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Scientists unlock secrets of first mechanical computer.

It's amazing that the Antikythera Mechanism was pretty accurate given that the ancient Greeks didn't know about Kepler's laws of planetary motion - the mechanism appears to be based on heuristic rather than physical principles.
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
It's amazing that the Antikythera Mechanism was pretty accurate given that the ancient Greeks didn't know about Kepler's laws of planetary motion - the mechanism appears to be based on heuristic rather than physical principles.
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This is my favourite ancient device.. I always wonder what they might have come up with next if they had kept developing things like this and advancing more and more.

Oh and found this.

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The mechanism is a weird anachronism. We don't have any ancient texts that mention such devices. Of course, many ancient documents were lost in the burning of the Great Library at Alexandria and suppression by the medieval RC church. One might think it would have been relatively easy to create a mechanical clock for more widespread use. However, pagans who owned slaves and had a vastly different work ethic to us probably had no need to regulate their days beyond vague statements such as "meet you at the agora/theatre/temple/baths around midmorning/midday/midafternoon". There were clepsydra, sundials, sand timers, and time candles so monitoring of time was possible but it wouldn't be very convenient.

The invention of the verge escapement, exploiting a ratchet mechanism, made mechanical clocks possible in 14th century Europe and these became widely employed in regulating church and secular activities. In Britain, every parish with a church clock kept its own time zone and this persisted until the invention of the railway as a means of transport much later in history.
 
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There is a woodcut supposedly by Flammarion that shows a figure peeking past the firmament—but it may have been art nouveau. Any chance this was a fake?
 
publiusr said:
There is a woodcut supposedly by Flammarion that shows a figure peeking past the firmament—but it may have been art nouveau. Any chance this was a fake?
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Probably. The first documented appearance of the illustration is in Flammarion's 1888 work L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire.

Why do you mention it? The depiction is hardly different from what was believed in medieval times except the stars, Sun, and Moon were thought to move on separate spheres and the Earth was known to be a globe. The illustration appears to be a metaphor.
 
publiusr said:
I was asking if the mechanism itself might have been a forgery—-
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It's very unlikely someone would go to all that trouble to dream up a novel mechanism that has no modern equivalent in implementation, build it, and then subject it to a simulated two millennia of decay at the bottom of the Mediterranean, bury it in a suitable shipwreck site, and then ensure it is found. It seems as unlikely to me as faking the Moon landings so completely as to place LM descent stages, footprints, and paraphernalia such as laser reflectors on the lunar surface for later survey missions to photograph. The posterior probability of it being a hoax is essentially zero.
 
NCC-73515 said:
Friends and I were discussing years ago if it could've been left by a time traveler XD
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Why would a time traveller need an analogue computer with inscriptions written in ancient Greek to calculate eclipses and similar based on an imperfect geocentric model of the cosmos? If he or she were merely trolling the future, I can think of more obvious ways to do this.
 
The simplest answer is that this was a real device made a long time ago... I wonder what their progression would have been like had they continued to invent new devices after this one.
 
StarCruiser said:
And the simplest answer is usually correct...

"Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains - however improbable - must be the truth."
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Amen.

Still imagine how things would have been had they kept developing and improving devices like this rather then they just stopped.
 
Hero’s engine was simpler—and it never took off.

There have been art fakes of course. There was an article in American Scientist by Nir Shafir called “Forging Islamic Science” that put an image of a Victorian clockmaker hoaxer in my head. People get up to all kinds of things
 
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Asbo Zaprudder said:
Why would a time traveller need an analogue computer with inscriptions written in ancient Greek to calculate eclipses and similar based on an imperfect geocentric model of the cosmos? If he or she were merely trolling the future, I can think of more obvious ways to do this.
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1. it was years ago
2. not as much was known about it
3. it was a relaxed fun discussion among friends
 
I'm not sure Heron's engine (basic steam turbine) didn't completely take off.

There are claims that some of the temples in ancient Greece had doors that would open without a human touching them. At the very least, the temple at Alexandria appears to have had one run by it.

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

Our ancestors were NOT idiots at all. They were surprisingly inventive and not at all afraid to experiment.
 
Wow that's just amazing, I would never have guessed in a bunch of years that they had automatic doors so far back but hey very cool.
 
Slavery was widespread back then so human chattel filled the roles played by machines in modern times. I expect this trend will continue.

ETA: BBC website article about the mechanism:
Scientists unlock mysteries of world's oldest 'computer' - BBC News

The earliest medieval equivalent of the Antikythera artefact was probably the Astrarium of Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio built between 1348 and 1364. This too was constructed assuming a geocentric model of the cosmos, although it was powered by a gravity driven escapement like a clock. It was also significantly larger.

It's thought that, before the Arabs, the ancient Greeks constructed astronomical calculating devices called planetary equatoria. The 4th century mathematician Theon of Alexandria published diagrams of equatoria that demonstrated how to compute planetary positions based on the geocentric epicyclical theory of Ptolemy.
 
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Even geocentric models work as a kludge of sorts. If there are any aliens on Jovian moon type worlds—they may have a gas-giant centric cosmology persist perhaps after even developing spaceflight, which would set them straight.

Unlike our dull little moon, their sky is like a mobile of many toys above a child’s crib—causing them to reach up...

More on the subject
https://www.space.com/scientists-unlock-cosmos-antikythera-mechanism-worlds-first-computer

Computers in the news
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-quantum-physics-wireless-devices.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-light-based-scheme-power-cryptocurrencies.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-side-channel-vulnerability-intel-cpu.html
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-chatgpt-outperforms-physicians-high-quality-empathetic.html
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-photons-quantum.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-positive-triggering-method-nationality-bias.html
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-teens-privately-instagram.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-atomically-thin-transistors-chips.html
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-scientists-longer-lasting-exciton-possibilities-quantum.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-outstanding-solar-cell-tin-oxide.html
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-van-der-waals-hetero-integrated-photonic.html
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-super-electron-interactions-efficiently-accurately.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-complex-problems-probabilistic.html
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-standards-wrong-statistics.html

We still have the edge
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-exploration-biological-brains-faster-ai.html
 
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