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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.
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!
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.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
...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.
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.
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".
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.
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?")
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."
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.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.