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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."
Well, sure. The Atlantans needed that clock to coordinate their rendezvous with the Mothership.
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'.
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!
The model T used a rather clever planetary transmision. So maybe they weren't that far.
...is greek and doesn't belong to the country-with-similar-name, namely FYROM (former yugoslav republic of...).
A detailed account of the mathematics of the mechanism, along with java animations, can be found at the American Mthematical Society: The Antikythera I and The Antikythera II.
To be fair, this battery thing was long before Iraq became what it is today.
Interesting indeed, shows how little we knew about ;^)
:o
:D
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
Expect the book in stores near you any day now
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.
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.
The Economist article mentions that research on the Antikythera mechanism was carried out with Allan Bromley from the University of Sydney. This recent eulogy in the Sydney Morning Herald presents the life and achievements of this remarkable identity.
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.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
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".
This was a weird idea (re)invented by the Catholic Church. Eratosthenes [sp?] not only demonstrated the Earth was round, he actually calculated its diameter (accurate to about 5%)... around 300 BCE. The reason everyone thought Columbus was a lunatic wasn't because of the supposed "sea monsters" -- it was because they couldn't possibly carry enough supplies for them to reach modern Indonesia by boat! (If the Caribbean plate weren't there, causing the long island chain, they would've all perished before even reaching the Yucatan peninsula.)
Religion is the opiate of the masses. The wealthy smoke the real stuff.
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.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. The wealthy smoke the real stuff.
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.
I used the device and I still have kytheras all over the damn place.
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
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald
A university publication
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
I had no idea George Clinton was from Atlanta!
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
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?")
See that and a whole bunch of other eye-poppin' stuff in this gallery. However, strange doesn't need to be small, in fact it can stand out a fair bit (bear in mind (which the page's author doesn't seem to have done) that things move over time).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It is missing one very important feature:
The snooze button!
Table-ized A.I.
They're really good at getting important things wrong, but this time - at least in general - they may turn out to have been right, or at least righter than their opponents.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Wave yer lookin' gear at this. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Visit http://plug.linux.org.au/~leonb/2000_seminar2a.htm l for some Wordless viewing pleasure. :-( Thank you, SlashDot, for that gratuitous space in the text. )-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
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.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
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.
And was that somebody not hung up by the belief that the world was flat? Or maybe at least some ancients had a few clues?!
Simple observation, especially on and near the ocean will establish the shape of the Earth.
On a somewhat related topic, the ancients seemed to know about the precession of the equinoxes. This implies measurements taken over a period of more than 10000 years and a sufficient theory to interpret those observations.
Our civililisation didn't require 10,000+ years of accurate measurements to work this out. So why should anyone else?
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.
and it is considered good design factor, but it is also of questionable legality, 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 :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero
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. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Wow. Kinda like the Christians. Only nicer.
Program the computers through trial and error. They may have some sort of compiler, but it would be brutish and ugly for what it does. (Compilers really need a lot of theory to make them smooth and efficient.) Imagine a linux that took twenty years longer to develop, running on significantly less elegant system, using significantly less elegant algorithms, because nobody involved has a clue about any sort of theory. Debugged over 30 years by raw trial and error, until it's solid, but atrociously bad engineering.
;-)
Yes, the transistor was a bit accidental, but without the associated theory, it could have stayed merely an uninteresting footnote.
I haven't sketched it all out, of course, it's just the kernel of an idea. Add a bit of religious-type dogmatism, and a heaping helping of a culture that prides itself only on results, and not on understanding (you've seen those people on this planet, you know; every time there's a Software Engineering post on Slashdot, twenty people thinking they are clever come out and post "Why do we need Software Engineering? It's just a crutch for those who can't code. Just write code already!". Imagine if that response was genetically determined somehow... that would REALLY slow science up.), and it would at least be worth writing about.
My problem is I can come up with a setting, no problem. I just can't set a story in it to save my life. I'm an OK writer, but not of science fiction.
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.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Agreed.
My flame was aimed at the parent poster who implied that behaviour of the Assyrians is tied to the behaviour of current Iraq. I believe that it can be shown the all groups of people have a history of behaviour unacceptable by modern western standards. If one was in a controvertial mood, one could say that modern western society behaves in ways which are unacceptable by modern western standards.
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.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
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...)
/.'s inane posting system to make them all clickable. Whaddya want for free?)
http://www.grand-illusions.com/antikyth.htm: //www.csd.uch.gr/~venturas/index2.htm. giant.net.au/users/rupert/kythera/kythe ra2.htmh era/kythe ra5.htmt p://www.ballarat.edu.au/student/cc6rmr/kythera/ kythera.htmr chimedes/Sphe re/SphereSources.html~ crorres/Archimedes/Sphe re/SphereIntro.htmli ce/usna_pap.htmlu blic.htmc e/Students /Jesse/CLOCK1A.htmld u/GreekScience/Studen ts/Jesse/differ.gifd u/GreekScience/Studen ts/Jesse/antik.gif1 031.htm
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
http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/diff1.html
http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/kyth1.html
http
http://www
http://www.giant.net.au/users/rupert/kyt
http://www.math.utsa.edu/ecz/ak.html
ht
http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/A
http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rr
http://uranus.ee.auth.gr/TMTh/p
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScien
http://hydra.perseus.tufts.e
http://hydra.perseus.tufts.e
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi
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.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last