57 lines
2.6 KiB
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57 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
From rssfeeds@jmason.org Tue Oct 1 10:36:26 2002
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From: boingboing <rssfeeds@example.com>
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Subject: 2000+ year old Greek computer reinterpreted
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Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 08:00:32 -0000
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URL: http://boingboing.net/#85507259
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Date: Not supplied
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The Antikythera mechanism, recovered off a sunken ship in Greece in 1900, is
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thought to be a clockwork device to calculate the orbits of the celestial
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bodies. New analysis of the remaining fragments shows that it was wicked-cool:
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The Greeks believed in an earth-centric universe and accounted for
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celestial bodies' motions using elaborate models based on epicycles, in
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which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that
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itself moves in a circle around the earth. Mr Wright found evidence that
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the Antikythera mechanism would have been able to reproduce the motions of
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the sun and moon accurately, using an epicyclic model devised by
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Hipparchus, and of the planets Mercury and Venus, using an epicyclic model
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derived by Apollonius of Perga. (These models, which predate the mechanism,
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were subsequently incorporated into the work of Claudius Ptolemy in the
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second century AD.)
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A device that just modelled the motions of the sun, moon, Mercury and Venus
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does not make much sense. But if an upper layer of mechanism had been
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built, and lost, these extra gears could have modelled the motions of the
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three other planets known at the time<6D>Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. In other
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words, the device may have been able to predict the positions of the known
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celestial bodies for any given date with a respectable degree of accuracy,
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using bronze pointers on a circular dial with the constellations of the
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zodiac running round its edge.
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Link[1] Discuss[2] (_Thanks, Mark!_)
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[1] http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1337165
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[2] http://www.quicktopic.com/boing/H/UKW9AAQCsFibH
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