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A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

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Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#111

Post by dylan604 »

posterboy wrote: post #72
mikepurvis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the ability to send letters is one thing, but that's not the same as having the kind of widespread societal/academic support system which circulates knowledge, elevates budding experts, and brings together groups interested in a common area of study.

Part of it may be that superior knowledge was highly secretive and well guarded. That's why I'm saying it's the same as today. There is no good reason a peasant would be unable to read, except that nobody taught them, which should not take too much time for alphabetics, or that it was written in a foreign, holy language. Heck, Runes were considered to have magical power and ritual incantations were highly formularize…

>Part of it may be that superior knowledge was highly secretive and well guarded.

Especially when that superior knowledge went against the controling religion of the day in that mass acceptance of the knowledge would severely weaken the control that the religion had on the populace. Some of these religious governing periods set back human learning for centuries.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#112

Post by dylan604 »

jandrese wrote: post #88
JKCalhoun wrote: post #12

The design, so slim, so dense, so well engineered. There has to have been ones that came before. Too clever to not be an iteration. I wonder if we'll ever discover another.

The flipside of being so small and dense is that was fragile, which is a problem when you're trying to preserve something for a millennia. It was also undoubtedly expensive, meaning few were produced in the first place and they would be a prime target for thieves and artifact hunters. The one in the article could easily be the last one remaining.

Would the maker have really been thinking that the thing being made would still be usefull 50, 100 or 1000 years later? Sure, it could be used to look that far ahead, but would they have been concerned about longevity of the device itself?

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#113

Post by jcrubino »

deek wrote: post #108
jcrubino wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They dabbled in engineering as well

But killed Calculus with Archimedes.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#114

Post by pmayrgundter »

waserwill wrote: post #53
generalizations wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People throw around "debunked" like it's final. In reality, it's just a lazy dismissal without substance. You want to say he's wrong about something, say what it is and give a reason. Otherwise you're just avoiding actual critical thought. (Also, I have no idea who Peter Turchin is. I just don't like it when people inflict their defective thinking on others.)

The short of it: Turchin advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially large ones such as collapse. His own description from a decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ And has produced some interesting descriptive work such as: htt…

One of my covid projects was to look into economic theories of "long cycles", which... go back a long time. I haven't got up to Turchin, but here's some notes for anyone who's interested... (sorry not well cited, but I think direct searches will yield supports for all claims).

There's an idea of "saecula" for the ancients: that humans go through cycles because we collectively forget lessons learned, most commonly after the last who witnessed the actual events dies, ~100yrs. The word meaning changed to mean knowledge caught up in an age, that which does not transcend like God's. Hence the modern usage of secular.

For the moderns, there's an economic idea like this that I think matriculates in German Empire/1850s-WWI...

(aside: I'm astonished the more I learn about what was a super-fecund school of thought centered 1850ish at Germany/U. Humboldt, Berlin and near schools, with many well-known names in politics and the humanities: Bismark, Hegel, Marx, Bauer, Stirner, Nietzsche. And the beginning of modern physics: Plank, Einstein, Helmholtz, Boltzman, Ernst, the list basically just goes on and on; and also the beginning of the modern practice of standard doctoral/masterly degrees in the academy.)

The reason for the context is that I think it's this combo of humanities and sciences that leads to an important development: "Kathedersozialisten" (armchair social philosophers) who were very concerned with the engineering/mechanism of _society_. i.e. They are the beginning of who we know as modern economists: heavy on math and data and they begin to notice patterns...

(aside: Marx is half in this tradition: Kapital reflects Smith's eye to data, but then he bails on this in preference for his linear history as, I think, it enables his revolutionary goals.)

What they got out of an early statistical analysis of historical wealth (equity, prices, interest rates) and social dynamics (like invention, booms, busts, unrest/warfare) is that there are regular cycles. Measurable in the data. This begins to be described by Schumpeter, esp the short ~10yr "business cycle" of boom/recession, tho he also comments on the longer cycles and their international character. I think maybe this is part of Austrian economics, and that there are some political-economic reasons on the way to the world wars to explain why the American/British/French traditions don't accept this knowledge until recently.

It's picked up by Kondatriev in 1950s Stalinist Russia, who pays more attention to the long cycles as a lens into Capital analysis and development of the capitalist state. As noted, Stalin (after Marx) wanted a linear end-of-history development/confrontation with "the old modes" of capitalist thought; but Kondatriev managed to keep an open mind, learned from the data, and came up with his "K-waves" theory of 50/100/150 year long economic cycles. (He paid for his open mind with his life.)

Since, Josh Goldstein's thesis (MIT/Stanford '89) is a great recap and update for the American empire and more rigorous statistical analysis of ~500 years of price/interest/invention/war data.

Today, Ray Dalio is the CO of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund: he has a blog series on long-cycles on LinkedIn (tho unfortunately doesn't cite any of this there) and basically says we're in the falling part of a 150 year hegemonic cycle and that it's gonna get grim. And all these other guys would agree! Goldstein has been commenting on the 2020s since the 1980s.

Could it really be that our current pandemic and economic recession/depression were somehow caused together? Should we expect major wars soon? How unlikely is it that this all happened 100 years ago, and 100 years before that? (the exceptionally large cholera epidemic in 1830s Europe in the aftermath of Napoleonic wars)

In this light, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that these four: economic hardship/famine, disease, war and death; do indeed travel together, caused by people forgetting to take them seriously and therefore suffering a terrible judgement. Ofc, that's just the ancient idea of apocalypse at the end of an age.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#115

Post by ncmncm »

mseepgood wrote: post #83
JKCalhoun wrote: post #12

The design, so slim, so dense, so well engineered. There has to have been ones that came before. Too clever to not be an iteration. I wonder if we'll ever discover another.

> The design, so slim, so dense, so well engineered. It's the Apple M1 of its time.

Meaning, it's one of billions only just slightly less sophisticated?

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#116

Post by marksbrown »

jcrubino wrote: post #61
sho_hn wrote: post #45

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…

Other numeral systems existed before the Roman. Etruscan for instance.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#117

Post by fullsend »

willhslade wrote: post #66
ddingus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is super cool. I think we'd very significantly underestimate what our earlier brothers and sisters could actually do. And I also believe, since communication was spotty, and took a long time, that there were pockets of real Mastery in the world. But everyone didn't benefit, just because of the communication and knowledge-sharing difficulties from that time. I think Travelers had an amazing experience. They c…

You can do this today: hang out with a reindeer herder in Siberia and then pop over to Shanghai. Nothing's changed.

I agree. I also have had a strange feeling my last few travels though. There is a pervasive sameness. Even in more traditional parts of India, Mexico. Obviously in places like the US, Western Europe, Canada. Once I step out of the temple, or get off the horse in the remote village, there’s this familiarity. I think an example is what I now think of as “the uniform”: sneakers, jeans, a t shirt with a brand on it. 9 to 5 jobs and democratic governments. Many similar problems, relationships. Obviously there are huge differences in so many fundamental ways, even the ones I mention. But it’s the thread of truth you find in controversial books like The End of History. Globalization is real. The conquest of capitalism and the dream of liberal democracy is far reaching.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#118

Post by shakezula »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #109
shakezula wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even just the specific knowledge of building a house is probably a generation removed from most people these days. It scares me to think of just how fragile we really are.

https://xkcd.com/1513/

This is absolutely perfect and is exactly the type of knowledge that I'm so afraid we'll lose with even one generation of major civil disruption.

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#119

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

stryan wrote: post #103
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "dark ages" is a good description of what happened throughout most of Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The nuance is that the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire survived much longer, and that somewhat well organized kingdoms remained in parts of the West for a time. But there was a remarkable economic and cultural collapse in most of the former Western Roman Empire. Large cities mostly dis…

> Large cities mostly disappeared. Literacy nearly disappeared, and was only really preserved by the Church. Neither of those were wide-spread in Western Europe during the Roman empire either. If you take a look at the major cities of the Roman Empire they're generally in either Italy, Byzantium, or North Africa[0]. All of which continued past the fall of Rome. Literacy rates were also questionable [1]. > Without lar…

> Neither of those were wide-spread in Western Europe during the Roman empire either.

Literacy was much more widespread in the Roman Empire than during the Dark Ages. If you go to archaeological sites like Vindolanda, you can see letters written by fairly ordinary people to one another. There was an entire literate culture that disappeared. The reason why they're called the "Dark Ages" in the first place is because of the paucity of written records.

> If you take a look at the major cities of the Roman Empire they're generally in either Italy, Byzantium, or North Africa

First of all, Italy and North Africa were part of the Western Roman Empire. Italy fared better than Gaul and Britain until the mid-6th Century, but Rome eventually declined from several hundred thousand inhabitants in the late Empire to a few tens of thousands.

There were major cities in Gaul, the German provinces and Britain, though: Augusta Treverorum, Londinium, Lugdunum, Narbo and Rheims all had tens of thousands of inhabitants during the Empire, but during the Dark Age shrank to a small fraction of their former size.

> Long-distance trade certainly did not collapse after the fall. While it did decrease to certain extent in the near time period, it rebound within a century or two [2].

The source you cite only notes that trade "never ceased." That doesn't mean there wasn't a massive collapse. The article notes that trade continued to decline for centuries after the fall of the Empire, into the 9th Century AD. The economy of Western Europe probably did not reach a similar level of development as in the Empire until the High Middle Ages.

What I'm pointing out is that the magnitude of the declines in literacy, trade, urbanization, etc. in most of the former Western Roman Empire were striking, and that they really can be characterized as a "collapse."

Re: A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism

#120

Post by CGamesPlay »

nograpes wrote: post #91

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…

The other commenters are all correct, but I wanted to say something I didn't see mentioned: you can totally do it, it's trivial to imagine a working gear with 13 teeth. But you can't make two smaller gears that have a ratio of 1:13, because 13 is prime, so you literally have to make it be 1 gear. That means the 1:1151 ratio literally has to be 1 big gear, which is hard to make.

You do have a misunderstanding about the wear. Unless your gear is oscillating back and forth, it will always move in a complete circle and always wear the teeth evenly. Note that the involute tooth design leads to less wear on an individual tooth, but it doesn't have to do with how many teeth are on the gear.

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