A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
nature.com
nature.com
[1] Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
And I also believe, since communication was spotty, and took a long time, that there were pockets of real Mastery in the world. But everyone didn't benefit, just because of the communication and knowledge-sharing difficulties from that time.
I think Travelers had an amazing experience. They could go to some parts of the world and literally see the future, and other parts of the world and perhaps feel very connected to the very basics.
Meta: I sure wish this Google Voice thing would not randomly capitalized words. Sorry for the typos I just dictated this and hit send
I think what happens is that we forget that you can make a heck of a lot of even complicated and precise things with simple technology if you have a lot of time, have a lot of money to pay for labor, and don't need to produce more than a handful of the thing.
Need 100000 pairs of matched gears with a very precise fit, and you need them next month and cheaply? You need modern techniques.
Need one pair, and you've got years to produce it, and plenty of money? All you need is someone with a fine file to hand file the teeth, frequently checking the fit and tweaking it.
Since the Median empire at least, the post was also fairly standard. Vice versa, I am affraid I severely underestimate what pockets of real mastery exist in the world, hidden behind NDAs, paywalls and below the threshold in libraries. I'm normally pretty much satisfied with holding a telecommunication device in my hand.
This includes, hypothetically, the modern knowledge of ancient knowledge. So I don't disagree with you.
That's why I'm saying it's the same as today. There is no good reason a peasant would be unable to read, except that nobody taught them, which should not take too much time for alphabetics, or that it was written in a foreign, holy language.
Heck, Runes were considered to have magical power and ritual incantations were highly formularized--as they are today: a) e.g. in fashion brands, b) e.g. in law code to the extent that it requires professional translators
Or closer to the topic, take maths, which has a highly formularized, international, often ambiguous and domain specific writing system. Indeed, it's also a good example of a science where instruction is crucial, and most information is left out in writing because the reader is expected to have it all in working memory.
Even better analogy, computing machines: Not only do write with them, but in a sense we encode information in the, well, object, just like a sine and cosine wave diagram (or animation) encodes the motion of a radius in the circle. Only the keenest reverse engineers are able to read out the fundamental principles of its working. But, for analogy, CISC was found unwieldy so the trend is going back to RISC and doing hyperscalarity via networking, to solve heat problems.
Anyhow,domain knowledge implies today as it did then where to get stuff, not just how to use it. Specifically for the Iron age this means knowledge of iron mines, geography and geology. Maths and other structural sciences are only peripheral.
Given that early Iron was meteoric, one can kind of see how a connection to the skies and gods could be drawn.
And we have to wonder about fate, too. Some resources simply deplete. It's not that the knowledge is lost, but its application. Calenders have been further developed, certainly. Currently we predict the future on the end of global climate. Yeah that's sad, but it puts the little bit of heat that I put out as background noise into perspective.
Obviously in-person mentorship and instruction is still ideal, but the modern internet is much more than just a virtual text book or a bunch of videos of recorded lectures— for any given topic there are a hundred communities which happily welcome novices and are willing to examine your reasoning about a particular problem and help plug the holes.
Especially when that superior knowledge went against the controling religion of the day in that mass acceptance of the knowledge would severely weaken the control that the religion had on the populace. Some of these religious governing periods set back human learning for centuries.
Thanks for posting it
I wonder if we'll ever discover another.
But I suspect a craftsperson is first and foremost focused on the quality of materials, quality of the construction — no doubt in large part so that the piece is durable. The degree to which that adds to the longevity is probably unimportant.
Like arguing wether the workbench you built will last 200 years or 400. What does it matter and who could know?
It's the Apple M1 of its time.
There are a lot of loss and bottlenecks along that journey, though. And many notable locations, installations and individuals. The history of instrument-making and how it is intertwined with philosophical and religious views on the skies and the topology of the universe is quite fascinating (e.g. the motivations for observing the sky, being able to produce predictions at all, crafting models, etc).
They never made an overwhelming shift to mathematical / science based civilization. They took over Syracuse with a mandate to keep Archimedes alive, but that failed. Some scholars say the only roman contribution to math was numerals.
Basically they reaped the profits of empire, and fell into the cargo cults of opulent success, abandoning the prior agricultural based common sense by never integrating new ideas in the Aristotelian domains except for to pay homage to the originating culture enough to collect taxes.
Not ready to drop a book on HN regarding the nuance of Roman evolution just yet.
While this is in part to be attributed to superstition and religion, this in turn was of material importance to navigation, aggriculture, and perhaps philosophy. Indeed, it is curious how those interrelated.
For one, nomads would need to know when it was time to move on, and where to.
The result is that even a gap of a single generation is enough for some knowledge to be lost. That's why Roman concrete was forgotten, why we can't build a Saturn V anymore, why you can't just start a chip-fab with enough money, and why it's so hard to maintain code without access to someone that designed the code-base.
Most things, even if they're written down, are more accurately modelled in someone's brain.
Maybe a few missing pieces are why Intel cant seem to figure out EUV lithography.
None of these things are trivial and probably not documented in a way where a noob could pick them up.
The death of Latin is very upsetting.
Exponential population growth is weird.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build...
The Antikythera mechanism or the somewhat inexplicable late bronze age collapse and the unidentifiable "sea people" that caused it are good examples to indicate there's some degree of cyclicality, wherein people stumble across ruins more advanced than their own civilization and wonder where they could have gone.[1]
Getting to the "why" part, Peter Turchin's work expanding on Ibn Khaldun's concept of Asabiyyah seems the most compelling to me.
You want to say he's wrong about something, say what it is and give a reason. Otherwise you're just avoiding actual critical thought.
(Also, I have no idea who Peter Turchin is. I just don't like it when people inflict their defective thinking on others.)
His own description from a decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ And has produced some interesting descriptive work such as: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full
Some of his group's work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1]. While some of his work may produce overdetermined models (trying to model history, considering all of the possible variables, can be tricky), the sorts of things he is interested in have been developed a fair bit, of late [2].
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 [1] https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full
I seem to remember that cliodynamics is really Asimov's psychohistory, but pursued in ernest, no?
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliod...
There's an idea of "saecula" for the ancients: that humans go through cycles because we collectively forget lessons learned, most commonly after the last who witnessed the actual events dies, ~100yrs. The word meaning changed to mean knowledge caught up in an age, that which does not transcend like God's. Hence the modern usage of secular.
For the moderns, there's an economic idea like this that I think matriculates in German Empire/1850s-WWI...
(aside: I'm astonished the more I learn about what was a super-fecund school of thought centered 1850ish at Germany/U. Humboldt, Berlin and near schools, with many well-known names in politics and the humanities: Bismark, Hegel, Marx, Bauer, Stirner, Nietzsche. And the beginning of modern physics: Plank, Einstein, Helmholtz, Boltzman, Ernst, the list basically just goes on and on; and also the beginning of the modern practice of standard doctoral/masterly degrees in the academy.)
The reason for the context is that I think it's this combo of humanities and sciences that leads to an important development: "Kathedersozialisten" (armchair social philosophers) who were very concerned with the engineering/mechanism of _society_. i.e. They are the beginning of who we know as modern economists: heavy on math and data and they begin to notice patterns...
(aside: Marx is half in this tradition: Kapital reflects Smith's eye to data, but then he bails on this in preference for his linear history as, I think, it enables his revolutionary goals.)
What they got out of an early statistical analysis of historical wealth (equity, prices, interest rates) and social dynamics (like invention, booms, busts, unrest/warfare) is that there are regular cycles. Measurable in the data. This begins to be described by Schumpeter, esp the short ~10yr "business cycle" of boom/recession, tho he also comments on the longer cycles and their international character. I think maybe this is part of Austrian economics, and that there are some political-economic reasons on the way to the world wars to explain why the American/British/French traditions don't accept this knowledge until recently.
It's picked up by Kondatriev in 1950s Stalinist Russia, who pays more attention to the long cycles as a lens into Capital analysis and development of the capitalist state. As noted, Stalin (after Marx) wanted a linear end-of-history development/confrontation with "the old modes" of capitalist thought; but Kondatriev managed to keep an open mind, learned from the data, and came up with his "K-waves" theory of 50/100/150 year long economic cycles. (He paid for his open mind with his life.)
Since, Josh Goldstein's thesis (MIT/Stanford '89) is a great recap and update for the American empire and more rigorous statistical analysis of ~500 years of price/interest/invention/war data.
Today, Ray Dalio is the CO of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund: he has a blog series on long-cycles on LinkedIn (tho unfortunately doesn't cite any of this there) and basically says we're in the falling part of a 150 year hegemonic cycle and that it's gonna get grim. And all these other guys would agree! Goldstein has been commenting on the 2020s since the 1980s.
Could it really be that our current pandemic and economic recession/depression were somehow caused together? Should we expect major wars soon? How unlikely is it that this all happened 100 years ago, and 100 years before that? (the exceptionally large cholera epidemic in 1830s Europe in the aftermath of Napoleonic wars)
In this light, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that these four: economic hardship/famine, disease, war and death; do indeed travel together, caused by people forgetting to take them seriously and therefore suffering a terrible judgement. Ofc, that's just the ancient idea of apocalypse at the end of an age.
In such a case the criticism of not being a professional historian seem odd, as the credentials of Edward Slingerland and Bret Beheim, the lead authors of the critical papers, seem to be fairly comparable to Turchin's.
[1]https://psyarxiv.com/jwa2n/
[2]https://eslingerland.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2019/09/Historia...
[3]http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/what-came-first-big-god...
Turchin may not be right about everything (or most things), but the kind of thing he's trying to do is the path forward. The really interesting action in history (broadly construed) is all being done by people doing history within analytic paradigms, like Turchin. Look for work by people who call themselves economic historians.
> In 1592, the Japanese general Hideyoshi invaded Korea, transporting over 160,000 troops on approximately seven hundred ships. He eventually mobilized half a million troops, intending to continue on to conquer China. Over sixty thousand Korean soldiers, eventually supported by over one hundred thousand Ming Chinese forces, defended the Korean peninsula. After six years of war, the Japanese retreated, and Hideyoshi died, having failed spectacularly in his quest.
> The Imjin War "easily dwarfed those of their European contemporaries" and involved men and material five to ten times the scale of the Spanish Armada of 1588, which has been described as "the greatest military force ever assembled" in Renaissance Europe. [2]
> [2] The Spanish armada consisted of thirty thousand troops on 130 ships and was defeated by twenty thousand English troops.
The Korean peninsula is about 86,000 square miles. Japan is about 146,000. (Modern) Spain is 195,000 square miles.
The fragmentation of Europe had really severe effects on the resources it was able to muster.
But there was a remarkable economic and cultural collapse in most of the former Western Roman Empire. Large cities mostly disappeared. Literacy nearly disappeared, and was only really preserved by the Church. The extensive Roman system of taxation and the public goods it paid for (roads, aqueducts, baths, theaters, security) nearly disappeared. Without large cities, roads and security, long-distance trade collapsed and the economy became much simpler. Skilled trades that existed in the highly complex Roman economy were forgotten. Classical literature and philosophy were largely lost in the West. Essentially, urbanized classical civilization disappeared.
There's a tendency to talk nowadays about the "transformation of the Roman Empire," rather than its fall, but I find that a bit too euphemistic.
Neither of those were wide-spread in Western Europe during the Roman empire either. If you take a look at the major cities of the Roman Empire they're generally in either Italy, Byzantium, or North Africa[0]. All of which continued past the fall of Rome. Literacy rates were also questionable [1].
> Without large cities, roads and security, long-distance trade collapsed and the economy became much simpler.
Long-distance trade certainly did not collapse after the fall. While it did decrease to certain extent in the near time period, it rebound within a century or two [2].
[0] https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=4db977...!
[1] https://www.quora.com/Was-literacy-common-in-the-Roman-Empir...
[2] https://oxfordre.com/economics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190...
Literacy was much more widespread in the Roman Empire than during the Dark Ages. If you go to archaeological sites like Vindolanda, you can see letters written by fairly ordinary people to one another. There was an entire literate culture that disappeared. The reason why they're called the "Dark Ages" in the first place is because of the paucity of written records.
> If you take a look at the major cities of the Roman Empire they're generally in either Italy, Byzantium, or North Africa
First of all, Italy and North Africa were part of the Western Roman Empire. Italy fared better than Gaul and Britain until the mid-6th Century, but Rome eventually declined from several hundred thousand inhabitants in the late Empire to a few tens of thousands.
There were major cities in Gaul, the German provinces and Britain, though: Augusta Treverorum, Londinium, Lugdunum, Narbo and Rheims all had tens of thousands of inhabitants during the Empire, but during the Dark Age shrank to a small fraction of their former size.
> Long-distance trade certainly did not collapse after the fall. While it did decrease to certain extent in the near time period, it rebound within a century or two [2].
The source you cite only notes that trade "never ceased." That doesn't mean there wasn't a massive collapse. The article notes that trade continued to decline for centuries after the fall of the Empire, into the 9th Century AD. The economy of Western Europe probably did not reach a similar level of development as in the Empire until the High Middle Ages.
What I'm pointing out is that the magnitude of the declines in literacy, trade, urbanization, etc. in most of the former Western Roman Empire were striking, and that they really can be characterized as a "collapse."
And don't think it couldn't happen again. We've stored the entirety of our cultural knowledge on an ephemeral digital network that depends upon an intricate and vastly complex technological infrastructure. If that collapses, so does modern civilization, and we're back to horses and buggies.
"Halted" and "post-apocalyptic" are strong words. The Fall of Rome was a very long and drawn out event, and plenty of technological and cultural development continued after the Fall. r/AskHistorians has many good posts[1] describing why the "Dark Ages" weren't Dark and the various advances made during the post-Rome pre-Rennasiance period.
A lot of people think that technological and philosophical progress stopped after Rome, when really it just isn't talked about. In my opinion, this is probably because it's a lot more exciting to talk about Roman architecture since many buildings still exist today, rather then the three-field system and mould-board plows that kept the population alive.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/235w3l/why_a...
Now, they didn't return to stone age of course, practical tools and technologies that were a part of common knowledge remained in use, but many advanced engineering skills were lost. Also the society drastically changed, it fell into religious fanaticism and extreme conservatism - which is the main reason why it was called the dark age actually.
While less available they were still known and studied and certainly not censored. Neo-Platonist and Aristotelian thought was very influential in the Post-Antiquity and Early-Medieval time periods: see the Desert Fathers and the Scholastics. And that's not even talking about the fact that the Byzantines were there the entire time; most "Renaissance" ideas had the origins in Medieval Byzantine thought.
As for hygiene, feel free to look at the Wikipedia article for it[1]: the sewers weren't that effective, people still threw rubbish in the streets, and the bathhouses were cesspools of disease. And that's not talking about that fact that Roman sewage and hygiene was just that: Roman. It's not like the Roman Empire was some golden age where every city in Europe lived like that. Most places it was just as dirty and filthy.
> Also the society drastically changed, it fell into religious fanaticism and extreme conservatism - which is the main reason why it was called the dark age actually. It went from being under the control of an autocratic emperor to...being under the control of an autocratic feudal lord. Saying it "fell into [..] conservatism" seems a bit off when it really just traded one man for many. Religious fanaticism I won't bother talking about (why does everyone think people suddenly became more religious after Rome?). As for the term dark ages, that's just a term Petrarch alluded to the time period with, which was then later used in reference to the fewer historical records we have for the time period. It made no reference to religious fanaticism or conservatism.
You are arguing against an ideology.
Save your breath.
This is their view of history:
Ancient Rome was enlightened. Then Christianity destroyed all the worlds great accomplishments. Then, Galileo showed everyone who was boss.
Oh yeah... a corollary to this version: Islam was as nearly enlightened as Rome and would have ushered in an age of elegant sophistication but for the no-good Crusaders.
So sad...
In reality, Ancient Rome was a brutal slave-based society where life was cheap, religious fanaticism was rampant, children were disposable, and death was glorified.
Given a choice of being an average inhabitant of the Roman Empire or an average inhabitant of medieval Europe, only the truly ignorant would choose the former.
How would you characterize things like Children's crusades (and Crusades in general), Holy Inquisition, hard prosecution of every other religion and even other Christian fractions like e.g. Cathars?
And let's keep Byzantine out of this, I was talking about West specifically. West which experienced a significant population decline, wars, plagues, and which between 1st and 10th century produced very little of anything new. No big science discoveries, very limited architecture pieces - almost all churches, the (single) religion becoming the absolute focus of any artistic and cultural life. The remaining books and educated people were forced into self-censorship, as many philosophical ideas were considered as blasphemes, and Church positioned itself as one and only gatekeeper to knowledge.
If it was like you're claiming then West Europeans wouldn't need Arabic books to learn about ancient Greece achievements (as they had), and there wouldn't be an explosion of culture and education and book production as it was after fall of Cordoba and Toledo back into the hands of Christians. Arabic library of Cordoba is claimed to have had 400 thousands books, which was estimated to be more than what the whole Western Europe had at the time. In just a few decades the number of books in Europe multiplied many times, first Universities started to be created, things started moving. Just look at the dates when the first Universities were created in Europe: Bologna and Oxford 11th century, Paris and Salamanca 12th century, etc. It's not coincidence, they regained access to the Ancient sources that were lost before and that put them back in the saddle. If all the knowledge was preserved and readily available all the time as you've claimed, this peak would never be that drastic. And also there wouldn't be "a lack of historical records" if people were writing down the facts more - instead of concentrating on religious discussions.
And yes, Francesco Petrarca was the first known to use the term Dark Ages, and he specifically meant that because of the lack of great works and authors of the Classical period. But he wasn't talking about "the fewer historical records" - he freaking lived in that time and was talking about his own feelings that the culture of his time sucks. And great that he did, because he helped change that later.
And the term certainly wasn't used only by him, and not only in that context.
The Ottomans did not take over East Rome until the 15th century, where much of the plunder was already gone to the West. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/ancient-history/fallconstan...
While the West would term the East Romans as "Byzantines" in the 15th Century, this isn't correct to say they were not in Roman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantium
It's not impossible but consider how many ancient human languages we still can't translate, or can only translate due to coincidence (as in the case of the Rosetta Stone with Egyptian hieroglyphics.) Translating digital information in a similar cultural vacuum would be exponentially more difficult. If that stick is encrypted, how does one even know there is information to begin with?
Also the engineers and high ranking members of society have to resources to flee to more stable regions and carry their knowledge with them. Its also the engineers that are usually given grace or offers by a opposing forces/rivals.
If you google "Iron processing in the middle ages" you won't find Bret Devereaux' excellent series[1], yet it is a much better read than the Wikipedia page.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
For Venus the original designer faced a dilemma: the known period relation (5, 8) was very inaccurate, whereas the accurate (720, 1151) was not mechanizable because 1151 is a prime number, requiring a gear with 1151 teeth.
I thought that gears with prime numbers of teeth would be advantageous because it would spread the wear evenly across the gear that it contacted.
You do have a misunderstanding about the wear. Unless your gear is oscillating back and forth, it will always move in a complete circle and always wear the teeth evenly. Note that the involute tooth design leads to less wear on an individual tooth, but it doesn't have to do with how many teeth are on the gear.
Let's say instead of a ratio of 720:1151, the ratio happened to be 720:1147. You construct gears with 24, 30, 31, and 37 teeth. (24x30 = 720, 31x37 = 1147) 720 and 1147 are still coprime, so you can't be reduced the way 720:1152 can be reduced to 5:8. (or more likely, 20:32) You connect the teeth of your 24 tooth gear to your 31 tooth gear, connect your 31 tooth gear to the 30 tooth gear via a common shaft, and connect the teeth of your 30 tooth gear to the 37 tooth gear. The final gear ratio of this mechanism will be 720:1147.
This only works because both 720 and 1147 can be factorized into manageable primes.
Constructing those 122 teeth will take 10 hours at 5 minutes a pop, which is a lot of work but not unmanageable. Furthermore, those four gears can be constructed by four workers, and it will take the 37 tooth worker 3 hours, but a worker working on a 1151 tooth gear will require 96 hours. The gears will be much smaller, easily fitting in your fingers.
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It's also more difficult to construct gears with prime numbers of teeth. If you need to construct a gear with 32 teeth, you bisect the angles a few times until there are 32 portions, then cut teeth there. If you need to construct a gear with 30 teeth, you split it carefully into thirds, carefully split each third into fifths, and then cut two teeth in each fifth. This would probably be a bit rough, but probably within tolerances. You split into thirds or fifths with a straight edge and compass, the way you can with bisecting, but you can wrap some string around the edges and even split string into thirds pretty easily, and fifths with some effort.
If you need to construct a gear with 31 teeth, there's not really a convenient way to do it. There's a lot of pedagogy involved; I think the best way would be to guess about how large a tooth is gonna be, add that to a string you've wrapped around the blank wheel, then repeatedly bisect the string into 32nds, then check if the 32nd tooth overlaps the 1st tooth well enough. If not, start over. But there might be a more convenient way to do it.
Also, meshing against a 1-tooth gear is problematic, so you would need to probably increase that to >4 teeth to have it work. Then your bigger gear needs to have >4x the teeth to get the desired ratio.
So it would be a coincidence, likely without much meaning.
Thus the mechanism has no relation to the sanskrit word.
We clearly do not know all the causal elements involved, plus I wouldn't be surprised if the name of the island itself had something to do with "antariksha".
Also just realised that I am replying to a sock puppet account. Thanks anyway.
Archimedes in the Sand Reckoner cites to be solving on a problem from the "Eastern Philosophers". The problem is also in the Vajra Sutra where the numbers of sands in the cosmos is contemplated.
Archimedes Father was an astronomer.
Great parallel lives material that never maid it into the original.
The Antikytheron is written in a Corinthian dialect, from where Archimdes father is said to have come from.
My musing consiracy theory for the Roman sacking of Syracuse was for the Antikythera from which harvest and thus taxes could be better calculated - i.e. Thales.
But the Romans killed the only guy who understood how the Antikythera worked.... so it became a generals paper weight.
In particular when it says "it was demonstrated in 2017 that the calendar on the Metonic Spiral is indeed of the Corinthian type but cannot be that of Syracuse," although as evidence goes that doesn't sound definitive.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Archimedes was part of an active intellectual community and is reported to have written a (now lost) manuscript on the construction of planetarium-style models ("On Sphere-Making"), so whether or not the artifact is directly from Archimedes there might be an intellectual link.
Thanks for posting the link. Much of my commentary comes from past research on Archimedes... so I am biased and amused.
If I recall the founding of Syracuse is by Spartans and Corinthians... Archimedes society cared enough about knowledge that he was sent to Alexandria to study. Syracuse was a melting pot of cultures from the start and the Phonecians and the roman conflicts reinforced that to the end.
I've named 3 types of plastic, you can't apply a blanket statement about any of them that applies to the rest.
There are several reasons for the gap in understanding of their scale, but one is that the well-settled communities (with some exceptions primarily centered in South America) often used primarily wooden construction, as wood was extremely plentiful in the New World. When the European plagues led to 90%-plus die-offs in these cultures, the survivors couldn't maintain the scale of cities they'd built, and since wood rots relatively quickly, their permanent settlements were all but eradicated by the time any subsequent waves of European exploration arrived to write down what they saw in languages Europeans could read.
Modern archaeology techniques, by analyzing land cultivation and the few remnants a wooden building leaves of foundation, are starting to comprehend the scale of the cities built by the original settlers of North and South America.
https://www.history.com/news/native-american-cahokia-chaco-c...
We only have a few books left from thousands of years of civilizations. It makes me incredibly sad to think about the history we lost. It would be like if we only had one or two books to understand all of Roman history. Absolutely blows my mind how fragile everything we've built is.
200 years of javascript-style churn does not a reliable storage method make.