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The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
- i_feel_great 10y agoWhat would the world be like if these ancient scientists and engineers persisted and their science and craft carried on and developed further? Instead, the period that followed gave rise to belief systems that still give us problems today. How very sad.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y agoI'm keeping my hopes up that they formed a secret society and are guiding the world with a steady hand towards an enlightened future. (Then I read the news and cry in my corn flakes, of course.)
- kleer001 10y agoWell, maybe the news is just there to steer us towards a new and more glorious dawn. Due to the laws of thermodynamics I have little belief left for a beneficent (let alone malignant) secret society of any stripe. But I could be wrong. There are more things in heaven and earth and all that.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoWhy would the laws of thermodynamics apply to a secret society?
- JonnieCache 10y agoThey're saying the second law of thermodynamics (in a closed system, entropy always increases) means a complex secret can't be kept for a long period of time: the tendency of life/the world towards chaos means that the truth will inevitably leak out. It's more a poetic application of statistical mechanics than a rigorous one.
- DanBC 10y agoWrite it, it would make a great chapbook.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y agoIf I find myself out of work, I'll give it a go :)
- selestify 10y agoDo we know why such expertise was lost in the first place? The collapse of the Roman empire wasn't for another couple centuries.
- tacos 10y agoIt was a Greek device. Theory is that it was pilfered with the other artifacts found in the shipwreck, en route to Julius Caesar. Rough couple years to be a Greek scientist.
- tzs 10y agoWas it lost? Or did those who could build such a thing simply did not think it was worth doing so? The astronomy knowledge and the mechanical theory needed to make the Antikythera mechanism were well known in ancient times, and I don't think those were ever lost. The mystery of the Antikythera mechanism is how it was actually built. But do we know how long it took to build? If it was built in a short time frame, then yeah, the maker probably used techniques that were lost not too long afterward, and not rediscovered until maybe the 14th century. But what if it were built over a much longer time frame? It could have been someone's lifetime project. Then simple techniques might work. For instance, if you need a piece of metal shaped to very tight tolerances, just get it close and then use a hand file to very slowly make it what you need. If this were the case, I can easily imagine that plenty of people between the time it was made and the 14th century knew how to build one, but simply were not interested enough to make building it their life's work.
- i_feel_great 10y agoScience is never lost, only suppressed.
- sanoli 10y agoThe history of scurvy is pretty interesting: http://mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-then-cure-was-lost http://mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-th...
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- TruthAndDare 10y ago> and their science and craft carried on And their gods too?
- elorant 10y agoHere's a replica of the device made out of Legos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk
- tacos 10y agoDerek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much. "He was The Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University from 1960 until his death in 1983. He was the first to record a complete lecture series on History of Science which could serve as a foundation for studies around the world... His entire 1976 lecture series 'Neolithic to Now' is now available on-line and for free at http://derekdesollaprice.org/" http://derekdesollaprice.org/" [Ignore the site design--the material is amazing.]
- jacquesm 10y agoThe site design is just fine with me. Good content is far more important than eye candy.
- leephillips 10y agoThanks for sharing that link, it is very interesting. But I'm curious - what do you think is wrong with the site design? It's responsive, legible, tasteful, and has no extraneous graphics nor a single thing that uBlock had to block. I wish the rest of the web was this beautiful.
- tacos 10y agoYes, it's the default Wordpress "Twenty Fifteen" template. It contains very important books corrupted by cut and paste into the wonky WordPress editor / blog post renderer. Someone in a hurry might think it was an autogenerated GoDaddy cash parking page, not one of the more interesting sites on the web. Thus my note.
- leephillips 10y agoI get it. I made my comment before looking past the front page to find the corrupted books.
- TruthAndDare 10y ago> Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much. I'm afraid I don't understand, especially not the last sentence. Could you explain?
- laurencerowe 10y agoThere's a great BBC documentary on this from a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q124C7W0WYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q124C7W0WYA
- jimjimjim 10y agoThank you for that link! I saw it a while ago and didn't realize it was on youtube. slightly offtopic: Does anyone else think that unless a History based TV Documentary is made by the BBC (or at least a presenter with an english accent) it will almost devoid of credibility?
- qarioz 10y agoWhy? It's not text book and scientific material but it's definitely good enough for the general population.
- jimjimjim 10y agoah, it was just a generalisation on my part. I'm a bit jaded after trying to watch US history documentaries (especially the history channel, or should i say the hitler channel) only to see that the producers felt some need to insert drama into it. Actors? with dialog? representing long-dead people for who there are no records of what might have been said? these are bad signs.
- brianpgordon 10y agoIs it just me, or does the "photo" of a diver wearing an Exosuit not really look like a real photo? https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_960w/2010-2019/Wires/Images/2014-10-09/Bloomberg/04438819.jpg&w=1484 https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
- danbruc 10y agoBut it probably really is a photo. Here [1] and here [2] are some more and that thing looks pretty unreal in most of them. [1] http://wetpixel.com/full_frame/brett-seymour-return-to-antikythera http://wetpixel.com/full_frame/brett-seymour-return-to-antik... [2] http://antikythera.whoi.edu/2014/10/07/exosuit-dives-antikythera/ http://antikythera.whoi.edu/2014/10/07/exosuit-dives-antikyt...
- nitrogen 10y agoIt looks like the color saturation was maxed out and some of the blues and reds started clipping in the saturation range.
- pimlottc 10y agoYou lose a lot of the longer wavelength colors underwater, they probably adjusted the levels to compensate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_photography#Lighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_photography#Lightin...
- nitrogen 10y agoProbably. It also looks like some median filtering or a selective blur was applied to remove dirt/debris/bubbles, which tends to give things a painted look.
- EdwardMSmith 10y agoI'd agree that it probably is a real photo, but you're right. It even looks like a digital painting - not just a 3D render. I wonder if the designers picked colors and surfaces that maximize visibility and sharpness underwater for safety reasons.
- conchy 10y agoCan anyone with free access post the PDFs from the Almagest journal articles? http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1 http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1
- HCIdivision17 10y agoDrats - I didn't mean to downvote! I actually really appreciate the obligatory utility comments referencing where to get the docs.
- 467568985476 10y agoI'd love to read some excerpts of the translations. I'm tempted to buy some of the papers but it's hard to justify sight unseen - I don't know how much detail they contain.
- JonnieCache 10y agoSeconded. I tried to use sci-hub but I couldn't get it to work.
- svag 10y agoHere is a zip file with the relevant issue http://www.megafileupload.com/bbgb/Almagest-Volume7-Issue1-The_Inscriptions_on_the_Antikythera_Device.zip http://www.megafileupload.com/bbgb/Almagest-Volume7-Issue1-T...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dclowd9901 10y agoIt's strange to me that all of the knowledge it took to make a device with this kind of precision was lost for 1400 some odd years. What the hell happened?
- BuckRogers 10y agoChristianity
- fit2rule 10y agoTime happened, and all civilization is perilously fragile. Don't be so surprised. For a while there we couldn't rebuild the Apollo rocket engines either.
- viewer5 10y ago> For a while there we couldn't rebuild the Apollo rocket engines either. What do you mean?
- fit2rule 10y agoQuite literally, NASA couldn't rebuild the Apollo engines after the program was shut down: we lost the plans and the technology to do that. It had to all be reverse-engineered. The point is: technology doesn't last any longer than the people who produced it.
- MichaelMoser123 10y agothe article says that researches found a description of this analog computer of antiquity. This makes it the first manual page in history (however the description does not quite tell you how to use this mechanism - even more similarities to man pages) other links: The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project : The http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ tweets by the diver team: https://twitter.com/antikytheradive?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/antikytheradive?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw a BBC documentary on the subject : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXjUqLMgxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXjUqLMgxM
- WalterBright 10y agoNobody designs such a thing as a first project. There must have been many predecessors, showing a progression in complexity.
- jhanschoo 10y agoThere may have been, but itchy hands combined with accessibility means that any more accessible replicas are likely to have been smelted down for other things.
- WalterBright 10y agoThe sad thing about this machine is its uselessness. It only had value as an amusement, or to religious people. Many inventions have been lost and reinvented because the earlier incarnations were not in a useful form. Perhaps if it was contrived instead to be a mundane adding machine, it might have found use among merchants, tax collectors, and bankers, and hence been duplicated in large numbers, and would not have been lost technology.
- rando444 10y agoI'm just going to go ahead and disagree. Having an accurate calendar provides much more than just 'amusement', and is in fact an important part of an organized society.
- WalterBright 10y agoFor our society, yes, for theirs, I have a hard time agreeing. For example, if you don't know what the current date is, the device will be useless to you. And if you know what the current date is, knowing how many days to the next eclipse is useful for - what? If the device were generally useful, many more of them would be made, as well as similar devices, and we'd have found more.