Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery
gla.ac.uk
gla.ac.uk
Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline? People who only read the headline and think "Woweee science is amazing!" before scrolling down? Anybody who reads the article will roll their eyes at the headline, and the publisher isn't even getting ad revenue from this shit. Why are they pandering to the most base idiots like this?
That's a bigger fraction of the population than we might like to think...and probably the majority of the eventual readers of that headline (as it trickles through to other publications). I'd bet your sarcasm is actually correct there.
When I worked at a research lab, the communications folks would often ask me, can we call it AI? They were almost begging to put that label on it, I suppose they new that would be high quality bait. But no, sorry it's just statistics and computational methods.
It is currently (4:50 PM EST) "GRAVITATIONAL WAVE RESEARCHERS CAST NEW LIGHT ON ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM MYSTERY" both in the article, and on the HN item.
If it didn't change, I guess my confusions stems from this is an extremely straightforward way to state it.
Two gravitational wave researchers wrote the paper, and the paper gave us more certainty about whether the Antikythera mechanism represents 354 or 365 days.
I can't envision how to make it less sensationalist.
Poking around this:
I have a test for myself before I rant about science journalism: "would it be confusing without the thing my rant is angry about?"
Answer here is yes, I'm very familiar with this sort of thing from the astrophysics people in my physics department 18 years ago (monte carlo, bayesian), but it would be bizarre from archaeologists.
Poking around this, again:
If that isn't convincing: the unwashed masses who we are worried being betrayed by clickbait don't know what "gravitational waves" are, there's no reason for them to be unduly attracted to it.
It's not technically lying but it will nonetheless induce people to think something which isn't true. If this confuses you, consider this article/example:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171114-the-disturbing-a...
> "A classic example might be if your mum asks if you've finished your homework and you respond: "I've written an essay on Tennessee Williams for my English class." This may be true, but it doesn't actually answer the question about whether your homework was done. That essay could have been written long ago and you have misled your poor mother with a truthful statement. You might not have even started your homework yet."
When you say something which is true but say it in a way or context which you know will cause somebody else to believe something which isn't true, that's a form of lying.
You believe that it is narrowly true gravitational wave researchers did this, like a kid saying they "wrote their essay" in response to whether they "did [completed] their homework"
I believe it is wholly true.
I believe we agree on the narrow truth that they are gravitational wave researchers.
I believe we disagree on the wider truth.
I believe you believe its a wider lie, in that it indicates they used gravitational wave-style techniques in this endeavor.
I believe it is widely true, because they're using the specific techniques that I saw astrophysicists use in grad school.
Is it possible you saw "Bayesian", assumed that was the extent of their expertise applied, then noted that it has no relation to their expertise, since that's entry-level stats, not physics?
From The ELements of Style, Strunk and White, omit needless words. Dropping "Gravitational waves" from the title conveys the same information.
The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
It doesn't really matter. The work is not exceptional, it doesn't shed new light on anything, and really only got the coverage it did due to clever use of key words and hype by the press release authors. In other words, like 90% of popular science.
I believe the author of the title deliberately crafted a title that would be misconstrued by his target audience into believing something false, even though it was technically true.
I believe this isn't lying, but I also believe it's not meaningfully distinct from lying.
"Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century’s most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer."
it elaborates further down: "Professor Woan used a technique called Bayesian analysis, which uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, to calculate the likely number of holes in the mechanism using the positions of the surviving holes and the placement of the ring’s surviving six fragments."
Bayesian analysis has nothing to do with gravitational waves, it's a statistics paradigm. It was not "developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime". The whole gravitational angle is totally superfluous and is only there to get more clicks.
They are physicists who are in practice data scientists. They are both male, presumably have experienced no amputations, and look like they were born in the 20th century. Their “day job” is in gravitation. They both likely speak English.
The only part of which which has even the slightest bearing on their work is that they are of late de facto data scientists, among their (presumable) other skills.
Unfortunately, this is the state of media today. It would be very helpful if the admins of HN could implement a way that users with enough karma could identify and vote to delete articles that have disingenuous headlines. Yes, we can flag articles, but maybe if we could choose WHY we're flagging to make others aware of what the problem is. If we don't protect the integrity of this site as an elevated place to have intellectual discourse, we will eventually lose it to the tidal wave of garbage content that seems to be getting worse by the day.
The headline seems fine to me. You might mean the synopsis after it?
In USA biology, there is a similar problem- it's known as the "Make Senators Believe Your Funding Will Cure Their Disease Problem" whereby even the simplest basic discoveries get pumped up to sound like they've cured cancer to induce future funding.
Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline?
University science-by-press-release drives me crazy, too. My guess has been that the intended audience is alums that might be enticed to donate more.
That doesn't seem as likely to grab the attention of people who watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
The antikythera mechanism is a (bad) predictor of planetary locations. People have recreated it in its entirety using legos. There isn't much mystery about what it does.
However, a new high resolution X-ray of the device inspired some scientists to do some neat math on it. I read the paper, it's good work. I'd love to a chance to get an article published about one of my papers, even more if regular people had even the slightest chance to understand it.
Besides that, things like the number of holes in the calendar ring matter.
Check out Clickspring on youtube, he's one of the people who narrowed the hole count down to 2 numbers, and this paper argues hard for one of those.
He's building a replica of the mechanism using period tools, and it's amazingly precise so far.
https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/07-HJJuly24-AOT...
Oh and quick timesaver for all the dubious people like me: they applied general statistical techniques from their gravity work to parsing the fragments of the computer we have. There’s no direct connection between the two subjects, otherwise.
EDIT: some kinda humorous scientific meta-commentary at the very bottom of the paper: they were able to get the anthropology paper based on these findings peer reviewed and published in print well before this technical paper finished peer review. If I were an Academia pen tester, this is the kind of race condition that I’d look for!
https://www.printables.com/model/284372-antikythera-mechanis...
It is insane how complicated this is, and this is a simplified version of the actual thing. This schematic of the proposed full mechanism (I think it's hypothesizing some of the missing parts) blows my mind: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Antikyth...
If you have a 3d printer, I really am enjoying the project and recommend it.
My guess is that the antikythera was probably state of the art, built by a highly advanced workshop by extremely skilled artisans, and cost an obscene amount of money. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison#H4
And the best was yet to come . . .
I also wonder about the abolition of slavery. It was normal through pretty much all of human history up to the last 200 years or so. Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor?
It's crazy that to some extent this is still true today. Automation could go a lot further with existing technologies and make many workers' lives easier or safer. But it is often cheaper to hire humans and burn through them instead of spending the money to implement new kinds of robotics. Especially when companies only think until the next quarter.
Earlier in life I created something that has generated a minimal stipend every month. That small security has enabled me to take risks, produce art, create technical processes, construct the water, power, data, and physical infrastructure for a private sustainable community, take a couple of years off to educate my children in technology, and, in short, prosper. It is life changing to know that the worst that can happen if you fail is that you will be mildly uncomfortable for a period of your choosing.
OTOH I see a lot of wasted potential, talented people working banal 9 to 5 jobs because they can’t risk failure, forgoing learning opportunities because they can’t take the time, and in general stuck in employment traps that prevent them from ever refining their natural talents.
Sure, some people will do nothing with their lives despite the opportunities presented to them… but many, many people would do much, much more if they weren’t trapped in a system designed to harvest, under duress of homelessness, the vast majority of their useful time in exchange for the lowest possible compensation.
Give humanity a chance. It might just surprise you.
Bret Devereaux proposed that Industrial Revolution was due to a highly improbable coincidence of circumstances.[1] It all started with a steam engine, and very inefficient one at first[2]. But it had found it place, and then James Watt made the better engine and it also found its uses. It gave time for material science and thermodynamics to catch up, and then steam engines became light enough to power ships and then locomotives.
Industrial Revolution, if we look closer took a lot of relatively small steps, and some of these steps made sense only because the stars lined up. Now people consciously "line up stars" to move progress forward, but then it was really a coincidence.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine
Of course we have solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear, but all of those are hard to access at any kind of scale without at the very least modern metallurgy and advanced materials made possible by fossil fuel energy. Modern renewable energy isn't possible without things like silicon PV, advanced materials for huge wind turbines, and batteries that are the product of extremely advanced materials science and manufacturing technology.
Fossil fuels were basically the thermodynamic seed capital.
It technically could have been done more slowly with wood and other biomass as a fuel and feedstock, but it seems like it would have been less likely to occur.
As well access to iron is required. And then eventually steel. All of this requires knowledge and writing and printing so that knowledge can be accumulated and propagated.
Late 18th century England and its colonies had access to all of these things. Coal, iron, printing presses, and universities. As well it had an political and economic structure that made risk-taking easy -- all the other prerequisites without risk-taking would still amount to the industrial revolution not happening.
Slaves weren't free. At least in the early United States, slaves were considered a significant investment; only rich plantation (land) owners could afford them. If they were cheap, then everyone would have had one. Here's an interesting article about the topic:
https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php
A typical slave in the US in the early 1800s cost several hundred dollars, which in today's dollars is between $60k and $184k. Obviously, this isn't something typical people can afford.
I'm not sure if slaves were this expensive back in ancient Greek or Roman times, but I suspect it probably wasn't that different.
Industrialization would have completely changed the economics of these places.
The price fluctuated heavily. After a successful conquest slaves were way more affordable. Generally, a lot of people were able to afford slaves, so it was cheaper on average too. It was also place-dependent, compare for example Athens where roughly half of the population was free, and Sparta, where most of the population was enslaved.
And of course even when slaves were expensive, most economically important labor was done by them anyway.
https://www.machinerypete.com/harvesting/combines
My point though was about the early days. There were no machines like that available, just slaves and animals. As long as there were slaves was there an incentive to develop this level of mechanization?
There are many factors at play. Serious industrialization requires several components to build on. There is a reason for example that "All roads lead to Rome". That's because no roads lead to Athens.
The machines to do the work, were the animals. Horses to carry merchandise around, bulls to plow land were used all over the place, by Romans, Greeks, Sumerians, Persians, everyone.
Metal constructions used for heavy work like iron, were too brittle, and bronze was too weak to withstand significant forces. It is only the last two hundred years that strong alloys were developed for industrial applications.
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/AF613...
I can't believe so many people people for for that kind of woo.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258728873_X-ray_Tom...
As for the method:
https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BHI-Antikythera...
> At the same time, one of Professor Woan’s colleagues at the University’s Institute for Gravitational Research, Dr Joseph Bayley, had also heard about the problem. He adapted techniques used by their research group to analyse the signals picked up by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors, which measure the tiny ripples in spacetime, caused by massive astronomical events like the collision of black holes, as they pass through the Earth, to scrutinise the calendar ring.
The title was very clickbait
The amazing thing is that the holes were placed with an average radial variation of only 28µm. This is about 0.001 inches. 2000 years ago. Our ancestors had some serious skills.
Seems like they are a bit out of their lane, as light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, a completely different force from gravitation.
More seriously: the fact that the two scientists happen to have been doing data analysis on gravitational data isn’t really relevant to the work, rather it was pulled out to make us click on the article title.
Super interesting work though, and not what I would have expected!
> In 2020, new X-ray images of one of the mechanism’s rings, known as the calendar ring, revealed fresh details of regularly spaced holes that sit beneath the ring. Since the ring was broken and incomplete, however, it wasn’t clear how just how many holes were there originally. Initial analysis by Antikythera researcher Chris Budiselic and colleagues suggested it was likely somewhere between 347 and 367.
I wasn't aware it had Greek symbols on it. That's all I meant.
Well, it was found in the Aegean sea, a few hundrend feet off the coast of the namesake Greek island, thousands of miles away from any ocean.
First you commented without knowing about the mechanism, or bothering to read to learn the very basic fact that it had Greek inscriptions.
Then you came back to comment that you believe it was found "in the ocean", again not bothering to read up, which would have told you it was found next to a Greek island in the eastern Aegean sea, as far away from the ocean as possible. Clearly didn't care to know the archeaologists' consensus either.
It seems like you have some bias to make it non-Greek for some reason?