Seriously - the 'ancients' built his machine thousands of years ago. What else did they know? And why don't we know, now?
“And why don’t we know, now? “
Because those lovely barbarians known as “Mohammetans” burned the library of Alexandria.
And they’re still stuck in the third or sixth century.
Amazing!
Geek Mom Bump :)
Fantastic, thanks! I feel less bad about collecting and playing with LEGO as an adult.
save
That is awesome !
I hope Lego releases this set. That is so over the top. Thanks for sharing.....C
“BCE.”
Sigh.
Cool.
No go make something that can rebuild the Pyramids of Giza.
For later.
And here I sit staring at the skiploader I finally managed to complete with an erector set.
Why do you think the knowledge was lost? Just because the library was burned (several times, in fact), doesn't mean anything of importance was lost at all.
Perhaps it was moved into... safekeeping... first.
Why?
Knowledge is power, that's why.
I’m sorry, while it’s very impressive, tt looks like an implementation of Derek J. de Solla Price’s interpertation of Antikythera Mechanicism. Price died in 1983, before high resolution tomographs of it were made and before “Part E” was recognized as part of the mechanism. The device had been submerged in the sea for almost 20 centuries before being discovered in 1900.
The actual device is more sophisticated in many ways than Price imagined, although Price inferred the existence of differential gears almost 1500 years before they are known to have been used, there is no direct evidence of their use in the mechanism and current “best” reconstructions do not employ them.
The device was pre-Ptolemy and probably incorporates astronomy as understood by Hipparcos but did not incorporate the eccentric orbit invented by Ptolmey, but did include epicycles which apparently were known to, if not invented by Hipparcos. Hipparcos based much his astronomy on the observations of the ancient Babylonians. Direct knowledge of Babylonian astronomy is very fragmentary, but Hipparcos incorporated much of it into his own. Our knowledge of Hipparcos is almost soley through Ptolemy, who credits Hipparcos quite generously. Our knowledge of Ptolemy is only through Arab translations of Almagest.
It would be inaccurate to say that we had no clue that such mechanism existed. There are numerous accounts of such mechanism by ancient authors, including Cicero. According to Cicero, Marcellus, the Roman General who lead the sack of Syracuse and ordered that no harm befall Archimedes, kept only one artefact of the loot for himself, a device attributed to Archimedes whose function as described by Cicero was remarkably similar to the Antikythera Mechanism. It is known to have been kept by Marcellus’ family for six generations.
Micheal Wright, who spent decades studying the device and even built his own homemade tomograph to photograph it in the 1980’s, has build a more faithful reconstruct in brass, with original inscriptions in Greek. To see Mr. Wright’s delightful device see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eUibFQKJqI
For a fascinating account of the Mechanism, published in 2009 see: http://www.decodingtheheavens.com/ The author, Jo Marchant, is the narrator of the Micheal Wright video.
Amazing.
Bookmarking for later.
Btw, I think I accidentally reported this as abuse, when I only meant to post a reply! Sorry.
Wow, somebody just has too much time on his hands, lol. But it is fascinating. Legos were my favorite toy as a child, and I had some interest in clockwork-type mechanisms. My maternal grandmother was a tad peculiar, almost entirely illiterate, part indian but descended from a prominent, old settler German family, had a house full of inherited cuckoo clocks, some quite old and elaborate. I tried to figure one of them out and recreate it with Legos. Didn’t succeed.
That is just amazing.
We live in a world of lost knowledge.
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” - George Eliot