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Recreating a Mysterious, 2,100-Year-Old Clock
fergus07 writes "Swiss watchmaker Hublot has created a scaled-down working replica of the ancient Antikythera mechanism. The question is — why on Earth would you want to strap one of these to your wrist? It barely tells the time, and it can't take pictures, tweet or connect to your Facebook. In fact, very few people would have the faintest idea what it is, or why you'd want one at all. But for those that do recognize its intricate gears and dials, this tiny, complex piece of machinery tells a vivid and incredible tale of gigantic scientific upheaval, of adventure and shipwreck on the high seas, of war and death."
That's pretty awesome. I kinda want one...
> why on Earth would you want to strap one of these to your wrist Because here on earth, we know vanity and use status symbols to impress?
it can't take pictures, tweet or connect to your Facebook.
Because THAT'S what's important in a watch.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The ad I see at the top of the page is for Fossil watches. ;-)
Because you can. Obviously.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Yep this is far from the first replica, but it's the first one I've seen made so tiny.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Antikythera in Lego
...because it is totally fucking awesome!
It's amazing in one respect, and sad in another. The Late Classical Greeks came so close to their own scientific revolution. If it hadn't been for the near culturally fatal effects of the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks may very well have invented science themselves. Can you imagine where we would be now if scientific methodology had fully blossomed 2,300 years ago?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's funny because its true.
I read the internet for the articles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk
Pretty cool project. :)
.: Max Romantschuk
Who cares if it can't take photos or connect to facebook.
It sill has enough wait to make a pig disgruntled if you throw it at one.
That's how the ancients used to play angry birds.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The article mentions this, and has a link to it. Replicating the device is not the achievement, doing so it such a small package is. They also threw in a few extra gears so it can tell time in addition to everything else.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
is a kit to build a working replica of the mechanism.
If it can be done in LEGO, surely we can create the RepRap CAD files to make one?
It barely tells the time, and it can't take pictures, tweet or connect to your Facebook
So? It's a watch, not a camera or a PC. Many people use watches, you know? It's much more practical than a cell phone, and if it's self-winding you don't have to worry about the battery.
It is truly a shame Ancient Greece was destroyed, we'd probably have spaceships piloted by nude dudes if they were still around.
Per TFA:
The watch is a concept piece only, and will be presented at the Baselworld watch show in 2012.
Maybe if enough people begged, they might make a production run.
I wouldn't mind having one, but I'm not holding my breath.
"Lame" - Galaxar
and had you read the article you'd know they even mention the lego one in it
*Apple rushes to patent the antikythera mechanism*
"why on Earth would you want to strap one of these to your wrist?" Because it's twenty percent cooler than a Rolex.
The ad I see at the top of the page is for Fossil watches. ;-)
Mother******* Adsense spots, how do they work?
(in other words, in order to read an article about a fancy watch and NOT seen an ad for a watch or watch-related service, you would need to be living in 1998.)
to your wrist?
It's obvious! So that you're ready for when the evil Kythera Mechanism shows up!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If you have to ask "Why?" when talking about this project, I pity your lack of intelligence and creativity.
You know, it's always assumed that the Antikythera mechanism's housing looked something like this:
http://images.gizmag.com/inline/hublot-antikythera-mechanism-first-computer-watch-14.png
But who says the corners couldn't have been rounded?
The ancient Greeks will have some serious royalties to cough up after all this time...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Are you mad?!?! You like the idea of naked oiled youths zipping through the aether in astervarka, possibly meeting psychic aliens and bringing them home?
Do you really want to meet the nude dude with the Ood?
Expect Apple to be suing them for patent, look & feel, trade dress, and anything else they can think of any time now.
Prior Art? What Prior Art?
Especially with: "Turning a single input knob.."
Yea, no wonder Greece is financially dead.
A lot of nerds simply don't get horology. They'll consider hand-crafted masterpieces as "junk" that your el-cheapo thinkgeek-powered watch renders useless...
But not all nerds are like that: quite some of them also recognize true craftmanship and fine horology when they see some. I do certainly see the appeal of such a watch for people into pure mechanical watches...
...here in an "extra" magazine to a local centrist daily newspaper, I watched dreamily through the train window and caught myself thinking: "Darn. This piece's price prolly exceeds the amount of my savings by some 100% or so. Darn...." How great it would be to carry such a thing on your wrist, and to casually explain its function - never mention its workings & innards - to fellow humans, e.g. on a party !!
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
So I'm suddenly imagining an alternate "steam punk" timeline in which we had mechanisms and gears 2000 years ago. It's always amazing to see what was really known back that far.
That's absolutely cool.
As someone with a lot of watches, that Hublot wrist watch is a really cool timepiece. A skeleton watch with 2000 years of history to it.
Though, as other people have pointed out, I bet this would cost a pretty penny.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It supposedly shows Olympics time schedules. Sadly, not London Games included, too many missiles pointed at this device. More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
And people would get annoyed..
Or if Sulu was captain instead of Kirk.
Chuckle at the "made by aliens" silliness as we all do, there really is a mystery to this device.
Archimedes was more than brilliant enough to work out the math for this orrery, also to work out the design for gear tooth profiles. He had the position and influence to have access to materials and the best crafts-people of the time. But how did they actually build that thing?
In theory an astonishingly good watchmaker could hand-file all those gears. In practice, I'm not so sure. Gears are finicky things, every single tooth must have the correct angular position, pitch diamerter and involute profile. A gear can look very pretty but simply not work with another gear. (I have made several such.) If you don't believe it, just go to a hardware store, buy a riffler file kit and some brass washers, then have at it. No microscope, no computer, no plotter. Any tools you hypothesize have to be built using the same starting conditions. It will be an educational experience. One of your observations will be that you can not see well enough to get the profile to adequately match the math for two gears to mesh smoothly.
So the greatest mystery, for me, is: How did they make the measurements required for this work?
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
But for those that do recognize its intricate gears and dials, this tiny, complex piece of machinery tells a vivid and incredible tale of gigantic scientific upheaval, of adventure and shipwreck on the high seas, of war and death."
Which will be turned out as a Dreamworks film because Spielberg will have always wanted to make a movie like this - it'll be 300, but with some yucks and absolutely no suspense as Steve finds it so enjoyable to have characters blather on about things to the point there's no mystery left.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
don't ruin the plot of the next dan brown book/ the next nicholas cage national treasure movie
this sort of speculation does not belong in the halls of science. it belongs rightly in the realm of populist lowest common denominator pulp fiction with paranoid conspiracy theories studded throughout
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That was a hilarious link.
Like people are going to be all, "Oh, I can't be bothered to go down to the jewelers. I'll just buy this $200,000 watch from a website."
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Dawkins said, "I've given you the word. Now go forth and convert the masses."
Used to be, there was only one guy at the party who, whenever the topic turned historical, would exclaim, "And then religion ruined it all!." Now you zealots are everywhere.
--
I'd like to take the person responsible for the first image out and punch him in the nose, for using Greek look-alike letters as substitutes for Latin letters. Using a Lambda as a capital A or a Sigma as a capital E is the worst form of international illiteracy.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The "l" in "clock" didn't register with my eyes as the title of this post moved down my screen...wow...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
It's really annoying how so many slashdot summaries these days are plagiarized directly from TFA. (I'm assuming that fergus07 is not the same person as Loz Blain.) Cutting and pasting withour giving proper attribution to the author is plagiarism.
An even more pathetic example was this one, which was, ironically, about academic dishonesty.
And let's say for the sake of argument that fergus07 *is* the same person as Loz Blain, and "an anonymous reader" *is* the same person as Kirk Klocke; then they should reveal that, rather than slyly plugging their own story under an alias.
Find free books.
Does this mean Archimedes, a guy that REALLY liked bath tubs, lost his watch in the water?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
It was looking awesome until I saw the close up, where horribly misuse Greek letters according to their coincidental resemblance to Roman letters. They use a Lambda instead of an "A"! ARRRRRGHH! I'd hate myself for having that on my wrist.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
What "master gear maker" are you envisioning? This is the oldest known example of gears of this design, by a great many centuries. You might as well have said "give the design to a master clockmaker" as though that profession even existed during the millenium in question. Besides, "leftover" is right - it's extremely difficult to engineer a gear system of any complexity, much less at such a small scale, where there's no risk of the gears jamming. The tolerances required to make something like this are incredible.
In any case, FTFA:
Now that we've resolved your ignorance of the general technological level at the time this thing was made, do you understand how absolutely incredible it is?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
read it aloud in a James Earl Jones Meets Don LaFontaine grate, you'll see what I mean...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
My current gig is also dealing with astronomical data. I doubt some historian will find my software a few thousand years from now. That's the down side of making things out of bits. Bits don't last very long when a volcano erupts and buries them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
At last, I can tell when the Olympics are to be held!
Sadly, this fuels my belief that the human race undergoes periodic civilization collapses, where the technology and understanding of the day is almost completely wiped out. We never quiet figure out how to get to the next level of human understanding / civilization / what have you, do we? Every time it looks like technology is beginning to unravel some of the secrets of the universe (or ourselves), social order collapses and the library / book burnings begin anew.
I'm going to put on my plush gopher hat for the moment, and hypothesize that when the slightly more...curious members of the human race turn their attention to unraveling the universe, the slightly less curious members begin trying to f*ck up things. For example, the year that scientists / engineers perfect cold fusion will also be the year that the various politically / religiously inclined individuals succeed in creating a real World War. Can't seem to divert your attention for more than several moments before they start getting out of hand.
I'm starting to think the human race, like a kid who craves attention, hates being ignored.
This would explain why, in the decade since some of the greatest technological improvements mankind has seen in at least 1500 years, we have the TSA and various congress critters doing things that even Kublai Khan would frown on. Cellphones and multicore computers, the price of which is the Patriot Act and the bank bailouts.
There must be a better way of dealing with this kind of situation. I don't want my great, great, great grand-kids thinking that fire is magic, or my even greater descendants to think that their the first ones to create a printing press. Improvements, not ditch-digging (and the subsequent filling in thereof, ad infinitum).
I am John Hurt.