I've always admired Roman engineering, but there is simply no way any craftsman of the time would know how his work would withstand the millennia. Nor could he have relied upon the examples of deeper antiquity, as there was no communication of information from his occupational predecessors. There is a type of survivor bias with which we moderns must contend when evaluating what remains of a (previous) variated subject of study. Structures which remain are remarkable for having survived, while those which did not last are somehow NOT remarkable and not held as evidentiary.
Exactly so. The stuff that wasn’t extraordinarily good is long gone. That’s exactly why I tend to question the notion that the ancients knew so much and could do so many things better than we can now. They got lucky sometimes, just like people in every era, and the rest of their works went to ruin.
The Antikythera mechanism ( / ˌæntɪkɪˈθɪərə / AN-tih-kih-THEER-ə) is an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the oldest known example of an analogue computer [1] [2] [3] used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance.
Explain that anyone