
The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets - Libertatea
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/06/14/the-worlds-oldest-computer-is-still-revealing-its-secrets/
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conchy
Can anyone with free access post the PDFs from the Almagest journal articles?
[http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1](http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1)

~~~
svag
Here is a zip file with the relevant issue

[http://www.megafileupload.com/bbgb/Almagest-
Volume7-Issue1-T...](http://www.megafileupload.com/bbgb/Almagest-
Volume7-Issue1-The_Inscriptions_on_the_Antikythera_Device.zip)

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laurencerowe
There's a great BBC documentary on this from a couple of years ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q124C7W0WYA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q124C7W0WYA)

~~~
jimjimjim
Thank you for that link! I saw it a while ago and didn't realize it was on
youtube.

slightly offtopic: Does anyone else think that unless a History based TV
Documentary is made by the BBC (or at least a presenter with an english
accent) it will almost devoid of credibility?

~~~
qarioz
Why? It's not text book and scientific material but it's definitely good
enough for the general population.

~~~
jimjimjim
ah, it was just a generalisation on my part. I'm a bit jaded after trying to
watch US history documentaries (especially the history channel, or should i
say the hitler channel) only to see that the producers felt some need to
insert drama into it. Actors? with dialog? representing long-dead people for
who there are no records of what might have been said? these are bad signs.

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elorant
Here's a replica of the device made out of Legos

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk)

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brianpgordon
Is it just me, or does the "photo" of a diver wearing an Exosuit not really
look like a real photo?

[https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-
apps/imrs.php?src=https://...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-
apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_960w/2010-2019/Wires/Images/2014-10-09/Bloomberg/04438819.jpg&w=1484)

~~~
EdwardMSmith
I'd agree that it probably is a real photo, but you're right. It even looks
like a digital painting - not just a 3D render.

I wonder if the designers picked colors and surfaces that maximize visibility
and sharpness underwater for safety reasons.

~~~
Trill-I-Am
How do colors and materials that lend themselves well to photography make the
suit more safe?

~~~
EdwardMSmith
Heightened visibility of the suit in emergency situations.

------
WalterBright
Nobody designs such a thing as a first project. There must have been many
predecessors, showing a progression in complexity.

~~~
jhanschoo
There may have been, but itchy hands combined with accessibility means that
any more accessible replicas are likely to have been smelted down for other
things.

------
tacos
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 foundation for studies
around the world... His entire 1976 lecture series 'Neolithic to Now' is now
available on-line and for free at
[http://derekdesollaprice.org/"](http://derekdesollaprice.org/")

[Ignore the site design--the material is amazing.]

~~~
TruthAndDare
> 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?

~~~
tacos
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...](http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/price/pricequantitativemeasures1951.pdf)

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.

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

~~~
tacos
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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
This contradicts the earlier description of "growing in a logarithmic curve"
\-- it's an exponential curve. A logarithmic curve would look like this:

    
    
        - The 1900s stack: 1" tall
        - The 1910s stack: 2" tall
        - The 1930s stack: 3" tall
        - The 1970s stack: 4" tall
        - The 2050s stack: 5" tall ...

~~~
tacos
"Ignore the details, consider the premise." :) Have an upvote and go read the
guy's Wiki article.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price)

~~~
acqq
The "logarihmic" premise was false from the start, that's why the people (I
too) couldn't understand what you initially wrote.

~~~
tacos
If you stack books horizontally on shelves by year it would form the textbook
exponential curve. If you stack them vertically on the floor it makes the
textbook log curve. It's a visual metaphor. Apparently not a very good one.

[http://science.larouchepac.com/gauss/ceres/InterimII/Arithme...](http://science.larouchepac.com/gauss/ceres/InterimII/Arithmetic/Primes/Log_Exp_inverts.jpg)

[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47zv3839-6U/UP37FwkfOhI/AAAAAAAACU...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47zv3839-6U/UP37FwkfOhI/AAAAAAAACUE/suc684kYcxE/s1600/logvsexpon.png)

EDIT: Wow, this is still ongoing? You can mount a hockey stick horizontally or
vertically on a wall, guys. Think about it.

~~~
dragonwriter
> If you stack books horizontally on shelves by year it would form the
> textbook exponential curve. If you stack them vertically on the floor it
> makes the textbook log curve.

It seems to me you have that exactly backwards:

If you stack books horizontally on shelves, which each shelf corresponding to
a same-size range of years (e.g., a shelf per decade), with earlier periods on
lower shelves, it would form a quantized approximation of the textbook
_logarithmic_ curve.

If you stack books vertically on the floor in similar periods with earlier
periods on the left, it would form a quantized approximation of the textbook
_exponential_ curve.

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MichaelMoser123
the article says that researches found a description of this analog computer
of antiquity. This makes it the first manual page in history (however the
description does not quite tell you how to use this mechanism - even more
similarities to man pages)

other links: The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project : The
[http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/](http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/)

tweets by the diver team:
[https://twitter.com/antikytheradive?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw](https://twitter.com/antikytheradive?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

a BBC documentary on the subject :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXjUqLMgxM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXjUqLMgxM)

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dclowd9901
It's strange to me that all of the knowledge it took to make a device with
this kind of precision was lost for 1400 some odd years. What the hell
happened?

~~~
fit2rule
Time happened, and all civilization is perilously fragile.

Don't be so surprised. For a while there we couldn't rebuild the Apollo rocket
engines either.

~~~
viewer5
> For a while there we couldn't rebuild the Apollo rocket engines either.

What do you mean?

~~~
fit2rule
Quite literally, NASA couldn't rebuild the Apollo engines after the program
was shut down: we lost the plans and the technology to do that. It had to all
be reverse-engineered.

The point is: technology doesn't last any longer than the people who produced
it.

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WalterBright
The sad thing about this machine is its uselessness. It only had value as an
amusement, or to religious people. Many inventions have been lost and
reinvented because the earlier incarnations were not in a useful form.

Perhaps if it was contrived instead to be a mundane adding machine, it might
have found use among merchants, tax collectors, and bankers, and hence been
duplicated in large numbers, and would not have been lost technology.

~~~
rando444
I'm just going to go ahead and disagree. Having an accurate calendar provides
much more than just 'amusement', and is in fact an important part of an
organized society.

~~~
WalterBright
For our society, yes, for theirs, I have a hard time agreeing.

For example, if you don't know what the current date is, the device will be
useless to you. And if you know what the current date is, knowing how many
days to the next eclipse is useful for - what?

If the device were generally useful, many more of them would be made, as well
as similar devices, and we'd have found more.

------
i_feel_great
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.

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

~~~
tzs
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.

~~~
i_feel_great
Science is never lost, only suppressed.

~~~
sanoli
The history of scurvy is pretty interesting:
[http://mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-
th...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-then-cure-
was-lost)

