... a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. <...> The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world's first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers was able to decipher many inscriptions and reconstruct the gear functions, revealing, they said, "an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period." <...> They established the date of the mechanism at 150-100 B.C. <...> The mechanism, presumably used in preparing calendars for seasons of planting and harvesting and fixing religious festivals, had at least 30, possibly 37, hand-cut bronze gear-wheels, the researchers reported. An ingenious pin-and-slot device connecting two gear-wheels induced variations in the representation of lunar motions according to the Hipparchos model of the Moon's elliptical orbit around Earth. <...> It seems clear, Dr. Charette said, that "much of the mind-boggling technological sophistication available in some parts of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world was simply not transmitted further," adding, "The gear-wheel, in this case, had to be reinvented."
The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world's first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers was able to decipher many inscriptions and reconstruct the gear functions, revealing, they said, "an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period." <...>
They established the date of the mechanism at 150-100 B.C. <...>
The mechanism, presumably used in preparing calendars for seasons of planting and harvesting and fixing religious festivals, had at least 30, possibly 37, hand-cut bronze gear-wheels, the researchers reported. An ingenious pin-and-slot device connecting two gear-wheels induced variations in the representation of lunar motions according to the Hipparchos model of the Moon's elliptical orbit around Earth. <...>
It seems clear, Dr. Charette said, that "much of the mind-boggling technological sophistication available in some parts of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world was simply not transmitted further," adding, "The gear-wheel, in this case, had to be reinvented."
And Archimedes' math was technically more complex than anything else for at least a millennium and a half.
And I can't agree more with Sven:
Way too cool in any case. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Apart from general physics, he was also an astronomer, and Cicero writes that the Roman consul Marcellus brought two devices back to Rome from the ransacked city of Syracuse. One device mapped the sky on a sphere and the other predicted the motions of the sun and the moon and the planets (i.e., an orrery). He credits Thales and Eudoxus for constructing these devices. For some time this was assumed to be a legend of doubtful nature, but the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism has changed the view of this issue, and it is indeed probable that Archimedes possessed and constructed such devices. Pappus of Alexandria writes that Archimedes had written a practical book on the construction of such spheres entitled On Sphere-Making.
8-p
In any field Benoît Mandelbrot should be a serious contender for the Archimedes Prize. He'll never win a Nobel Prize due the intense dislike he has generated among mathematicans.
Any of the above, but most interested in the first two. (Probably quite a few candidates for the last one!)
Fascinating. I only knew of Mandelbrot by name in relation to "Chaos", in particular, the book.
Would you really put him in the same category as Archimedes, Newton and Gauss? (My layperson's understanding of the conventional wisdom is that these are three giants of mathematics in history.) Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Most people think that technology progresses from the simple to the complex, but in mechanical things, it's often the other way around. There are lots of examples of complicated astronomical functions, even pre-dating the invention of the mechanical clock. There's record of a chinese water clock with even more complicated functions. One of the earliest known mechanical clocks had separate dials for the (even retrograde) motions of various "travelers".
The most interesting part of the article is the speculation that this was an ordinary object, one of many such devices. It's entirely possible, because it was made of expensive metal, which would have been re-used when the device outlived it's usefulness. This one survived in a shipwreck.
People also have lots of wrong ideas about biological evolution, just look at Intelliget Design.
"Progress" is really a dangerous paradigm. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
