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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
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.
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.