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The Antikythera mechanism reveals new secrets

scientificamerican.com

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Re: The Antikythera mechanism reveals new secrets

#71

Post by creato »

radu_floricica wrote: post #67
me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really dumb question, but one I must ask after reading this article and then your post. Could it be possible that humans had some pretty awesome technology even farther in the past than we know (beyond earliest recorded history), but due to some extinction event all records of society from that time were wiped out? For example if we had some crazy extinction event, the dark ages that would follow are pretty scary to…

What'll really bake your noodle is the fact that we most likely couldn't tell if there was a pre-human civilization on earth, even around industrial levels. What we have now will easily last a thousand years - but not a thousand thousands years. And my favorite hypothesis: Antarctica. If there ever was a species which flourished there, it's a lot harder for them to colonize the rest of the world than it is for us to…

I doubt this is really true. We've identified many traces of life from millions of years ago. You don't think we could find some bricks or beams from an industrial civilization?

Re: The Antikythera mechanism reveals new secrets

#72

Post by nemo »

areoform wrote: post #35
marcosdumay wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Antikythera mechanism is a strong indicator of technological regression in human beings. Is it evidence of widespread technological regression, or "this small group with strong leadership did amazing things, too bad nobody can do that anymore", or just people not wanting it anymore? For centuries after it was built, there was no large scale collapse that could bring a widespread regression (there were many loca…

The mechanism suggests a strong "industrial" base to support it. They had to get the metals from somewhere, find the expert artisans to craft from somewhere else, source the parts, find the tooling etc. Just as a mass produced pencil isn't just a pencil, it is the capacity to produce the pencil. They had the capacity to create precision gearing, which suggests a level of mechanical prowess that isn't matched until a…

FWIW, the device is called an 'orrery'. When it was made in Syracuse, it wasn't a product of an industrial base, but was a project made by a certain sort of mathematician and scholar doing cutting edge engineering and applied mathematics. The Antikythera one seems to go back to the traditions from Archimedes' workshop which was amazingly advanced. Archimedes wrote a treatise on building them (now lost, alas). Orrery making in something like Archmedes' tradition continued on for hundreds of years outside Syracuse, esp. in Athens and Alexandria, and we have references to orrery making through the ages. The art of making them was a product of libraries and schools where they were created by scholars as an academic craft, not an industrial production facility.

Re: The Antikythera mechanism reveals new secrets

#73

Post by hasmanean »

marcosdumay wrote: post #45
areoform wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mechanism suggests a strong "industrial" base to support it. They had to get the metals from somewhere, find the expert artisans to craft from somewhere else, source the parts, find the tooling etc. Just as a mass produced pencil isn't just a pencil, it is the capacity to produce the pencil. They had the capacity to create precision gearing, which suggests a level of mechanical prowess that isn't matched until a…

Commercial metalworking stayed around all the time until today. It only increased and improved. (It's made of bronze, it's not like bronze working was lost.) The tooling may evidence some kind of regression. I really don't know what kind of tooling was needed to create this, although gears by themselves and high precision in a single mechanism do not say much. From the looks of it, this devices requires a lot of theo…

Don’t forget the fact that the mechanism used a model made by Hipparchus, but after Hellenism the Greeks adopted the Ptolemaic geocentric view of the cosmos with epicycles and stuff.

Epicycles delivered more precision but at the cost of much greater complexity. Ultimately it took Kepler to simplify it even more through his iterative equation though I can’t imagine how to turn that into a mechanical model.

The Antikythera mechanism was possible because of the simplicity of the underlying solar system model that lent itself to easy implementation by gears. It’s much more elegant than even modern methods of computing orbits. That’s the main surprise I find in its design…how much they could simplify it (and not how complex the mechanical construction is).

Re: The Antikythera mechanism reveals new secrets

#74

Post by decebalus1 »

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #57
skunkworker wrote: post #22

Every time I think about the Antikythera mechanism the quote by Arthur C. Clarke comes to mind "If the insight of the Greeks had matched their ingenuity…we would not merely be puttering around on the Moon, we would have reached the nearer stars." It's a little sensational but also makes me think of what could've been, if certain paths had been realized in past times, and also makes me put the technical knowledge of p…

Really dumb question, but one I must ask after reading this article and then your post. Could it be possible that humans had some pretty awesome technology even farther in the past than we know (beyond earliest recorded history), but due to some extinction event all records of society from that time were wiped out? For example if we had some crazy extinction event, the dark ages that would follow are pretty scary to…

No at all a dumb question :) It's actually a fascinating question!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

Re: The Antikythera mechanism reveals new secrets

#76

Post by bryanrasmussen »

dougmwne wrote: post #23
skunkworker wrote: post #22

Every time I think about the Antikythera mechanism the quote by Arthur C. Clarke comes to mind "If the insight of the Greeks had matched their ingenuity…we would not merely be puttering around on the Moon, we would have reached the nearer stars." It's a little sensational but also makes me think of what could've been, if certain paths had been realized in past times, and also makes me put the technical knowledge of p…

This realization hit me after spending a few weeks in Italy seeing the remains of the Roman Empire. I had a building sense that they were awfully close to the industrial revolution, that there was no particular reason it couldn’t have happened thousands of years ago in the face of a highly organized, long lived, innovative empire with enormous resources. I think it’s an accident of history that it happened in England…

L. Sprague De Camp had the same opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall

Re: The Antikythera mechanism reveals new secrets

#78

Post by tehjoker »

quacked wrote: post #75
tehjoker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't which is great news, but tbh I regard the Russians as more rational than us.

You don't know any Russians then, haha

I'm thinking more of their cold war strategizing, but I also ask you, have you ever met an American QAnon enthusiast? ;)

Re: The Antikythera mechanism reveals new secrets

#80

Post by dghughes »

jaggederest wrote: post #12
phcreery wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This series is so good but it is unfinished with the last video being uploaded 5 years ago. I want for Chris to finish it so badly.

All of his videos are behind a Patreon paywall these days, as far as I can tell. He's still working on the Antikythera mechanism, it's just only visible to patrons.

Patreon has gone from helpful support by a few to an exclusive club.
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