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For Venus the original designer faced a dilemma: the known period relation (5, 8) was very inaccurate, whereas the accurate (720, 1151) was not mechanizable because 1151 is a prime number, requiring a gear with 1151 teeth.
I thought that gears with prime numbers of teeth would be advantageous because it would spread the wear evenly across the gear that it contacted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the case of the Antikythera mechanism, it turns out the knowledge and technology weren't entirely lost. There's a fairly well-established throughline now from Babylonian observation-based astronomical tables to Greek philosophical views and mathematics (and craftmanship) to Arabic astrolabes (retaining some of the gear-train tech) and then back to Europe, to the monastic astronomical clocks. Then the escapement wa…
The Roman were truly a successful agrarian civilization, but became lackluster in progress from there. They never made an overwhelming shift to mathematical / science based civilization. They took over Syracuse with a mandate to keep Archimedes alive, but that failed. Some scholars say the only roman contribution to math was numerals. Basically they reaped the profits of empire, and fell into the cargo cults of opule…
Sadly or maybe only interestingly, the Clickspring folks' recent article[1] arguing that the mechanism used a lunar calendar doesn't seem to be cited in this new article. [1] https://bhi.co.uk/antikytheramechanism/
Forgive the naive question, but does this mean these ancient Greeks knew the world was round thousands of years ago?
Forgive the naive question, but does this mean these ancient Greeks knew the world was round thousands of years ago?
Can anyone help me understand why gears with prime numbers of teeth would not be mechanizable? For Venus the original designer faced a dilemma: the known period relation (5, 8) was very inaccurate, whereas the accurate (720, 1151) was not mechanizable because 1151 is a prime number, requiring a gear with 1151 teeth. I thought that gears with prime numbers of teeth would be advantageous because it would spread the wea…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which are hopefully sometimes improvements The death of Latin is very upsetting.
Why is that out of curiosity?
Can anyone help me understand why gears with prime numbers of teeth would not be mechanizable? For Venus the original designer faced a dilemma: the known period relation (5, 8) was very inaccurate, whereas the accurate (720, 1151) was not mechanizable because 1151 is a prime number, requiring a gear with 1151 teeth. I thought that gears with prime numbers of teeth would be advantageous because it would spread the wea…
Can anyone help me understand why gears with prime numbers of teeth would not be mechanizable? For Venus the original designer faced a dilemma: the known period relation (5, 8) was very inaccurate, whereas the accurate (720, 1151) was not mechanizable because 1151 is a prime number, requiring a gear with 1151 teeth. I thought that gears with prime numbers of teeth would be advantageous because it would spread the wea…
Also, meshing against a 1-tooth gear is problematic, so you would need to probably increase that to >4 teeth to have it work. Then your bigger gear needs to have >4x the teeth to get the desired ratio.
I always wonder what future archaeologists in will read into artifacts from our time when they find them in 2000 years...
We really like trash made of plastic.