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Examining the Antikythera Mechanism
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."
"...He returned to the surface, removed his helmet, and gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women."
Figures, dude thought he was looking at ancient porn.
Side note. I don't even wanna know how the submitter got his name.
Sent from your iPad.
ATTN: People of Macedonia. All your bandwidths are belong to us!
Signed,
CmdrTaco
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.