
Decoding the Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator: Antikythera Mechanism - HNLurker2
https://fermatslibrary.com/s/decoding-the-ancient-greek-astronomical-calculator-known-as-the-antikythera-mechanism
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coldcode
It's easy today to imagine we are smarter than people 2000+ years ago, but
it's more like we are standing on the shoulders of a ton of generations before
us. I always wonder if I went back in time 2000 years from today, if I would
be able to translate my knowledge at all into the limitations of back then.
The folks who built this only knew what they knew back then or could imagine,
but were still able to build this complex machine.

~~~
ALittleLight
It's strange to think about something like the Flynn Effect, which suggests
people are getting more intelligent, and then do something like go back and
read older authors.

I'm reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire now - and I'm often stuck by
imagining how an author 300 years ago managed to write it. It's staggering to
think how you could do so much scholarship, writing, and historical analysis
without the benefits of computers, the internet, and the modern world. Not to
mention the prose, which I absolutely love, and is so dense, thoughtful, and
stylish.

I've also read a collection of letters from ancient Rome. Just random letters
that have been translated, nobody historical or famous. The writing and
thinking in the letters makes it hard to square with the Flynn Effect. The
authors seem at least as intelligent, if not more so, than modern people I'm
acquainted with.

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ZeroGravitas
I think this is similar to the "people used to live to 30" where the average
can rise dramatically without the higher bound changing that much if you bring
up the lower scorers to fulfil their potential.

~~~
ALittleLight
Wouldn't that metaphor suggest that there were lots of people with extremely
low IQ as average lifespan figures were previously dominated by infant
mortality?

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ZeroGravitas
Yep, exactly. Diet, education, illness etc. all take a toll on IQ.

People sometimes think you can't really change IQ via environment but that's
because we've worked really hard to eliminate the things that can limit it.

(Plus the Flynn point is that some of the rise is about abstract
sophistication rather than actual intelligence rising, people just getting
better at what IQ tests test, which would be lower too.)

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arnado
He's been scarce for a while, but Clickspring on youtube has a series on
rebuilding the Antikythera Mechanism. It's quite fascinating.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-
Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-
Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA/videos)

~~~
sitharus
He ended up discovering something new about the mechanism and has spent the
past few months working on a research paper about it. Hopefully it'll come out
soon.

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rtkwe
It's always shocking to me how much they were able to deduce from those
fragments. Guess it really helps that gears are so evenly toothed so you can
get a very good estimate of the total number of teeth just from a small
segment.

Also I wonder how many of these existed and were just lost to time by people
melting them down after they broke or if this was a one off commissioned piece
for someone (which seems somewhat improbable given the complexity, you'd
expect there to be similar devices with less features).

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craftoman
Ancient Greeks were 1000 years ahead of their time. The more you study about
their history, the more you go crazy. For example the first vending machine or
the automatic doors, or machines that working using steam. They were talking
about robots (Talos) and had a God of Technology (Hephaestus). Some scientists
believe that if Greeks didn't invaded by Persians or Romans and continued to
give all this knowledge and technology to the world, we would have the
industrial revolution 1000-1500 years earlier.

~~~
Mobius01
Do you have some references or reading material on that?

I wonder why some of the technological advancements were lost due to Roman
invasion, since the Romans themselves were avid engineers and has great
admiration for Greek arts. I know that Roman rulers in provincial Greece were
exploiting it for maximum financial gain using awful methods (at least for
some time), but still... if some of these technological advancements were well
known you’d think the Romans would invariably adopt and expand on them as
they’ve done with so much they encountered in other civilizations.

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devchix
People built one out of Lego.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk)

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basementcat
Something that I didn't fully appreciate until I had an opportunity to see it
in the museum was just how _small_ it was. I had assumed it was larger
(perhaps easier to fabricate in my mind).

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dmolony
[2006]

