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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."
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.