antikythera – The Journal of A_C

The content below is from Episode 155 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

This week I recommend having your own garden.
- If you have land of your own or land you are able to plant on (like a community garden or something like that) great!
- But even if you live in an apartment you can still grow a little herb garden on your windowsill.
- Shannon and I now have lived in our house for a little over a year. Last year’s garden was a success, but we now have a better understanding of what plants flourish and which don’t grow very well.
- If it were up to me, we would just grow Arugula, green onions, and tomatoes LOL
- I can’t express how satisfying it is to be doing yard work and all of a sudden just pluck a fresh Arugula leaf from your own garden and enjoy that peppery goodness.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

What is a computer?
- A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These programs enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks.
- A computer is a machine that deal in 1s and 0s a few million at a time.

What about an analog computer?
- An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuous variation aspect of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved.
- It is a computational device that uses mechanical principles instead of digital math to make calculations.
  - A good example is a wind-up clock or a wind-up kitchen timer.
- When did Analog computers first appear? There’s some debate on that.
  - Most think it was the astronomical clocks that were invented and used during the 14th century. Or at least that WAS thought to be the beginning of analog computers until 1901…
In 1901, near Antikythera Greece, a discovery was made.
- Captain Dmitrios Kontos took a crew of sponge divers from the island of Siamese out to sea in the year 1900.
  - As they were checking out the depths off the island of Antikythera looking for sponges…
    - I wasn’t aware Sponge Diver was an occupation, but OK…
  - One of the crew surfaced in a panic. He was frantically talking about a bunch of underwater mummy ghost ladies and freaking everyone out.
  - Captain Kontos filed the report and sent it off to the Greek Navy not thinking much of it.
- A year later the Hellenic Royal Navy went to investigate.
  - At about 45 meters (150 feet) down the navy found an ancient shipwreck and plundered it. They found a treasure trove of bronze and marble statues!
    - These statues are what spooked the sponge diver into thinking ghost mummies were on the ocean floor LOL
  - They also found coins, glassware, pottery, jewels and all sorts of expensive ancient stuff that would end up in a museum.
- The Ship contained a bunch of EXPENSIVE Greco-Roman art pieces and with all this super expensive stuff was a box….
  - Some think the ship was meant for Julius Ceasar himself as a gift from the Island of Rhodes.
  - The island of Athens cataloged the artifacts found on the ship but seemed to overlook the box. There were so many more eye-catching items. Little did they know, that lump of bronze and wood inside the box would be a lot more famous than any of the artifacts.

In 1902 an archeologist Velerios Stais was walking through the Athens museum when he noticed what he thought was a gear wheel stuck in a rock.
- He examined the lump of rock further and thought it had to be an astronomical clock. When he told museum officials they laughed at him and told him ancient Greeks/Romans didn’t have that technology.
  - The Museum officials explained the gear wheel as a piece of another, much more modern ship that had fallen off and glided right into the ancient ship wreck.

For 7 or so decades after its discovery, experts either thought this device was either a fake or a fluke because the technology was so advanced beyond what historians thought possible.
- The Antikythera Mechanism sat in the Athens Museum in relative obscurity as a mysteriously weird-looking lump as humanity went from the Industrial Revolution to the Computer Revolution.
  - The device wasn’t picked apart or disturbed for all that time, keeping it preserved.
In 1951, Derek J. de Solla Price from Yale University decided to look at the device more closely. He was a physicist and liked clocks. Solla Price would come to be known as the grandfather of information about the mechanism.
- One of his first discoveries were markings denoting the calendar month Libra.
- Based on that discovery he started to reconstruct (a simulated reconstruction via paper) the pieces to make a Greco-Roman calendar.
- It took Solla Price 20 years to convince the Museum officials the device was more than just a lump of rock found in a shipwreck.
- In 1971, along with nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakolos, Solla Price was able to convince the Museum to allow them to examine the actual device.
- They scanned it with XRays to avoid damaging the device.
- In 1974, they published a 70 page paper showing the 82 fragments of the mechanism.
  - The paper showed just how complicated the device is, not just in its innerworkings, but also in its implied understanding of the solar system, or the the understanding the device’s creator had.
  - Most experts thought it had to be a fake.
Since the Solla Price paper in 1974 the mechanism has been examined down to the very tiniest of parts.
- Now the academic community, by and large, considers it to NOT be a fake and in fact is from ancient Greco-Roman times.
- It is mostly made of Bronze and has a bunch of intricate gears and locking mechanisms which it uses to complete complex mathematical procedures to rectify the solar year
- It utilizes rod and pin technology which again, wasn’t thought to be available to the ancient Greeks and Romans
- Experts think it had at least 40 gears when it was intact
- The device is thought to be able to calculate the exact position and size of a celestial body such as the moon at any point during an 18-year period
- It could also calculate the position of planets in their then-known orbit
- This thing could have allowed Julius Ceasar to accurately predict eclipses, full moons, and the speed of the moon across the night sky.
- And because the device is in much disrepair after 2 thousand years of laying at the bottom of the sea, they think this analog device could have done much more
- The Romans did understand astrophysical concepts that were only rediscovered in Europe during the 16th century or later.

You might be able to guess what happened next
- Anthropologists and historians started to go nuts with the implications of this device.
  - Was there any other ancient tech we didn’t know about?
- The precision needed to create this astronomical math machine was astonishing. The user could turn one gear and dozens of other gears would turn to reveal the position of celestial bodies in our solar system
- There are even a bunch of these smaller gears that track the sun and moon throughout their 19-year cycle and can tell the wielder of the device where each will be in the sky
- There is a lot of complicated astronomical stuff this device calculates and some of the most ingenious parts are how it accounts for the tilt of the Earth causes the Moon to appear to speed up or slow down as it crosses our night sky.
  - The Atikythera Mechanism uses canted gears to accurately show how the moon moves from our perspective down here on Earth.
- A major difference or tell about the ancient Greco-Roman astronomers is that this device seems to accurately predict the positions of the planets, sun, and moon from the perspective that the EARTH is the center of the solar system instead of the sun.

Some historians believe this device could have inspired Copernicus and Galileo to solve the problem the device was making.
- They may have known about the device and may have used its flaw to come up with the idea that the Earth was NOT the center of the solar system.
From the shipwrecked and multi-thousand-year remains of the device, experts were able to piece together that it could do all this, but they now think it had more components that didn’t survive the time underwater and therefore probably had other abilities.
- It could probably predict solar and lunar eclipses and track the time of the Olympic games.
- They found inscriptions on the back of the mechanism that suggests it could, at one time, do all this.
- There were dials on the front and back of the device that allowed the user to spin the dial to a solar day and the back would show the precise lunar day on the 235 month cycle on the other side.
- Experts think this device was instrumental in planning ahead for things like Military campaigns and religious ceremonies/.
  - Think about it, if you are a general it would be helpful to know if your army needs to prepare for a FullMoon night where the enemy has visibility or for a new moon night where it is pitch black. It would also be helpful to know how many hours of sunlight the day will have in the future.
  - Same applies for an ancient greco-roman priest trying to schedule a sacrifice or feast during a lunar eclipse or something of that nature.

Some of the inscriptions suggest the device was used to teach astronomy classes to students

So who made this thing?
- Some speculate it was Archimedes
  - Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity
  - But there is no proof it was him
- Regardless of who made it, this machine wasn’t a simple tool. It is the product of thousands of hours of research, planning, and engineering.
- Although no other device has been found, it is very unlikely that only one of these things ever existed.
- It is too accurate and precise to be the result of a one-time experiment.
Today the device is still under analysis. Scientists use microfocus x-rays, CT scans, and computer tomography, and polynomial texture mapping to unlock its secrets.
- No, I don’t understand all of those big words, but they all sound very technical and cool.
They are trying to know all the abilities of the machine and just how it was constructed.
- Master clockmakers have studied it and recreated it using the ancient methods thought to be available to the device’s original creators.
  - The lack of corrections or addition of materials to a gear after its first construction suggest this machine was made perfectly the first time it was contsructed. So either the person that made it was an absolute master of his craft OR the ancient Greeks/Romans had specialized assembly lines for the purpose of making these Antikythera Mechanisms…
    - Both are daunting possibilities.
    - One thing most agree on is that the maker definitely had done this kind of work before. So what other devices were created with this level of complexity and precision in the ancient world?
- When it was discovered to be a machine historians thought it had to be the most powerful analog device ever created in its time, but the skill level needed to make it suggests it was the product of years perhaps generations of skillful clock makers…
- These people were accurately mapping the positions and trajectories of Venus and Saturn!
So if these were made en masse, where are all the other Antikythera Mechanisms?
- Well, they were made of bronze and time likely destroyed them.
The Antikythera Mechanism, when first discovered by a sponge diver at the turn of the 1900’s, was thought to be a hunk of junk amidst a treasure trove of beautiful statues and jewels. But over a century since then it has come to be known as one of the greatest archeological discoveries of all time.
- What was once thought to be a worthless hunk of bronze in a box is now regarded as one of the most expensive devices ever created in the ancient world.
- This thing went from an irrelevant box among treasure to a focal point of historical understanding.

And I thank my friend Cory for suggesting this topic.

Thanks for listening/reading Who’d a Thunkers!

Until next time

CREDIT