An ancient Greek calendar was ahead of its time (2006) | Hacker News Reader

An ancient Greek calendar was ahead of its time (2006)

smithsonianmag.com

45 pointsgyre00720 comments

Check out Archytas, the so-called "father of mechanical engineering." He was the (philosopher) king of Tarentum and a major influence on Plato. He was one of the last Pythagoreans and probably authored the first treatise of mech Eng, "mechanical problems" (Winter, 2007). Archytas is attested to have built the first self-propelled, steam powered flying machine. He was also a major influence on Vitruvius.

The Pythagoreans were erased from history several times - but essentially introduced the modern world view that the natural world, including the human mind, has a mathematical basis.

This is completely off topic but I also discovered recently (from the source text) that Philo of Alexandria, contemporary to Jesus Christ, twice described the Essenes of Israel as "Pythagoreans". That is super strange, people! Jesus was described as a Nazorean, a sect of the Essenes. Iamblicus claims Pythagoras visited Mt Caramel (later the home of the Nazoreans) around the time that the Jewish "babylonian captivity" ended. So, that's an alternate narrative for the basis of Christianity that has better historical documentation than most of the new testament. And, via Pythagorean ideas, is far more commensurable with modern science. Just saying! It's a real rabbit hole, these original source texts....

It is sad how much of technology got lost over and over.

The Greeks in 500BC weren't matched again until the Romans at about 50BC-50AD who weren't matched again until Florence in 1400AD.

How could Medieval art for the ruling classes be so terrible compared to mosaics and art for the middle classes in Pompeii?

It is terrifying how much human progress and time have been wasted.

There's an ongoing youtube series about recreating the Antikythera Mechanism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...

That's a really great series, I just wanted to reccommend it myself. It's fun so see something done with such high love for detail and professionalism.

The Museum of Ancient Greek Technology has Antikythera mechanism replicas for sale [1]. They are kind of pricey, at €550, but sure are cool looking.

[1] https://www.kotsanasmuseumshop.com/en/shop/108-antikythera-c...

Such great inventions ancient Greek made! I was impressed from an other invention of steam power that was rotating a ball around it self. I suppose that with some more hundrent of years of peace they might have invented steam train or something.

True. To say nothing of the philosophy. Reading Plutarch's essays now. I find it soothing and inspirational.

It's not wars that stopped Greece from further advancement. It was religion. Same happened to all of the Western world in the middle ages. Since Christianity took over they did everything in their power to fight science. And up to this day they still do.

That smacks of the infamous "gap left by the dark ages" chart, and doesn't really account for the drop in innovation across the Roman world in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, when large parts of the empire (indeed, notably excluding Greece) were not Christian or minority-Christian. Unless you are supposing some crucial difference between Hellenism and its Roman adaptation?

Just wondering, what was the reason for this? I would assume that the peace brought by the Pax Romana alongside with the employment of military devices such as ballistae in the roman army would increase innovation instead.

There was a discussion about this issue last month, where i wrote out a fairly detailed reply and gave a good reference to learn more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18644880

Where you mention the book :

The Forgotten Revolution by Lucio Russo

The Kindle version of this is being sold on Amazon UK for £52.24! Not much cheaper than the paperback.

pdf or djvu: http://libgen.io/search.php?req=the%20forgotten%20revolution...

Such claims require more support, lest we go another turn on the religious flamewar unmerry-go-round.

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Entirely false. It is Rome that absorbed Greece civilization. You need to study history instead of showing your hate for Christianity. Http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece_in_the_Roman_era

I have no hate for Christianity. I'm just stating the facts. It took the western world 1.500 years to go from the Antikythera mechanism to the first automatons. And those 1.500 years were when Christianity took reign over Europe.

The Antikythera mechanism likely was likely built in Rhodes. Rhodes itself had, by that point, been famous for its automatons for several hundred years.

The world is not limited to Europe.

Greek inventions could have been replicated in any other part of the world not subject to the middle ages and also having access to greek archives and knowledge (Middle East)

My argument from good old Civ5: some invention require a network of other advancements to take hold, otherwise they are not good alternative to existing technology and the constraints it imposes (as in, what good would a modern computer have been in ancient Greece in measurement errors made the fine precision of the advanced calculations exihibit more variance than simpler method using rough estimations?)

I snapped a few photos from Russo's book 'The Forgotten Revolution' that show the logical structure of the mechanism, and also the pump of Ctesibus mentioned in the article:

https://imgur.com/a/BnaGIvW

The full citation for [Price: Gears] is

Derek J. de Solla Price, "Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera mechanism - a calendar computer from ca 80 b.c.", Trans. Am. Phil. Soc. 64 (1974), part 7. Book reprint: New York, Science History Publications, 1975.

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Copying an older comment of mine:

The spectacular technical achievement of the antikythera mechanism, apart from its overall complexity, is the presence of differential gearing. Specifically, a differential turntable allows it to add or subtract angular velocities: you subtract the effect of the suns movement from the lunar movement to compute the lunar cycle.

PS Gears and cog wheels were only invented a century or two before the antikythera mechanism; scientific progress during the Hellenistic era was very rapid! Then the decline after the roman conquest was quite rapid as well - by the imperial period (eg Heron's writings) techniques like differential gears had already been lost, and they wouldn't be reinvented till (i think?) the 18th century!

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Also relevant to combat some of the nonsense about religion and rome that have appeared in this thread is this comment about the decline of greek science:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18644880

So many mysteries about the ancient world, I can't ever stop learning enough. It's endlessly fascinating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com