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Linguistic Clue Pushes Back Origin of "World's Oldest Computer"
Calopteryx points out a piece at New Scientist which suggests that the Antikythera mechanism may be even older than previously thought; an ancient Greek word on of the device's dials suggests the device may date to the early second century BC. The article is accompanied by a great animation of its (deduced) workings, too.
My gut says someone is already thinking of adding this device as part of a movie plot. sigh...
Wouldn't threatening leading scientists with heresy or witchcraft charges, crusades against a technologically advanced (and supportive of science!) civilization, and a general discouragement of literacy outside the clergy count as "holding back scientific research"? I think it does.
Read Bachelard Formation of the scientific mind and weep. If only it were so easy and blame everything on the catholic church. For a very long period of time, it looks as if entertainment value was put way above scientific rigor... that and scientific thinking is quite a recent thing. From the book, experiment held around 1700 (from vague recollection): Electricity from a battery cell passes through a liquid and the experimenter's tongue. Experimenter then "tastes" the electricity. Taste through milk? "Soft and sweet" as opposed to electricity flowing through vinegar "strong acid taste". Anyway, interesting read.
bundaegi is good for you
If anything, the catholic church promoted the brightest minds and protected them. You know, when the roman empire fell, most europeans favourite hobby was still smashing their neighbours heads with axes. It wasn't even just the northern europeans, since the german tribes spread to all parts of the old western rome.
Luckily, the catholic church eventually converted these peoples and with that came a culture where even a quiet man who spent most of his life in a room doing experiments could be regarded a great man. That would not have happened without the catholic church.
For a very long period of time, it looks as if entertainment value was put way above scientific rigor
And we have recently returned to that dark age.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I had always read that the Arabs were the repository of ancient knowledge, keeping good quality copies in libraries, not some cloister in some hick medieval village. (In fact, religion is often quoted as being the cause of the destruction of the library at Alexandria ...) Thus our numeric scheme (0..9, 10 ...). As much as many seem to deny (in the threads above) Religion has been accused of holding back scientific progress. If some halfwit religous nut calculates that the world is only 6231.1215926 years old, that is the age of the world! Thus evolution is a load of crap, since the world is demonstrably less than 7000 years old.
Better get of my soapbox now, before some deluded religious maniac threatens me with bodily harm.
Jeez, AC.
Yes, maybe the GGP exageratted some things, but it still doesn't change the fact that the Catholic Church sucks.
+5 interesting for a blatant troll?
If anything held back technology, it was the slavery of the ancient world (by this, I mean slaves controlled by punishment rather than reward).
Sure, slavery eliminated the economic need for mechanical technology in many regions, but it did not hold back technology in any way. Where slaves were not practical there was plenty of mechanical technology that rivaled that of the modern industrial revolutions.
The history channel had a good show on it a while back called Roman Tech.
If you take out the social issues, slavery has usually provided enough wealth to create the good tech. Then when the tech is at a high enough level it replaces the slaves unless it is still cheaper to have slaves. both the roman and modern examples follow this example. The Romans just never totally gave up slavery.
Luckily, the catholic church eventually converted these peoples
You make it sound wonderful. Yes, just like the Catholic church "converted" the natives living in the Americas. Oh, where are they today, anyway? That's right, most of them chose to die rather than be "converted". Now why would that be?
No, it's not burning people at the stake that brought about the renaissance. Progress and science continued East of Constantinople which less than 300 years after the fall of Rome, converted to Islam. During the golden age of the Islamic Caliphate, great progress was achieved in mathematics and natural science while Europe was embroiled in petty squabbles and eternally warring fiefdoms and baronies. The catholic church actively persecuted scientists as heretics, whereas the Islamic world embraced them (with certain limitations in the field of medicine, like not allowing dissections of the human body).
Then the Mongols invaded and destroyed the Islamic caliphate, and again a lot of progress and knowledge was lost in the world. Fortunately for Western Europe the big fish had eaten most of the little fish, and the squabbling local bosses had been forced to accept the rule of kings by then. This allowed for the organization of navies, the re-establishment of international trade and the establishment of universities - like Salamanca in Spain and Oxford and Cambridge in England. Finally Western Europe could afford to maintain scholars again. However what mostly happened is that they copied the knowledge that was coming from the East. It would be another 200 years before the Renaissance happened, and invention took off in the West.
No, please don't give me that line about how the church promoted scholarship. The ONLY thing the church did was force monks to copy old texts, and that's how SOME of the ancient knowledge was preserved. However monks weren't allowed to pass that knowledge on to the general public, and didn't communicate much among themselves lest they be called heretics.
It's no coincidence that the only "religious" scientist, Mendel, only had his work on genetics "discovered" 200 years AFTER HE WAS DEAD.
I suggest you read a few history books, and you'll see what a nasty political tool the Catholic church (or any church, for that matter) is. But remember, God needs your money.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You make it sound wonderful. Yes, just like the Catholic church "converted" the natives living in the Americas. Oh, where are they today, anyway? That's right, most of them chose to die rather than be "converted". Now why would that be?
Take a look south of the US border sometime. Most of the Central and South American population is of native descent. Of the ones that died, most didn't "chose" to, but died of imported diseases no one really had control over. The only large area of the Americas where natives were completely eradicated was North America, which happens to be the only area colonized largely by non-Catholic nations...
Oh boo hoo, science hasn't slowed down any, and it isn't as if current researchers are working on easier problems.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
If Plato had had to get up off his ass and do some productive work once in a while, he might have had some more sensible ideas. Instead his anti-democratic notion of "philosopher-kings", and his metaphysical elevation of ideas over observations, have been toxic streams in Western thought for millennia.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Maybe this is why these devices have vanished so completely from known history.
What is more likely is that devices like this were never widely known because there was very little that resembled a scientific community, so there was no way to make such knowledge public. By "no way" I mean there was neither the technical means of dissemination nor the social means of rewarding the creators of such knowledge.
Science is a public, communal activity. Until the founding of the Royal Society in the 1600's there was no way for the nascent scientific community to actualize itself in archival journals and shared results. Such "science" as there was was carried on by practitioners who swore oaths of secrecy (much of the actual text of the vaunted Hipocratic Oath is actually about not teaching anyone but the sons of physicians any trade secrets, and not stepping on the toes of any of the other medical services unions.)
It is therefore likely that similar techniques and ideas were rediscovered and lost many times during the past few thousand years, in a wide variety of fields. And extreme example of this is knowledge of the diameter of the Earth, which the Greeks knew pretty well, but which was sufficiently debatable 1500 years later that a nutjob like Columbus could convince people that it was about half the actual figure.
The lack of comprehensive, authoritative publications embedded in a living community of empirical investigators meant that knowledge tended to wither and die with time, resulting in relatively slow accumulation over the long term.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The most important question I have about the Antikythera mechanism is: does it compute utilizing a heliocentric solar system model? If it does, then constructing a device to model the existing solar system would have given you the heliocentric answer as the most simplified solution to the heavens very much pre-Copernicus.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."