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The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

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Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

#21

Post by jloughry »

TruthAndDare wrote: post #17
tacos wrote: post #3

Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much. "He was The Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University from 1960 until his death in 1983. He was the first to record a complete lecture series on History of Science which could serve as a foundati…

> Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much. I'm afraid I don't understand, especially not the last sentence. Could you explain?

Found it, I think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price#Scient...

Price's Law generally predicts the growth of social networks, which is why it's important today, but he discovered it in the context of number of scientific citations.

Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

#22

Post by tacos »

TruthAndDare wrote: post #17
tacos wrote: post #3

Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much. "He was The Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University from 1960 until his death in 1983. He was the first to record a complete lecture series on History of Science which could serve as a foundati…

> Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much. I'm afraid I don't understand, especially not the last sentence. Could you explain?

In 1951!

"The number of scientific papers published each year may be taken as a rough indication of the activity displayed in any general or specialised fleld of research... The growth factor of the exponential portions is such as to double the amount of literature every ten or eleven years in both the general and specialised cases."

http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/price/pricequantitativemea...

This is 15 years before Moore's Law and he's predicting the growth of science and citation relationships. His books basically lay out PageRank and network effects.

Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

#23

Post by tzs »

selestify wrote: post #13
i_feel_great wrote: post #10

What would the world be like if these ancient scientists and engineers persisted and their science and craft carried on and developed further? Instead, the period that followed gave rise to belief systems that still give us problems today. How very sad.

Do we know why such expertise was lost in the first place? The collapse of the Roman empire wasn't for another couple centuries.

Was it lost? Or did those who could build such a thing simply did not think it was worth doing so?

The astronomy knowledge and the mechanical theory needed to make the Antikythera mechanism were well known in ancient times, and I don't think those were ever lost. The mystery of the Antikythera mechanism is how it was actually built.

But do we know how long it took to build?

If it was built in a short time frame, then yeah, the maker probably used techniques that were lost not too long afterward, and not rediscovered until maybe the 14th century.

But what if it were built over a much longer time frame? It could have been someone's lifetime project. Then simple techniques might work. For instance, if you need a piece of metal shaped to very tight tolerances, just get it close and then use a hand file to very slowly make it what you need.

If this were the case, I can easily imagine that plenty of people between the time it was made and the 14th century knew how to build one, but simply were not interested enough to make building it their life's work.

Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

#24

Post by acqq »

tacos wrote: post #22
TruthAndDare wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much. I'm afraid I don't understand, especially not the last sentence. Could you explain?

In 1951! "The number of scientific papers published each year may be taken as a rough indication of the activity displayed in any general or specialised fleld of research... The growth factor of the exponential portions is such as to double the amount of literature every ten or eleven years in both the general and specialised cases." http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/price/pricequantitativemea... This is 15 years bef…

Thanks. That has much more sense than "grew in height in a logarithmic curve."

Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

#25

Post by i_feel_great »

tzs wrote: post #23
selestify wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know why such expertise was lost in the first place? The collapse of the Roman empire wasn't for another couple centuries.

Was it lost? Or did those who could build such a thing simply did not think it was worth doing so? The astronomy knowledge and the mechanical theory needed to make the Antikythera mechanism were well known in ancient times, and I don't think those were ever lost. The mystery of the Antikythera mechanism is how it was actually built. But do we know how long it took to build? If it was built in a short time frame, then…

Science is never lost, only suppressed.

Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

#26

Post by tacos »

acqq wrote: post #24
tacos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1951! "The number of scientific papers published each year may be taken as a rough indication of the activity displayed in any general or specialised fleld of research... The growth factor of the exponential portions is such as to double the amount of literature every ten or eleven years in both the general and specialised cases." http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/price/pricequantitativemea... This is 15 years bef…

Thanks. That has much more sense than "grew in height in a logarithmic curve."

More detail but less beauty. I'll take a second whack at it. Ignore the details, consider the premise. The university library was under renovation. He wound up in charge of safekeeping a pile of journals. So he stacked them neatly by year and decade:

  - The 1900s Physics Journals: 1" tall
  - The 1910s stack: 2" tall
  - The 1920s stack: 4" tall
  - The 1930s stack: 8" tall ...
I'm reminded of Feynman's tale of the Bell Labs scientists who had a view of suspension bridge construction. Marked the progress week by week on the glass, watching the cable slowly fall into parabolic shape.

Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

#28

Post by sanoli »

i_feel_great wrote: post #25
tzs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it lost? Or did those who could build such a thing simply did not think it was worth doing so? The astronomy knowledge and the mechanical theory needed to make the Antikythera mechanism were well known in ancient times, and I don't think those were ever lost. The mystery of the Antikythera mechanism is how it was actually built. But do we know how long it took to build? If it was built in a short time frame, then…

Science is never lost, only suppressed.

The history of scurvy is pretty interesting: http://mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-th...

Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

#29

Post by abecedarius »

selestify wrote: post #13
i_feel_great wrote: post #10

What would the world be like if these ancient scientists and engineers persisted and their science and craft carried on and developed further? Instead, the period that followed gave rise to belief systems that still give us problems today. How very sad.

Do we know why such expertise was lost in the first place? The collapse of the Roman empire wasn't for another couple centuries.

The Forgotten Revolution by Russo blames the establishment of the Roman empire instead -- or rather all the troubles in the couple centuries before. For example, he showed a timeline of astronomical observations used by Ptolemy: it had bars over the centuries from around 700 BC (iirc) down to Hipparchus in the 100s BC, then nothing until Ptolemy's era around 100 AD (which Russo thought a weak revival with people like Ptolemy more mining the libraries than really reestablishing scientific and technical progress).

The author is more of a physicist than a historian, fwiw.

Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

#30

Post by 467568985476 »

conchy wrote: post #7

Can anyone with free access post the PDFs from the Almagest journal articles? http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1

I'd love to read some excerpts of the translations. I'm tempted to buy some of the papers but it's hard to justify sight unseen - I don't know how much detail they contain.
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