys were sailing to the capital with a piece of technology so advanced it boggled the mind - so they rammed the ship and sent it to the bottom of the ocean because it threatened the establishment and their inaccurate, but cheap and labour-intensive methods of calculating planetary motions for the purposes of tax calculations.

  • Discoveries like these reconfirms my beliefthat there really is nothing new under the sun, or at least it is an extreemely rare event. It makes you want to take a closer look at patents of all types and ask yourself if they are *really* original ideas.
    • Discoveries like these reconfirms my beliefthat there really is nothing new under the sun

      Care to point out the ancient nuclear weapon? Or the ancient use of velcro? Radar? Full plate armor before the fall or Rome?

      There's plenty new things under the sun. Thinking that there aren't is as arrogant as thinking that there's nothing new to discover.
      • Care to point out the ancient nuclear weapon? Or the ancient use of velcro? Radar? Full plate armor before the fall or Rome?

        Well, the first one might be a bit tricky, but the other three all have analogs in biology: burrs, bat/dolphin sonar, and any critter with an exoskeleton.

        I agree with your conclusion, you just happened to pick bad examples.
      • Care to point out the ancient nuclear weapon?

        There are mentions in ancient texts of what could be the use of nuclear weapons, most notably from India. As well as fused soil and stone all over the planet.
        If a technology were lost to subsequent civilisations it would appear magical and fantastic. e.g. a story of a man who flew on the back of the giant eagle Useaf and cast down mighty thunderbolts on his enemies might make a lot more sense to some future people than some story about a flying machines made of metal propelled by oil.
      • Umm, if you are Christian I suggest a re-reading of the plight of Lot and his family, then the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction.

        Not that I actually believe this theory, but it is a theory.

        Also, wasn't there a /. story a few years ago about a ancient, spontanious natural nuclear reaction that has been studied recently?
  • I used the device and I still have kytheras all over the damn place.

  • Allan Bromley (Score:4, Interesting)

    by oh ( 68589 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @10:09PM (#4309038) Journal
    As a side note. The article mentioned that a "computer scientist at Sydney University helped Analyise the images to work out what the componenets were."

    I had the pleasure of being a student on Alan's for some time. He was intensly interested in this sort of thing. He was involved in studying Babbage's work, and in the re-creation of Babbage's Difference Engine. I remember standing with him in front of a display case containing gears from one of these projects as he explained how they had been manufactured.

    Alan Bromely died on August 16 this year after a long battle with cancer. I remember in 1998 I was studing a subject taught by Alan. Twice during one semester he was unable to give lectures due to his chemo therapy, but he continued to teach, and always had time to explain something to anyone who wanted to listen.

    The Babbage project [ex.ac.uk]
    An article in the Sydney Morning Herald [smh.com.au]
    A university publication [usyd.edu.au]

    • I hoped that someone would mention Alan here.

      I was also a student of his, and had many dealings with him as a member of the Wesley College Council. He was a wonderful man. Exceptionally intelligent, compassionate and fun-loving. A great story-teller, wily politician and above all, an exceptional teacher.

      I had the opportunity to attend the memorial service held for him at the College, and was touched by the effect that he had on so many people at a personal and professional level. He was a fine man who's loss certainly diminished the world, and touched my very personally. I hope that his work on the Antikythera and Babbage machines will continue to prove useful and interesting.


  • Feynmann wrote about this in "What do you care..." (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Organic orange ( 515003 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @10:58PM (#4309248)
    This is the thing Feynmann commented on, especially the
    improbability of one of these really being ancient, in one of his
    letters printed in "What do _you_ care what other people think?", pages
    94 - 96:

    Yesterday morning I went to the archeological museum. . . . Also, it was
    slightly boring because we have seen so much of that stuff before.
    Except for one thing: among all those art objects there was one thing so
    entirely different and strange that it is nearly impossible. It was
    recovered from the sea in 1900 and is some kind of machine with gear
    trains, very much like the inside of a modern wind-up alarm clock. The
    teeth are very regular and many wheels are fitted closely together.
    There are graduated circles and Greek inscriptions. I wonder if it is
    some kind of fake. There was an article on it in the Scientific
    American in 1959. . . .

    I asked the archeologist lady about the machine in the museum -- whether
    other similar machines , or simpler machines leading up to it or down
    form it, were ever found -- but she hadn't heard of it. So I met her
    and her son of Carl's age (who looks at me as if I were a heroic ancient
    Greek, for he is studying physics) at the museum to show it to her. She
    required some explanation from me why I thought such a machine was
    interesting and surprising because, "Didn't Erastosthenese measure the
    distance to the sun, and didn't that require elaborate scientific
    instruments?" Oh, how ignorant are classically educated people. No
    wonder they don't appreciate their own time. They are not of it and do
    not understand it. But after a bit she believed maybe it was striking,
    and she took me to the back rooms of the museum-- surely there were
    other examples, and she would get a complete bibliography. Well, there
    were no other examples, and the complete bibliography was a list of
    three articles (including the one in the Scientific American) -- all by
    one man, an _American_ from Yale!

    I guess the Greeks think all Americans must be dull, being only
    interested in machinery when there are all those beautiful statues and
    portrayals of lovely myths and stories of gods and goddesses to look at.
    (In fact, a lady from the museum staff remarked, when told that the
    professor from America wanted to know more about item 15087, "Of all the
    beautiful things in this museum, why does he pick out _that_ particular
    item? What is so special about it?")

    • Oh, how ignorant are classically educated people. No wonder they don't appreciate their own time. They are not of it and do
      not understand it

      Typical Feynmannian arrogance. His fellow physicist, C.P. Snow, recognized that there are in fact "two cultures" in modern society, and that natural scientists tend to be as ignorant of the humanities as scholars in the humanities are about the natural sciences.
    • That was my impression also. It's a fake. Stuff like that wouldn't show up without similiar examples of that kind of stuff, even if more simple.

      Cutouts of the gears I think was something invented by clock makers to reduce gear inertia. Pendulums don't exert a lot of force. This wasn't something driven by a pendulum.

      • Plenty of examples are recorded, if not found. A device similar to this was described by Cicero. Archimedes's defences of Syracuse were by all acounts quite elaborate pieces of machinery. King Shu of China ca. 500BCE had made for him a flying bird and a spring operated horse. Egyptian automata from as early as the 15th century BCE were surprisingly - to later hellenes - sophisticated. Archytas of Tarentum - supposed inventor of the screw and pulley - made a wooden pigeon operated by a stream of water that simulated flight. Ctesibius made pnuematic automata around 280BCE. Philon of Byzantium is reputed to have invented a steam powered automaton in the 3rd centurt BCE. Also see the "throne of Solomon" upon which the Byzantine emporers sat.

        Important works - unfortunatly only in fragmentary form - from ancient times concerning sophisticated machinery include Hero of Alexandria's (another man supposed to have invented a steam engine) Pneumatica, Automatopoietica, Belopoiica and Cheiroballistra; Philon's De Ingeniis Spiritualibus; and Vitruvius's On Pneumatics for example.

  • Coincidence? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )
    What if it was just a fancy leather shaper that just *happened* to have astronomical ratios in it?
  • I always love to see how our current civilization derived its knowledge in part or in full from the past. It gives a feeling of connectivity to our past, like we are not an island - but instead part of a much larger history. It also removes national boundaries, and helps me remember that even though we are from different races, we all have a common ancestry.

    Much of our current culture and knowledge we owe to ancient Greece - yet ancient Greece was also no island. From whom did they derive their knowledge? The historian Josephus (born around AD30) said that Abraham, father of the Jews, taught the art of astronomy to the Egyptians. What other mysteries await us in history? It magnifies the ignorance of our current day, that thinks we are unique, when in fact all the thoughts and concepts we come up with are merely repeats of something older. Perhaps in a new skin (Eg computers and electricity), but the same concepts.

  • Big drawback (Score:2, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )

    It is missing one very important feature:

    The snooze button!
  • I picked up a little book on this device in a supermarket in Rhodes 2 years ago for about 3 euro.

    It was about 40 pages and alot of the history of the what was going on at the time, the story of how the thing was found, the investigation and rows over what it was afterwards, sketches of what was found, an sketches of an extrapolation of what the whole thing would looked like, etc ..

    I cant remember if there was an ISBN code this but i'll check at home later if anyone is interested.

    regrads

    pthooper
  • I can explain it. It is an actual Chrono Trigger that was left there by accident by some purple-haired boy from the future.
  • I didn't catch this story when it was first posted, but this device is a serious research interest of mine. (Blame Dava Sobel and her excellent "Longitude" - that book has cost me a small fortune, and set me to learning about globes, clocks, sundials, armillary spheres, orreries, tellurians, chonometers, sextants, octants, latitude hooks, astrolabes, backstaffs, Nathaniel Bowditch, and who knows what all else...)

    I got the fever so bad I even had Amazon hunt me down a $150 copy of Price's book (this was several years ago, long before they bought bibliofind and had theri current network of used book shops.)

    Anyway, I can't post the book of course, because I fully respect and support copyright law, but I do have a fairly extensive list of links about the Antikythera mechanism that might be useful for those just beginning to be infected with curiosity about the gadget: (Sorry, there are so many of these I'm not jumping through /.'s inane posting system to make them all clickable. Whaddya want for free?)

    http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/diff1.html
    http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/kyth1.html
    http://www.grand-illusions.com/antikyth.htm
    http: //www.csd.uch.gr/~venturas/index2.htm
    http://www. giant.net.au/users/rupert/kythera/kythe ra2.htm
    http://www.giant.net.au/users/rupert/kyth era/kythe ra5.htm
    http://www.math.utsa.edu/ecz/ak.html
    htt p://www.ballarat.edu.au/student/cc6rmr/kythera/ kythera.htm
    http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/Ar chimedes/Sphe re/SphereSources.html
    http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~ crorres/Archimedes/Sphe re/SphereIntro.html
    http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rri ce/usna_pap.html
    http://uranus.ee.auth.gr/TMTh/pu blic.htm
    http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScienc e/Students /Jesse/CLOCK1A.html
    http://hydra.perseus.tufts.ed u/GreekScience/Studen ts/Jesse/differ.gif
    http://hydra.perseus.tufts.ed u/GreekScience/Studen ts/Jesse/antik.gif
    http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1 031.htm

    Enjoy.

    P.S:
    I think Rob Rice's paper may be one of the most interesting overall, if only because it goes a long way toward suggesting that the knowledge to build such a device might correlate with the substantial evidence that the Rhodian navy had unmatched navigational and command and control capabilities, including the ability to navigate and coordinate the motions of fleets at night, giving them an impressive strategic advantage over all opponents.

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