I haven’t read the paper under current discussion yet. I wonder how it relates to Budiselic & al.’s work. For anyone curious, the new paper is https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-84310-w (as far as I can tell, not linked by the posted article)
While he does use some modern tools and techniques, he also spends time doing things the same way the craftsmen of the time did them.
The ancients weren't stupid or primitive people. They were quite capable of quite subtle and ingenious engineering, and it is a shame that much of that has been lost over time.
What is interesting to me is that he shows that the craftsman that fabricated it were familiar with the techniques. This was not a one off wonder device. Numerous copies were probably made and they’re buried somewhere just waiting to be discovered. This is the level of skill that was lost during the dark ages and then rediscovered afterwards.
It probably was. Mind you the craftsman probably made more than one of that type of thing, but each would have been to order for the customer, and designed to the needs and budget of the customer. Want a different calendar - no problem at all. Want to skip the phases of the moon - that will save you some money. Want to add something else - just a bit more cash.
This was made by a master craftsman, but in there wouldn't have been a large number of people who could afford such a thing. It is possible the craftsman was paid to never made another so the buyer can show off something unique.
It wouldn’t have been very customizable. The mechanism uses gear trains with shared gears. The are physical constraints to what gear ratios work in addition to the constraint of integer tooth counts. The interdependency is inherent to the design.
But gear tooth counts are easy to change for a different ratio. This was not mass produced, everything was made to fit this machine. So the shared gears can change within the limits.
> It is possible the craftsman was paid to never made another so the buyer can show off something unique.
It's possible that Facebook will ring me today to make me VP of R&D and pay me $5m a year. But I have no reason to believe that is so, and nor do you, and nor does anyone about the craftsman who made the Antikythera Mechanism! There is no reason to believe that the thing was customized from a menu of functionality - it's just as likely that a machine like this was the tool of a navigator or sea captain and one of a hand made, very expensive, but standard type. Rather like a marine chronometer would have been in the 16th Century. I could argue that it's much more likely because we found the thing on a ship and so on - but there is just no evidence either way really.
On the other hand we do have references to similar machines, autonoma and so on, in ancient sources. So it certainly wasn't completely unique. The interesting thing to me is that it doesn't seem that this was translated into clock making.
I don't see how religious zealotry had anything to do with it. I presume you'r referring to Christianity.
This device originated some time in the second or first century BC, half a millennium before the ascendancy of Christianity, so we can't blame the lack of evidence of any successor devices during that period on religion.
The next time we see similarly sophisticated devices in Europe is the early 14th century, in the form of astronomical clocks such as those made by Richard of Wallingford in the 1330s. That's at the height of the ascendency of the Catholic church, and several hundred years before the reformation got under way.
You make solid points. I was thinking of the destruction of the library of Alexandria which I came to learn just recently was more a centuries long decline rather than a tear down by angry religious fanatics.
Or cultural prejudice and ignorance - the skills and ideas were likely retained in the middle east and used to build many of the mechanisms that were made to grace Mosques and palaces there - later to be ignored by scholars and historians alike.
>> I wonder how advanced technology would be today if the Greeks realised the potential of this mechanism at the time.
I'm pretty sure they did, at least the ones that were aware of it- otherwise, why would they make it?
>> * 200 AD: the industrial revolution.
>> * 300 AD: cars, the radio.
>> etc.
Yes, but why? Why would the ancients want to start the industrial revolution in their time, and what tells us that cars and the radio would inevitably follow suit? Maybe the fact that they didn't start an industrial revolution should tell us that their goals did not align with the goals of the era of the industrial revolution.
As to technological discoveries taking a predetermined path, one after the other, exactly in the order in which they happened in our times, there's no reason to assume this. How do we know what obvious things we haven't invented yet that are well within our technological capabilities but we simply haven't thought of? Everything is pretty obvious with hindsight and with enough obviousness everything looks inevitable, but in reality nothing is.
Here's my favourite example: the Australian aborigines invented the airfoil many millennia befor the Wright brothers. They could have at least made gliders to swoop down upon prey from above. They never did. Why?
Because who knows how ancient people thought? All we know is that they thought not exactly as we do, and so they did things different than us. There's every reason to suspect that the ancients would have done things differently: they did.
Edit: Oh. Wait. Was that a "whoosh" sound far above my head?
It is sad that even in this case, the orthodox line that "the ancients were ignorant about the movement around the Sun" is pushed by the very people who perhaps ought to know better. This machine would clearly have been a useful predictor of the positions of the planets regardless whether you subscribe to the heliocentric model or not.
It was more likely inspired by the pythagorian numerical model of the universe. Who is to say that Pythagoras was wrong? For example, all of modern chemistry is explainable in those terms.
"Ignorant" is a bit of a value judgement that I didn't perceive the article as attempting to make. Heliocentricism was indeed the dominant theory in ancient times. There were competing theories but they didn't have many supporters. It makes sense that the Antikythera device would probably reflect the prevailing opinion of its time.
