Posted on 07/02/2016 1:00:20 AM PDT by blueplum
....With the turn of a hand crank, the ancient Greeks could track the positions of the sun and the moon, the lunar phases, and even cycles of Greek athletic competitions.
The 82 corroded metal fragments of the Antikythera mechanism contain ancient Greek text, much of which is unreadable to the naked eye. But over the past 10 years, new imaging techniques, such as 3D X-ray scanning, have revealed hidden letters and words in the text...
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Probably an easier explanation is that man is capable of advancing quite rapidly, if he’s not in a period of deprivation and has a libertarian level of freedom to fulfil needs in society.
Most of the population of Antikythera were wiped out during the Greek civil war in the late 1940’s. When I was there briefly on a ferry stop in 1999 the total population of the island was about 30 - all old.
It would be cool if someone with an engineering knack would make a working replica of the device.
I’d say to translate the instructions into English, but even if they are translated, most people would probably still think they are written in ancient Greek.
I’m thinking it was used to more accurately predict the tides. That knowledge was a big deal back in the day.
“Read an interesting book called “ Longitude “.”
There was a documentary about him.
Shadow clocks were used to find longitude in both the East and West thousands of years ago, but the knowledge was lost (like most things known and in common use in the Classical Christian Era by the hundred years war (628-723AD) by the Varsity muslim armies led by Mohammad and his successors, who destroyed everything that was not in the koran - even to creating the desert conditions in today’s north Africa using vast goat herds to eat the vegetation).
they don’t really know but computer sounds official
cosmological simulator is too many syllables for the average reader
Did they ever solve the Y1 problem?
They figured out that what goes around comes around
It’s amazing what you can do with geometry.
believe it or don’t but I actually had one of those circa 1950 model or so . I used it in 1963/64 school years my Jr and sr years.
My professor in CE314 Estimating and Costs said all of you got a type writer to go to college...... sell it and buy a calculator.
The one I bought was old and used and had a hand crank and lever. it was humongous. It allowed the rapid computation of complex estimate spread sheets that simply couldn’t be done on the trusty K&E log log decitrig slide rule
It was a perfectly good mechanical computer, like a tabulator machine used in the early 20th Century.
What would be classical Greek for “read the effing manual”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Accuracy
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. The accuracy could not have been improved until first Ptolemy put forth his Planetary Hypotheses in the second half of the second century AD and then the introduction of Kepler’s Second Law.[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![6]
In addition to theoretical accuracy, there is the matter of mechanical accuracy. Freeth and Jones note that the inevitable “looseness” in the mechanism due to the hand-built gears, with their triangular teeth and the frictions between gears, and in bearing surfaces, probably would have swamped the finer solar and lunar correction mechanisms built into it:
Though the engineering was remarkable for its era, recent research indicates that its design conception exceeded the engineering precision of its manufacture by a wide margin—with considerable accumulative inaccuracies in the gear trains, which would have cancelled out many of the subtle anomalies built into its design.
Replica - the original has to have been a masterwork requiring years of handwork. One wonders about who commissioned and paid for its construction and why. Was it a rich person's toy, a scholar or religion-based tool or something else.
Drink More Ovaltine
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