12/7/2023 0 Comments Oid civilization v backgroundWill you support Vox’s explanatory journalism? “It is a bit frightening, to know that just before the fall of their great civilization the ancient Greeks had come so close to our age, not only in their thought, but also in their scientific technology.”Ĭheck out a modern reconstruction of the mechanism in the video below. Nothing comparable to it is known from any ancient scientific text or literary allusion,” Price wrote in 1959. "Nothing like this instrument is preserved elsewhere. Whatever it was used for and however it was built, we know this: Its discovery changed our understanding of human history, and reminds us that flashes of genius are possible in every human age. How the ancient Greeks accomplished this feat is unknown to this day. Did scientists build it to aid their calculations? Or was it a type of a teaching tool, to show students the math that held the cosmos together? Was it unique? Or are there more similar devices yet to be discovered? Researchers are still not sure who, exactly, used it. A 2006 Nature paper plotted out a schematic of the mechanics that connect all the gears. And this is pretty neat: another dial of the mechanism that counted down the days to regularly scheduled sporting events around the Greek isles, like the OlympicsĪgain, the mechanics of this are absurdly complicated.A tiny pearl-size ball that rotated to show you the phase of the moon.A lunar calendar, counting a 19-year lunar cycle.A solar calendar, charting the 365 days of the year.The ancient Greeks were a little superstitious.) (Researchers guess that different colored eclipses were considered omens of the future. Another dial forecasting solar and lunar eclipses - and, oddly, predictions about their color.The position of the sun and moon, relative to the 12 constellations of the zodiac. Little stone or glass orbs that would have moved across the machine’s face to show the motion of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in the night sky.The mechanism had several dials and clock faces, each which served a different function for measuring movements of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, but they were all operated by one main crank: The text - written in tiny typeface but legible ancient Greek - helped them complete the puzzle of what the machine did and how it was operated. In the 2000s, researchers revealed text - a kind of instruction manual - inscribed on parts of the mechanism that had never been seen before. Since Price’s assessment, modern X-ray and 3D mapping technology have allowed scientists to peer deeper into the remains of the mechanism and learn even more of its secrets. (For some reference, mechanical calculators - which used gear ratios to add and subtract - didn’t arrive in Europe until the 1600s.) Scientists have learned even more about how the Antikythera mechanism works A modern reconstruction of the mechanism. All the user had to do was enter the main date on one gear, and through a series of subsequent gear turns, the mechanism could calculate things like the angle of the sun crossing the sky. This ancient clock had its code written into the mathematical ratios of its gears. Today the programming of computers is written in digital code - series of ones and zeros. It was a computer in the sense that you, as a user, could input a few simple variables and it would yield a flurry of complicated mathematical calculations. or like a modern analogue computer which uses mechanical parts to save tedious calculation.” So you could set the main gear to the calendar date and get approximations for where those celestial objects would be in the sky on that date.Īnd Price declared in the pages of Scientific American that it was a computer: “The mechanism is like a great astronomical clock. A main gear would move to represent the calendar year, and would, in turn, move many separate smaller gears to represent the motions of the planets, sun, and moon. After a careful study of the gears, he deduced that the mechanism was used to predict the position of the planets and stars in the sky depending on the calendar month. de Solla Price provided the most thorough scientific analysis of the contraption to date. In 1959, Princeton science historian Derek J. For decades, they debated: Was the Antikythera a toy model of the planets? Or perhaps it was an early astrolabe (a device to calculate latitude)? To archeologists, it was immediately apparent that the mechanism was some sort of clock, calendar, or calculating device. This was a level of technology that archeologists would usually date to the 16th century, not well before the first.īut a mystery remained: What was this contraption used for? The world’s first mechanical computer? Wikimedia Commonsīut if you look into the machine, you see evidence of at least two dozen gears, laid neatly on top of one another, calibrated with the precision of a master-crafted Swiss watch. The front side of the Antikythera mechanism.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |