New Analysis Pushes Back Possible Origin For Antikythera Mechanism 62
We've mentioned several times over the years the Antikythera Mechanism, the astounding early analog computer recovered from a Greek shipwreck in shape good enough to allow modern recreations. The device has been attributed to different Greek mathemeticians and thinkers, such as Archimedes, Hipparchus, and Posidonius, but as reader puddingebola writes, "Current research suggests its origin may be much earlier, and its working based on Babylonian arithmetical methods rather than Greek Trigonometry, which did not exist at the time. Puddingebola excerpts from the NYT article:
Writing this month in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Dr. Carman and Dr. Evans took a different tack. Starting with the ways the device's eclipse patterns fit Babylonian eclipse records, the two scientists used a process of elimination to reach a conclusion that the "epoch date," or starting point, of the Antikythera Mechanism's calendar was 50 years to a century earlier than had been generally believed.
Training set... (Score:5, Insightful)
That seems like a weak assumption to start from, that is, if you were trying to make a device that predicted eclipses and wanted to check that it was working wouldn't you set the device to begin calculations for some time period during which you have reasonable records, say 50-100 years in the past...
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That seems like a weak assumption to start from, that is, if you were trying to make a device that predicted eclipses and wanted to check that it was working wouldn't you set the device to begin calculations for some time period during which you have reasonable records, say 50-100 years in the past...
Not only that, but also 205 B.C. (this "new" date for the calendar's starting point - just seven years after Archimedes died) it was not even an "old" date for Greeks...
(disclaimer: i am Greek!)
Re:Training set... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The etymology of "renaissance" answers your last snark.
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Granted, but generally speaking epoch points are selected to be at some point in the past, for a variety of reasons. Just consider computer date epochs - virtually all of them count from years or decades before the software was developed, and many start from a point thousands of years in the past.
The counterpoint of course is that for a simulation such as an orrery, the farther in the past the epoch is the more accurate the simulation has to be to obtain accurate results, and I don't know that the Greeks h
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"Just consider computer date epochs - virtually all of them count from years or decades before the software was developed, and many start from a point thousands of years in the past."
The most widely known being UNIX' epoch, which is January the first... 1970.
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And Microsoft .NT and several others use 1/1/1. Over 2000 years in the past. Symbian and other go back even further to 1/1/0
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Particularly relevant to the Antikythera Mechanism is the date system that astronomers use : the Julian Date [wikipedia.org], whose zero point is at mid-day January 01 4713 BCE. This software standard was introduced in 1583, though the definit
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How so? Galileo was working on the problem of the actual relationships of planets to each other, not so much sky-position prediction, which was more or less a "solved" problem at the time.
Re:look up also (Score:4, Informative)
Except for the fact that it's complete pseudo-scientific bunk, promoted by the likes of frauds like Von Daniken:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It's not really significant that Von Daniken used it in his work, it's that at least much of it seems to have originated there, and for the bits that may not, there aren't any references from earlier sources that are actually considered any more reliable. What a hoaxter promotes is less significant than what he originates. I bring this point up because there are some people, such as Carlos Casteneda, that tend to occasionally mention some real bits in the middle of runs of pseudo-science, and readers end up
Tower of the winds (Score:2)
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What happens when you link the Antikythera mechanism with the Kythera mechanism? Fusion experts should investigate!
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I wonder (Score:2)
How many ideas and creations have been lost only to be rediscovered, like the Baghdad battery, or the antikythera mechanism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Did you even read the link you posted? Those vases as found don't make electricity, because the bitumen used for sealing them is an insulator; moreover, even if you do alter the design, as the pseudo-archaeologist nutters did back in the day, you can't get enough charge out of a whole rack of those vases to do anything, because the design is so bad that no matter what electrolyte you use, you'll end up with problems. Real archaeologists suggest that the "battery" idea was always just wishful thinking on t
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The process of manufacturing concrete was lost, the process of manufacturing wootz steel aka damascus steel is still lost, there are ancient Chinese tombs with stainless steel swords. In all of these cases the manufacturing method relied on some naturally occurring material which was eventually exhausted and eventually painstakingly recreated from more basic sources much, much later on.
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Most archaeologists seem to have come to the conclusion that the Baghdad battery probably wasn't a battery after all [wikipedia.org]...
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Yep it's debated.
Re:A lesson about History- and the liar narrative (Score:5, Informative)
Correctly so because science is based on evidence, not wild speculation or serendipity.
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But also of observation (that bacteria were killed by mold) and methodical experimentation (isolating the mold, extracting the antibiotic chemical and performing control trials on animals). Use of Penicillin wouldn't have happened without those further steps.
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Difference being that relativity was mathematically deduced from a simple set of hypotheses.
Are you saying that archeologists don't follow scientific method [sciencebuddies.org]? Because that is not how I have experienced archeology. Archeologist have to construct hypotheses based on certain evidence and then set out to prove them like everybody else. Of course you can't obtain your proof sitting on your ass in an air conditioned office deducing mathematical formulae, you have to go out and dig around in the dirt to find you proof. If an archeologist finds marble sheets in Roman ruins around Europe and the the Middle
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But your example is about fitting various pieces of evidence together to come up with a theory that challenges previously held beliefs, our AC friend at the top there seems to have missed that bit out. It doesn't matter how true something is, if there's no evidence for it then it's not scientific.
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Umm, no. Perhaps you missed the part where Einstein wasn't actually all that hot at math, and the mathematical formulation of his theories was actually constructed by a mathematician friend, with Einstein claiming (possibly only humorously) to be unable to understand them. Or so I remember the story.
Relativity, like all theoretical physics, was constructed on thought experiments - aka logically creative speculation. There has been lots of mathematically deduced *implications* of the theory, but that "sim
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"Perhaps you missed the part where Einstein wasn't actually all that hot at math"
Relatively speaking -pun intended.
Einstein might not be as good at maths as his friend Marcel Grossman, but he still could beat your pants off any day of the week unless you are a professional physic or mathematician (and Grossman helped Einstein on his General Relativity work, once Einstein already had published what earned him his Nobel Prize -just to put things into perspective).
"it wasn't until years later that there was th
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But without the speculation, the experiments which eventually accumulated the evidence would never have been performed.
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"But without the speculation, the experiments which eventually accumulated the evidence would never have been performed."
That helps to produce a romantic narrative, but it is not usually the case.
Usually evidence gets gathered by "mere" observation of natural phenomena or by structured attack to current theories that, oh, surprise, happens not to render the expected results (falsification).
Usually, *only* when it's already suspected that a theory (or group of theories) has a flaw or a crack *and* there is a
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Generally speaking unexpected results point to a crack in the existing explanations, but they rarely point directly at an alternative. There then exists a period where lots of intelligent people speculate wildly and come up with lots of different alternate explanations that fit the new data, and try to come up with new experiments that would confirm them. Most explanations get rapidly disproven, and the handful that remain then compete for mindspace among the broader community until they are either disprov
Re:A lesson about History- and the liar narrative (Score:5, Informative)
If this device hadn't been found, anyone and I mean ANYONE who dared to suggest that such technology existed in this time-frame would be described, ESPECIALLY on forums like this one, as a complete 'anti-scientific' 'nutter'.
There are records of such devices (or at least related ones), but the Antikythera mechanism is the only surviving one. Cicero, for instance, describes an orrery which shows the motions of the moon and planets. Ancient Rhodes was famous for its automata [wikipedia.org].
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Correctly so because science is based on evidence, not wild speculation or serendipity.
The scientific process involves all three. Scientific results is the subset limited to evidence.
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"If this device hadn't been found, anyone and I mean ANYONE who dared to suggest that such technology existed in this time-frame would be described, ESPECIALLY on forums like this one, as a complete 'anti-scientific' 'nutter'."
Yes, exactly that.
And there lies the difference between a scientific mind and a nutter: once the device was found and found to be legit, the 'anti-scientific' tag is gladly removed and the implications researched.
The nutter, on the other hand, will still insist that "man was never on
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This topic really shook the nut tree (Score:2)
To get today's reactions, it used to be necessary to drop the name Tesla - the man, not the car.
Babylonian? or even earlier.. (Score:1)