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Cool video of the Antikythera Mechanism rebuilt in Lego, and how it works.

The ancient Greeks' vision of a geometrical Universe seemed to come out of nowhere. Could their ideas have come from the internal gearing of an ancient mechanism? Two thousand years ago, a Greek mechanic set out to build a machine that would model the workings of the known Universe. The result was a complex clockwork mechanism that displayed the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets on precisely marked dials. By turning a handle, the creator could watch his tiny celestial bodies trace their undulating paths through the sky.The mechanic's name is now lost. But his machine, dubbed the Antikythera...

MARCELLUS and his men blockaded Syracuse, in Sicily, for two years. The Roman general expected to conquer the Greek city state easily, but the ingenious siege towers and catapults designed by Archimedes helped to keep his troops at bay. Then, in 212 BC, the Syracusans neglected their defences during a festival to the goddess Artemis, and the Romans finally breached the city walls. Marcellus wanted Archimedes alive, but it wasn't to be. According to ancient historians, Archimedes was killed in the chaos; by one account a soldier ran him through with a sword as he was in the middle of...

Look at an ancient coin under ordinary light and the chances are that its features, worn down by its passage from hand to hand, will be hard to make out. Point a spotlight at it, though, so that the face of the coin is illuminated from an acute angle, and the resulting shadows will emphasise any minor details. This is the basic principle behind a novel technique that is helping archaeologists reveal previously invisible clues hidden in the worn or damaged surfaces of any objects they uncover. From wall paintings in Herculaneum to Scandinavian stone tools to rock art...

Ooparts ? What are Ooparts? That stands for Out of Place Artifacts. Things that show up where they shouldn't, a piece of gold chain found in a coal seam, what appears to be a sparkplug embedded in rock that is thousands of years old and what appears to be a bullet hole in the skull of a mastodon. These things are ooparts. A Gold Thread Workmen quarrying stone near the River Tweed below Rutherford, Scotland in 1844, found a piece of gold thread embedded in the rock of the quarry eight feet below ground level. A small piece of the...

Medieval calculator up for grabsUK museum seeks cash to keep a rare astrolabe in public hands. Philip Ball The British Museum needs £350,000 to secure this astrolabe. The fate of a fourteenth-century pocket calculator is hanging in the balance between museum ownership and private sale. The device is a brass astrolabe quadrant that opens a new window on the mathematical and astronomical literacy of the Middle Ages, experts say. It can tell the time from the position of the Sun, calculate the heights of tall objects, and work out the date of Easter. Found in 2005, the instrument has captivated...

Science journalist and author Jo Marchant will discuss the century-long quest to understand the purpose of a mysterious Greek artifact buried beneath the sea for 2,000 years.

A little more than a century ago, in the year 1900, some Aegean sponge divers stopped on the barren Greek islet of Antikythera, between Crete and Greece, to seek shelter from a fierce storm. After things had calmed, they continued diving in the relatively shallow waters nearby and happened upon an ancient Roman shipwreck that contained confiscated Greek treasures of bronze and marble statues, jewelry, glassware and even a bronze throne. Also among the artifacts was what appeared to be a corroded lump of rock that, for some unknown reason, was dumped into a crate during the 10-month salvage recovery...

The secrets of the worlds oldest calculating machine are revealed today, showing that it had dials to mark the timing of eclipses and the Olympic games. Ever since the spectacular bronze device was salvaged from a shipwreck after its discovery in 1900 many have speculated about the uses of the mechanical calculator which was constructed long before the birth of Christ and was one of the wonders of the ancient world. The dictionary sized crumbly lump containing corroded fragments of what is now known to be a marvellous hand cranked machine is known as the 'Antikythera Mechanism' because it was...

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C. Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument's back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar. In the...

The Antikythera Mechanism Credit & Copyright: Wikipedia Explanation: What is it? It was found at the bottom of the sea aboard an ancient Greek ship. Its seeming complexity has prompted decades of study, although many of its functions remained unknown. Recent X-rays of the device have now confirmed the nature of the Antikythera mechanism, and discovered several surprising functions. The Antikythera mechanism has been discovered to be a mechanical computer of an accuracy thought impossible in 80 BC, when the ship that carried it sunk. Such sophisticated technology was not thought to be developed by humanity for another 1,000...

The ancient Antikythera Mechanism doesn't just challenge our assumptions about technology transfer over the ages — it gives us fresh insights into history itself.

A 2,100-year-old clockwork machine whose remains were retrieved from a shipwreck more than a century ago has turned out to be the celestial super-computer of the ancient world. Using 21st-century technology to peer beneath the surface of the encrusted gearwheels, stunned scientists say the so-called Antikythera Mechanism could predict the ballet of the Sun and Moon over decades and calculate a lunar anomaly that would bedevil Isaac Newton himself. Built in Greece around 150-100 BC and possibly linked to the astronomer and mathematician Hipparchos, its complexity was probably unrivalled for at least a thousand years, they say. "It's beautifully designed....

Scientists have finally demystified the incredible workings of a 2,000-year-old astronomical calculator built by ancient Greeks. A new analysis of the Antikythera Mechanism [image], a clock-like machine consisting of more than 30 precise, hand-cut bronze gears, show it to be more advanced than previously thought—so much so that nothing comparable was built for another thousand years. "This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind," said study leader Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University in the UK. "The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right…In terms of historical and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as...

A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone. But a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C. 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...

LONDON (Reuters) - An ancient astronomical calculator made at the end of the 2nd century BC was amazingly accurate and more complex than any instrument for the next 1,000 years, scientists said on Wednesday. The Antikythera Mechanism is the earliest known device to contain an intricate set of gear wheels. It was retrieved from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901 but until now what it was used for has been a mystery. Although the remains are fragmented in 82 brass pieces, scientists from Britain, Greece and the United States have reconstructed a model of it using...

Ray Kurzweil will be the first guest on theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku's new ("Science Fantastic") radio show, which debuts on about 90 commercial radio stations nationwide Saturday April 15 at 5:00 - 8:00 p.m., Eastern, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m. Pacific. The show is syndicated on Talk Radio Network. Kaku, the co-founder of string field theory, holds the Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics at the City Univ. of New York and is the author of two international best-sellers, Hyperspace and Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, and Parallel Worlds. The interview covers the Singularity, merger with intelligent...

I'd been here a couple of months, and had begun to worry about handling all the threads. Sooooo, today I grabbed all of the pages by source, grabbed the tables of links to posts to and from me, and sorted them (the easy way, well, as easy as it gets) alpha instead of chrono. Please, don't tell me that there's a way to do that automatically, or my brain will hurt.

Over the years, I have tried to collect info about odds and ends that don't fit into the standard ideas and theories about how things came to be. Doing some googling this morning, I bumped into this set of data and thought I'd post it for other Freepers amusement and comments. My own personal research related to possible pole shifts ("The HAB Theory", Alan Eckert, 1976, based on the work of Hugh Auchincloss Brown), has uncovered alot of facts that even if they do not end up supporting a pole shift dynamic, show that things are very much different from...