The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets | Hacker News Reader

The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets

washingtonpost.com

159 pointsLibertatea66 comments

Can anyone with free access post the PDFs from the Almagest journal articles? http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1

Here is a zip file with the relevant issue

http://www.megafileupload.com/bbgb/Almagest-Volume7-Issue1-T...

Drats - I didn't mean to downvote! I actually really appreciate the obligatory utility comments referencing where to get the docs.

I'd love to read some excerpts of the translations. I'm tempted to buy some of the papers but it's hard to justify sight unseen - I don't know how much detail they contain.

Seconded. I tried to use sci-hub but I couldn't get it to work.

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

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?

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

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.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk

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://...

But it probably really is a photo. Here [1] and here [2] are some more and that thing looks pretty unreal in most of them.

[1] http://wetpixel.com/full_frame/brett-seymour-return-to-antik...

[2] http://antikythera.whoi.edu/2014/10/07/exosuit-dives-antikyt...

It looks like the color saturation was maxed out and some of the blues and reds started clipping in the saturation range.

You lose a lot of the longer wavelength colors underwater, they probably adjusted the levels to compensate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_photography#Lightin...

Probably. It also looks like some median filtering or a selective blur was applied to remove dirt/debris/bubbles, which tends to give things a painted look.

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.

How do colors and materials that lend themselves well to photography make the suit more safe?

Heightened visibility of the suit in emergency situations.

The company that makes the suit has a site that's worth a look: http://www.hublot.com/antikythera/

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

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.

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/"

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

> 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?

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...

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.

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

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.

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 ...

"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

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

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://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47zv3839-6U/UP37FwkfOhI/AAAAAAAACU...

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

> 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.

So there are 10 magazines from 1910s, 20 from 1920s and 40 from 1930s. How would you arrange them so that I can recognize the log curve?

Found it, I think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price#Scient...

Price's Law generally predicts the growth of social networks, which is why it's important today, but he discovered it in the context of number of scientific citations.

Thanks for sharing that link, it is very interesting.

But I'm curious - what do you think is wrong with the site design? It's responsive, legible, tasteful, and has no extraneous graphics nor a single thing that uBlock had to block. I wish the rest of the web was this beautiful.

Yes, it's the default Wordpress "Twenty Fifteen" template.

It contains very important books corrupted by cut and paste into the wonky WordPress editor / blog post renderer.

Someone in a hurry might think it was an autogenerated GoDaddy cash parking page, not one of the more interesting sites on the web. Thus my note.

I get it. I made my comment before looking past the front page to find the corrupted books.

The site design is just fine with me. Good content is far more important than eye candy.

"Logarithmic" is practically a constant. Do you mean "exponential" instead? (as in "double in X years")

A visual log curve, not log growth. Log curve is a reflection of an exponential curve. He stacked the journals on the floor.

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/

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

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

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?

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.

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

What do you mean?

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.

Christianity

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Using a file to cut gears doesn't take a lifetime, they even did this in one of the documentaries about the subject.

https://youtu.be/5mIGJzqrGnc?t=36m9s

Science is never lost, only suppressed.

The history of scurvy is pretty interesting: http://mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-th...

The history of concrete is quite interesting. http://www.romanconcrete.com/docs/spillway/spillway.htm http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-the-ancient-romans-made-better-co...

The Forgotten Revolution by Russo blames the establishment of the Roman empire instead -- or rather all the troubles in the couple centuries before. For example, he showed a timeline of astronomical observations used by Ptolemy: it had bars over the centuries from around 700 BC (iirc) down to Hipparchus in the 100s BC, then nothing until Ptolemy's era around 100 AD (which Russo thought a weak revival with people like Ptolemy more mining the libraries than really reestablishing scientific and technical progress).

The author is more of a physicist than a historian, fwiw.

My only question, was there only one ever? It seems implausible that it would be unique

No. Archimedes for instance is known to have built orreries and written a lost book on "Sphere-making", apparently this topic. Cicero reported seeing one that the Roman general responsible for conquering Syracuse took back as loot. We don't know just how much these had in common with the Antikythera device. https://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Sphere/SphereIn...

It was a Greek device. Theory is that it was pilfered with the other artifacts found in the shipwreck, en route to Julius Caesar. Rough couple years to be a Greek scientist.

I'm keeping my hopes up that they formed a secret society and are guiding the world with a steady hand towards an enlightened future.

(Then I read the news and cry in my corn flakes, of course.)

Well, maybe the news is just there to steer us towards a new and more glorious dawn.

Due to the laws of thermodynamics I have little belief left for a beneficent (let alone malignant) secret society of any stripe. But I could be wrong. There are more things in heaven and earth and all that.

Why would the laws of thermodynamics apply to a secret society?

They're saying the second law of thermodynamics (in a closed system, entropy always increases) means a complex secret can't be kept for a long period of time: the tendency of life/the world towards chaos means that the truth will inevitably leak out.

It's more a poetic application of statistical mechanics than a rigorous one.

Write it, it would make a great chapbook.

If I find myself out of work, I'll give it a go :)

> and their science and craft carried on

And their gods too?

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