Question: History's Mysteries Tuesday Night June 10, 2008

[LaurenG]

They were discussing a geared clock like device found at the ocean's floor near one of the Islands near Greece. I was wondering if they decided what this was and how old it was. Did anyone see the show and/ or already know about this? I fell asleep and can't remember the name of the Island (A-----thea?) either so it's hard to search for the answers.











*my apologies if this doesn't belong in this group.

[semillama]

1. you're talking about the Antikythera 'computer'

which is actually an astrolabe, probably the prized possession of a very well off, important astrologer.

http://www.badarchaeology.net/data/ooparts/antikythera.php

"Shortly before Easter 1900, a Greek sponge diver off the small Aegean island of Antikythera discovered the wreck of an ancient ship filled with artefacts, including bronze and marble statues, dating from 85 to 50 BCE. Among the numerous finds, a small formless lump of corroded bronze and rotted wood lay unregarded at the National Museum in Athens for years. As the wood fragments dried and shrank, the lump split open to reveal the outlines of a series of gear wheels resembling clockwork. Gamma-ray photography allowed the historian of science Derek de Solla Price (1922-1983) to reconstruct the machine’s original appearance.

The gear wheels were proportioned to show the movements of the sun, moon and planets. The gears could be moved backwards and forwards, making the device a calculator that could show the positions of planets in the sky at any required date. It is nothing less than an astrolabe, a device well known in the Middle Ages.

Although the device is a remarkable achievement, its status should not be exaggerated. We know that the principles of gearing were understood in the Classical world and what is surprising about the Antikythera object is its uniqueness: no similar gearing mechanisms have survived from antiquity. Furthermore, the mechanism is unlikely to have been built for purely scientific purposes, but is more likely to have been part of an astrologer’s toolkit. It does not show a Copernican solar system, with the planets revolving around sun, but a Ptolemaic system, with the sun and planets revolving around the earth in complex motions. Calling it a ‘computer’ rather than an ‘astrolabe’ only serves to make it sound mysterious and out-of-place!"

[LaurenG]

2. Antikythera, yes thank you very much!

An astrolabe is not something I have ever heard of.

[frogmarch]

3. Are you referring to the Antikythera Mechanism?

http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_4.htm

An Ancient Greek Computer? - Part 1

In 1901 divers working off the isle of Antikythera found the remains of a clocklike mechanism 2,000 years old. The mechanism now appears to have been a device for calculating the motions of stars and planets.

by Derek J. de Solla Price
From June 1959 Scientific American p.60-7