[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.

[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