[pepsionice]

The best description for this: If you took ten of the best scientist and engineers of our times today, and locked them into a vault with no access to computers, and gave them a simple detailed requirement to develop or design something like this out of thin air......it might take forty years and you can’t even be sure of the success of the end-result.

Somewhere out there....two and three thousand years ago....we had brilliant men...generations ahead of Einstein. And what they knew....was lost.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks, but that’s just not true. The math available to Einstein was far beyond what the ancient Greeks had available, they couldn’t even make an arrow hit a man, as the old saying goes (couldn’t solve for two unknowns).

Whatever the mechanism was used for (probably just eclipse predictions and lunar cycles, and within a narrow range of centuries, it wouldn’t work today; at one time it was speculated that it was an early attempt to enhance navigation by calculating longitude), the construction was based on astronomical observations. That’s the real insight, how much did the Greeks know, and how accurately? Turns out, not as accurate as the Mayans.

The scientists of the Manhattan Project still used mechanical calculators and formulas on blackboards. Here’s a link about the progress made in computers as a result of the needs of the Manhattan Project (rather than the other way around):

http://www.mphpa.org/classic/HISTORY/H-06c18.htm

The Abacus: A Brief History
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/history.html

Zero — Greeks and Romans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number)#Greeks_and_Romans

[BCW]

“And what they knew....was lost.”

After being assigned in Babylon, Iraq for a number of years, visiting foreign battle fields & forgotten cities, and the study of warfare, I have come to the same conclusion that there have been great leaps forward by mankind in understanding the universe and all number of issues that surround us presently - most of which have been lost due to conflict, disease, or a culture subdued into thinking that such information is evil and thus destroyed...

This brings mankind into a darkness and it take a very long time for generations at some later date to rise out of it...losing time and precious data like this device once held. That is sad.

[BroJoeK]

pepsionice: "Somewhere out there....two and three thousand years ago....we had brilliant men...generations ahead of Einstein.
And what they knew....was lost."

Sure, they were smart, as smart as any good mechanical engineer today, no doubt about it.
But they weren't all that freekin smart:

On the Antikythera mechanism:

"Investigations by Freeth and Jones reveal that their simulated mechanism is not particularly accurate, the Mars pointer being up to 38° off at times.
This is not due to inaccuracies in gearing ratios in the mechanism, but rather to inadequacies in the Greek theory at that point in time.
This could not have been improved until first Ptolemy introduced the equant, circa 150 AD, and then when Johannes Kepler changed orbits to ellipses and broke from the concept of uniform motion and circular orbits in 1609 AD.[6]
'In short, the Antikythera Mechanism was a machine designed to predict celestial phenomena according to the sophisticated astronomical theories current in its day, the sole witness to a lost history of brilliant engineering, a conception of pure genius, one of the great wonders of the ancient world — but it didn’t really work very well!' "

[DonaldC]

“The best description for this: If you took ten of the best scientist and engineers of our times today, and locked them into a vault with no access to computers, and gave them a simple detailed requirement to develop or design something like this out of thin air......it might take forty years and you can’t even be sure of the success of the end-result.”

LOL, just look at how long it is taking to reinvent Apollo technology.

[Born to Conserve]

“...The best description for this: If you took ten of the best scientist and engineers of our times today, and locked them into a vault with no access to computers, and gave them a simple detailed requirement to develop or design something like this out of thin air......it might take forty years...”

Nonsense. If you know the relative motions of the planets, you can build an orrery very easily. There are thousands of clock makers and home shop machinists that could work this out over night.

[blam]

"Somewhere out there....two and three thousand years ago....we had brilliant men...generations ahead of Einstein. And what they knew....was lost."

Not lost. They're still here...IQ levels haven't changed appreciably in 10k years.