[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Myran_*]

The Antikythera Mechanism have been one enigma since it was discovered 100 years ago.
It have no counterpart and sports a mechanical clockwork so cunningly fashioned that archaeologists
have speculated for a century, especially since no other examples of a similar kind have been found.

With mechanical gears it could compute and display the movement of the Sun, the Moon, Venus and possibly also the other known planets, it could also predict the dates of future eclipses. Also the planets?

The Roman Cicero once wrote that the greek astronomer and philosopher Posidonius had made an instrument "which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night".

So its possible but not proven that the Antikythera mechanism originated at the ancient school for astronomy on Rhodos.

"In search of lost time" Antikythera Mechanism article, free access at Nature mag online.

[odave]

I heard about this listening to NPR on my way home yesterday - a really fascinating story. They were discussing what the purpose of the machine might be, and one theory was that it may have been used for entertainment at a party. That made me feel a sense of kinship reaching across the millenia; that 2,000+ years ago there was a fellow space-nerd fussing with and showing off his gear just like I do

[ngunn]

Thanks for posting that, Myran. This has fascinated me for some time. There was an article in (I think) 'Astronomy and Geophysics' a few years back. I agree it's stupendous, like finding a steam engine at the court of King Arthur or a Ming Dynasty mobile phone.

[karolp]

It was also mentioned in the book Cosmos by Carl Sagan which I am reading now. A few months earlier there was a short article in a free newspaper regarding this thing. It was described as an "ancient computer" robbed by the Romans and found in the wreckage of a sunken ship. Sagan also mentioned Heron of Alexandria who experimented with steam machines. Imagine having an ancient Greek steam runner on its way to America...

[Guest_Myran_*]

I am happy you liked it ngunn.
As for steam engines, you are right about the comparison, its one early start of technology but it never reached any widespread use, even less mass production. There simply wasnt any market in a slave society.

Well - at least this have been the usual explanation in many textbooks for decades.

The Romans didnt want to buy mass produced gadgets from the Greeks in any case, only exclusive ones!
So I think odave are close to the mark, personally I dont think items like this was for "entertainment at a party" but for status. 'Look at my new cool gadget, and I am the only one who have it!'

And the rich ones bought the philosoper himself! One early example of 'brain drain' that might be one additional explanation why the Greek technology became stillborn.

As for ancient steam engines. No need to go back to King Arthur or the Ming Dynasty to look for steam engines however, they were found earlier than that! yes, the ancient Greek again!

There were a number of 'technology demonstrators' which were no more than a boliling kettele with one offset pipe to let the steam trough. More advance models of their steam engine technology opened the doors of a temple.

Religion was one economic power back then, just like the catholic church of today, perhaps only those could afford this 'super technology'.
I personally think that most people of that day most likely felt uneasy by this tampering with the pure forces of Earth, Water, Fire and Wind and the 'unnatural' transfer of phlogiston in mechanical devices.
But they seems to accepted it for a 'holy' purpose of opening templedoors - or that the gods would at least forgive the sin when the steam engines were used in such a manner.
(Come to think of it this sounds quite similar to what many feels about nuclear power today)

Talking about ancient technology, we also have the electrical batteries from Ur, but I stray from the topics of this forum even for the subdivision of EVA MMU so I stop right here.

[tuvas]

It's really amazing that this kind of technology existed, it's something I can barely fathom, yet people so many years ago had such incredible technology...

[ngunn]

The A&G reference on Antikythera Mechanism:
Astronomy and Geophysics December 2000 Vol 41 issue 6. Blackwell Science.
It was the cover story on that issue.

[angel1801]

We wonder about something. If the ancient world had such technology and scientific brains at their disposal, then why did not we see it in common use only in recent times?

But Carl Sagan answered that question in Chapter 13 of "Cosmos". Here is that bit:

Here clearly were the seeds of the modern world. What prevented them from taking root
and flourishing? Why instead did the West slumber through a thousand years of darkness until
Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done in Alexandria? I
cannot give you a simple answer. But I do know this: there is no record, in the entire history of
the Library, that any of its illustrious scientists and scholars ever seriously challenged the
political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was
questioned; the justice of slavery was not. Science and learning in general were the preserve of a
privileged few. The vast population of the city had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries
taking place within the Library. New findings were not explained or popularized. The research
benefited them little. Discoveries in mechanics and steam technology were applied mainly to the
perfection of weapons, the encouragement of superstition, the amusement of kings. The scientists
never grasped the potential of machines to free people. The great intellectual achievements of
antiquity had few immediate practical applications. Science never captured the imagination of the
multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject surrenders
to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there was nobody to
stop them.

[karolp]

Here is a website with animations of the mechanism:

http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/index....=10&catid=6

I personally think that stillborn or not, the seeds of "modern" technology were there all the time, only one step away from becoming reality. And it changes our perspective a lot. We tend to view the ancients as "primitive" and associate modern technology with the 1800s and 1900s. As it turns out, the birth of "modern world" with cars, steamrunners, airplanes etc. was possible in any times with any society. We might as well have had Greeks driving steam-driven cars or medieval knights riding tanks instead of horses. Humanity was always one step away from becoming what it is now.

[dvandorn]

Sagan has it mostly right -- with science relegated to "wizards" (be they religious or secular) who used it to maintain a sense of awe and fear in the populace, it just wasn't possible to apply the kind of collective brain-power that's needed to find applications for newly-discovered powers and principles.

However, there is one aspect that Sagan doesn't breach -- worldview. The ancient Chinese had made more scientific discoveries than the Greeks, Romans or Europeans did, and they did it thousands of years earlier. However, the Chinese view of existence denied that the real world could be modeled in any accurate way, since the real world was imbued by the Gods with a life-force that the modeler could not re-create. Therefore, even though the Chinese had electricity and gunpowder and steam power, their own view of how existence worked didn't allow them to really apply these technologies, because any modeling of larger systems via smaller systems was automatically disregarded. And without that crucial step in the logic process, development of technology just didn't occur.

There are those who believe that scientific rationalism was a result of the industrial revolution. I more believe that it was a cause...

-the other Doug

[nprev]

Interesting comments, dvandorn. Sometimes I wonder just what incredible applications of existing technology/materials/etc. are literally just sitting under our noses, waiting to be realized...but we're blind to them due to attribution biases.

[dvandorn]

I wonder the same thing -- though I rather think that there are fewer than you might guess. One of the benefits of the ways in which technology was used and built upon during the 19th and 20th centuries was the relatively open environment in which new discoveries were made. We've spread pretty much every new discovery in every field across every single existing human society. Almost everything has been looked at from every cultural point of view currently extant.

Anything that we're missing by now is probably due to general human limitation, not just cultural limitation...

-the other Doug

[lyford]

Very good points, but I would add that the tremendous success of science can also get in the way, since we are at a point in our knowledge where whole careers are spent investigating ever smaller domains of speciality, and cross fertilization of ideas becomes more and more challenging. How many epidemiologists are there at a physics conference? The great descriptive power of analysis must be married with creative synthesis if we are to move forward - and even though we value that freedom of expression, the lifetime of study required to advance research by its nature builds walls between the disciplines!

From what I know of MER, it's hard enough to get engineers and scientists on the SAME MISSION on the same page consistently - though to that team's credit I think they have created the standard to which other missions will aspire.

For more philosophy and history of science, try The Ascent of Man. I recommend Episode 11 highly, but if you have a spare 12 hours and high speed internet, its worth seeing it all, and in order. The series explores the history of science more thematically than chronologically, and is starting to show it's age now 30 plus years later, but still speaks powerfully and beautifully across the decades.

PS - Personally, I have always enjoyed musing alternate technology history, the application of current trends to retro tech style, like SteamPunk or The ElectriClerk. And who hasn't imagined a squadron of DaVinci tanks on the medieval battle field?