de Corbin
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Registered: 09-2008
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The Antikythera Mechanism
I just finished reading a book about one of the most amazing artifacts ever discovered. It's call the Antikythera Mechanism, and was found by sponge divers of a Greek island in the early 1900's. Nobody's been able to figure out exactly what the thing was until just recently.
You may have seen something about it on TV. The Antikythera Mechanism dates to just before the first century. It's made up of a complex mess of bronze gears. What's interesting about it is that, prior to a careful study of this device, nobody - nobody believed that the Greeks used geared mechanisms for anything more complex than a waterwheel. Things like this weren't supposed to exist until the renaissance.
It turns out that this machine can calculate the exact position of the planets know to the Greeks, the position of the sun, the phases of the moon, the locations of the major constellations, and the time of lunar and solar eclipses for any time period.
From what was previously known about the history of technology, the discovery of this machine is kind of like discovering that Queen Elizabeth had a television set.
It's a very interesting book. It's called Decoding the Heavens: a 2,000 year old computer - and the Century Long Search to Discover Its Secrets by Jo Marchant.
Kind of make you wonder what else those ancient primitives might have had lying about the house that we don't know about...
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4/16/2009, 6:56 pm
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