Scientists Finally Discovered the Truth About Antikythera Mechanism

 

Humanity's knowledge is without

 question more vast than ever

 with some saying it now doubles every 12 hours far from the linear increase experienced for millennia knowledge is now growing exponentially and there is no sign of letting up but are we smarter our ancestors did not have telescopes and Carl Sagan to lay out the universe for them they had their eyesight and their brains they calculated lengths of time and eclipses and planetary movements the old-fashioned way by observing or so we thought a device discovered over a century ago is just now revealing its marbles and secrets and because of it we know the ancient greeks not only knew more about the cosmos than we ever thought but they produced a stunningly advanced invention to determine exacting details of celestial events hundreds of years in the future or the past simply put the Antikythera Mechanism

 is the world's first analog computer

 welcome to fact nominal in today's article we examine a shipwrecked ancient artifact that was virtually ignored for half a century before being revealed by modern technology to be an ancient wonder of humanity that's rewriting what our ancestors knew of astronomy and technology in 1901 sponge divers near the tiny island of Antikythera between Crete and mainland Greece happened upon a shipwreck filled with

 archaeological artifacts among the hundreds of works of art and life-sized marble horses was a lump the size of a large dictionary months later researchers at the national archaeological museum in Athens discovered bronze gear wheels inside the mysterious artifact scientists dated the shipwreck using coins found among the wreckage to between 60 and 70 bc but evidence puts the Antikythera Mechanisms building closer to 200 bc which is only about 1500 years before bronze gear wheels of that caliber were thought to exist despite initial publicity the find was largely forgotten until the 1950s when British science historian and Yale professor Derek Desola price began two decades of study of the device price and his wife Emily estimated the number of teeth in the gear wheels as well as the gear train that calculated the moon's position on specific dates the mechanism was much more complex than anyone realized in fact nothing produced in the west was comparable until at least the 14th century a.d in 1959 the eminent scientist declared nothing like this instrument is preserved elsewhere nothing comparable to it is known from any ancient scientific text or literary illusion it is a bit frightening to know that just before the fall of their great civilization the ancient greeks had come so close to our age not only in their thought but also in their scientific technology while documenting the incredibly complex gear mechanisms as well as greek inscriptions imprinted on the device itself price died in 1983 without having figured out how the anti-gathering mechanism worked he did however establish initial tooth counts for the gears and correctly suggest the device followed the metonic cycle a 235-month pattern used to predict eclipses in ancient times but in 2005 this extraordinary artifact was studied using 3d x-ray technology

 with an 8-ton machine shipped from the uk to athens and its findings were extraordinary within the 82 surviving fragments

 researchers found gear wheels and

 a user guide engraved in the corroded

 bronze containing thousands of text

 characters in ancient greek that lay out how it works and how it works is mind-boggling in march 2021 the university college

 london antikythera research team

 published the most advanced analysis of the device to date using the most modern technology available to recreate its genius as tony freith founding member of the project and lead author of the landmark analysis explains ours is the first model that conforms to all the physical evidence and matches the descriptions in the scientific inscriptions engraved on the mechanism itself the team used never before seen inscriptions only discovered in the 2005 3d imaging to recreate the device and the words worked as a user's guide here's what they found the front panel of the Antikythera Mechanism featured pointers and concentric rings to display the positions of celestial bodies such as the sun moon and planets the back panel had two large dials to demonstrate the 19-year period of 235 moon phases and 223 months cycle of solar and lunar eclipses the inside featured no less than 69 gears and a stunning complex array of plates bearings wheels and gears the largest with 223 teeth so what exactly could the antikythera mechanism do it predicted the month day and hour of

 an eclipse even accounting for leap years it predicted the positions of the

 sun and moon against the zodiac

 yes the greeks were superstitious it had a gear train to turn a black and white stone that displayed the moon's phase on a certain date it showed the astronomical positions of mercury Venus mars Jupiter and Saturn the planets known to the ancients the ancient olympic games marked a four-year time span called an olympiad and began on the full moon closest to summer solstice the Antikythera Mechanism told the greeks exactly when to start the games and at least four ancient olympic sites are listed in the device's inscriptions the ancients knew the moon sometimes slows or speeds up as it traverses the sky but did not know it has an elliptical orbit however they engineered the device to mimic the changing speed of our satellite by using an advanced pin and slot mechanism and

 epicyclic gears a level of technology far beyond their suspected capabilities what's next discovering an iphone in the great pyramid of giza that's a very good question and clues do exist much of the extensive knowledge demonstrated in the mechanism originated with babylonian predictive astronomy and greek refinements of their older observations for example there are two critical numbers revealed in x-rays in the antikythera mechanism 462 and 442 these are the cycles of venus and saturn respectively and obviously must be tracked over extremely long time periods and while the region of modern iraq laid the groundwork for predicting planetary movements as ucl antikythera research team member arista canalis notes the classic astronomy of the first millennium bc originated in babylon but nothing in this astronomy suggested how the ancient greeks found the highly accurate 462-year cycle for venus and 442-year cycle for saturn the roman statesman cicero wrote of a bronze device made by archimedes the preeminent mathematician and inventor in ancient greece saying the machine delineated the motions of the sun and moon and of those five stars which are called wanderers the planets archimedes had thought out a way to represent accurately by a single device for turning the globe those various and divergent movements with their different rates of speed and though this particular device was almost certainly built after archimedes death

 it was very possibly based on his earlier design the latest breakthroughs reveal the antikythera mechanism originated in corinth or one of its colonies and sicily a corinthian colony was archimedes headquarters it is not known if other devices such as this were created but the likelihood of finding the only one ever built in a greek shipwreck is minuscule likely there were prototypes and copies though only one has partially survived cicero also credited his friend posidonius a greek astronomer and mathematician with creating what he described as a globe which in its revolution shows the movement of the sun and stars and planets by day and night just as they appear in the sky concrete evidence only to suggest pasadonius made a similar device original researcher derek desala price who though limited by lack of technology still discovered early hints that the antikythera mechanism was far more than it first appeared said in 1959 from all we know of science and technology in the hellenistic age we should have felt that such a device could not exist perhaps it was legendary science fiction writer arthur c clarke who summed up the astonishing revelation best in 1975. 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 so what do you think about the antikythera mechanism and the latest revelations of its engineering genius does it make you look differently at civilizations that came before us tell us in the comments and as always

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