The Antikythera Mechanism: The Ancient Greek Super Computer

everyone today is familiar with the digital computer a machine that deals in ones and zeros a few million at a time but have you ever heard about analog computers or perhaps not as much as you probably should have an analog computer is a computational device that uses mechanical principles rather than digital maths to make calculations you may have seen one or two in your time like a wind-up clock for example quite how long these devices have been around is debatable but most agree that the first analog computers mostly astronomical Clocks Were first invented in and around the 14th century there was until one Discovery in 1901 near antichythera in Greece which changed our understanding of the history of computers forever it was a discovery so shocking that for nearly 70 years mainstream historians of Technology dismissed it as either a fluke or a fake that is until a small group of dedicated researchers unraveled its Mysteries and proved that the ancient Greeks did indeed possess astonishingly complex analog computers of their own and nearly a millennium and a half earlier than we thought [Music] thank you [Music] One Day in the year 1900 Captain Demetrius contos was in command of a crew of sponge divers from the island of Siamese as they plumbed The Depths off of points glyphalia off the island of anti-carethera always going well when one of his crew surfaced in a panic babbling about having seen a group of ghost women or mummies at the bottom of the sea divers often report strange sightings but contos nevertheless documented the incident and informed the Greek government within a year the Hellenic Royal Navy was back at the same spot to investigate and what they found would shocked the whole world there on the sea floor the Greek navy discovered an ancient shipwreck in a depth of about 45 meters and brought up a treasure Trove of bronze and marble statues the women the diver had seen as well as Pottery glassware Jewels coins and a mysterious box this was a cargo ship full of many of the finest Greco-Roman artifacts ever discovered we now believe that it may have been destined for the court of Julius Caesar himself a gift from the island of Rhodes the items are cataloged by by the national museum of archeology in Athens where the box which appeared to be little more than a corroded lump of bronze and wood when largely unnoticed as the curators of the museum fast over the far more arresting Vines like the coins and the statues and yet of all the treasures this mysterious Ghost Ship had given the world none were greater than that little lump of bronze and wood [Music] by May of 1902 Valeria stays at staff archaeologist at the Athens Museum had noted barely in passing what appeared to be a gear wheel embedded in a piece of rock he theorized that the device must have been some sort of ancient astronomical clock unbelievably Museum officials dismissed the find reasoning that the Greeks and Romans never possessed that kind of Technology meaning that the object must have been coincidentally dropped off by a passing ship perhaps a thousand years after the initial shipwreck had occurred perhaps Scholars lack of interest in the object was a blessing in disguise there it's at in the museum for nearly half a century a curiosity neglected as human beings went from the Industrial Revolution to the computer Revolution its relative anonymity meant that it remained undisturbed and never disassembled until 1951 when Yale University's Derek Jade a solar price took an interest in the device a physicist and Clark fictionado price would become the grandfather of a modern understanding of the mechanism pouring out the device's impressive Secrets over the decades to come he first recognized markings of the calendar month Libra on one of the visible gears as corresponding to the ancient Greek dialect of the period and place in which the Shipwreck occurred beginning with the assumption that the device was some kind of calendar clock he set about reconstructing its possible original design in order to convince the curators of the Greek Museum price needed to offer compelling evidence of what the mechanism might be it took a long time until 1971 for price and the Greek nuclear physicist Shara lampos caracolos to be given permission to examine the mechanism together they devised a method of scanning the device using x-rays which enabled them to image the mechanism they are by layer revealing its internal workings without ever destroying the machines a whole the series of x-ray images the pair produced of the 82 fragments of the mechanism were revealed to the world in a 70-page paper published in 1974. the result was shocking a device so complex in its design as well as in the knowledge that it implied about the workings of the solar system that many mainstream scientists at first derived at it as a fake [Music] throughout a subsequent half century of study scientists are painstakingly cataloged and examined every millimeter of the mechanism today its origin is without question in the academic immunity the device is an extremely complex analog computer once consisting of at least 40 gears which would have been capable of calculating anything from the exact position and size of the moon in the sky at any point during an 18-year period to the positions of every then-known planet in their orbits it could have predicted eclipses full moons and even the speed of the Moon across the sky and it would have told its owner the future date to Olympic Games and much much more the mechanism which some believed to have been even larger and more complex than what is now visible to us reveals that the ancient Greeks and Romans understood astrophysical Concepts which were only rediscovered in Europe in the 16th century or later including lunar standstill or lunestus which occurs when the moon reduces its furthest North or South Point in a lunar month and its apparent motion cease what's more beta-vised ways of building a machine to precisely mimic this Behavior it also reveals a far greater Mastery of complex miniaturization of mechanical devices than anyone had dared think existed in ancient Greece and Rome around the first century BC it has sparked the imaginations of thousands of anthropologists and historians as to the many secrets that may yet remain in European history the mechanism is constructed mostly of bronze in an ingenious array of interlocking gears which use complex mathematical procedures to rectify the solar year the amount of time it takes for Earth to rotate around the sun with the lunar month the amount of time it takes for the moon to Transit between nodes in the northern and southern hemisphere in a 19-year cycle that was only rediscovered in the west during the Enlightenment this means that the Greeks had a deeper understanding of astronomy than had once been thought and knowledge which rivaled 16th century science there are yet more secrets hidden within the mechanism contains a compound sent shaft a series of shafts within shafts with Rod and pin gearing again a piece of technology that was not thought to exist in ancient Greece which helps it to display the position of both the Sun and Moon as well as Venus Mars Mercury Jupiter and Saturn and to predict their future movement through mathematical calculations carried out by compound gears inside the mechanism the mechanism's calculations occur when the gears with different numbers of teeth work together to recreate the appropriate relative motion of different celestial objects the side handle meant to be operated by a person turns a main gear which represents the solar year the power from this gear is variously reduced or enlarged by subsequent connected gears to produce the motion of different objects including the Sun the moon the planets and the constellations in order to achieve this a dazzling display of mechanical workmanship was required each gear must be utterly precise and fitted ever so perfectly in place for the device to have worked it is in this way that the mechanism calculates the future bodies for example in order to calculate the 19-year cycle in which the solar and lunar years overlap and to accurately show where the moon will be in the sky at any given point during that cycle gears that indicate the solar day and the lunar day are connected by a series of smaller gears which translate the motion of the solar day into the corresponding motion of the lunar day the mechanism also appears to contain a number of Novel complications a name given by horologists for a device within a device which subtly changes its operation these complications seem to be inserted into the mechanism in order to make very fine Corrections of The observed motion of the planet that are not accounted for in the Greek's understanding of astronomy and yet do actually exist because of the Cycle's implanetary motion which the Greeks saw but did not understand this included the way in which the elliptical orbit of the Earth around the Sun or the movement of the sun itself around its own center of gravity where thus errors in their observations which needed to be corrected for mechanically in order for the mechanism to demonstrate the apparently irregular motion of the Moon around the earth how the moon appears to speed up and slow down in its orbit from our perspective the mechanism uses an ingenious series of compound canted gears offset from each other and spinning at different speeds which are driven by the Central Drive Shaft but which come into contact with the moon's controlling gear only when the moon is meant to be in motion and not when the moon is meant to stop in the model what is perhaps even more incredible about this model is that despite the fact that it can predict the positions of all of the planets and the Moon and the Sun in the sky it actually does this using the assumption that the planets and Sun orbit the earth thus a complex series of canted Gears must be used to represent the epicycles of each celestial object circular movement around a fixed Center of mass which was the way in which Greek mathematicians explained the apparent motion of the Sun and planets around the earth it is not far-fetched to imagine that if such devices had become really widespread in the Greek and Roman World some astronomers like Copernicus or Galileo might eventually have been inspired to solve the problem that kept such models from functioning in periods longer than a few decades indeed it was the invention of precise time keeping and exact observations of the heavens that did later Inspire astronomers to move past the model of the Earth as the center of the universe not all of the anti-cauthora mechanisms abilities are known and it is now believed that there were probably additional gears and dials which did not survive the device's underwater burial however modern reconstruction shows that the mechanism would have been capable of reconciling the solar and lunar calendars representing the precise positions of each planet and the Sun and Moon over a 19-year period the mechanism would have been capable of predicting solar and lunar eclipses and appears to have been able to show the timing of the ancient Olympic Games based on inscriptions found on the back of the mechanism five dials on the back of the mechanism demonstrate the 235 synodic months showing that the Greeks understood 235 lunar months to be extremely close to 19 solar years this allows the user to set the current solar day on the front of the dial and have the Day translated to the lunar Day within the 235 month cycle on the back of the mechanism it's believed that these calculations could have been important for planning important events such as military camp pains as well as religious ceremonies particularly when the ancient Greeks needed to know the length of a day in the future and the brightness of the moon on that day as well as its position using this mechanism a Greek or Roman general could predict that the moon would be full and located in one particular place in the sky and that the day would end at a specific time possibly conferring an advantage in a nighttime attack fragments of texts that were inscribed on the front back and inside cover of the mechanism showed that this was also a teaching device that would have been used to explain the apparent motion of the stars and the planets possibly to a young pupil or even a group of students while of course all these calculations very well could have been and probably were done by hand the ability of a Roman or Greek leader or teacher to visualize the precise conditions on a day in the future would no doubt be incredibly useful there's no doubt that among the many Treasures on this particular shipwreck the Antica through a mechanism was likely a central attraction probably representing many thousands of hours of skilled work many questions remain about device's Origins and the maker leading some to theorize that it came from the hand of Archimedes himself while there's no proof of this it's absolutely clear that the maker had a very clear understanding of all that the Greeks once understood about the heavens and it is extremely unlikely that this device was just a one-off its workings are too clever its craftsmanship too precise to be the result of a lone experimenter it was manufactured by someone and was probably of great monetary value [Music] study of the antichythera mechanism is ongoing as scientists continue to apply new methods such as microfocus x-ray computer tomography CT scans and polynomial texture mapping PTM to try and understand both the mechanism's purpose and the means by which it was initially constructed one of the most important findings of This research is the Revelation that whoever made it knew exactly what they were doing and almost certainly had made more than one such device master clockmakers who have studied the mechanism and some have even recreated it using ancient methods notes how the workmanship reveals no obvious Corrections or the addition of materials to a gear after it has been cut indicating that the maker was extremely masterful or that the workshop that created it was specialized in gear making to an extremely high degree this may in fact be new evidence that the Greeks at one time were able to produce assembly line products and may have owned very complex tool making machines of which modern historians now know extremely little however the mechanism was made the maker had most certainly done this kind work before when fully constructed the anticothera mechanism may very well have been the most powerful analog computer ever constructed at the time and yet the Precision and confidence of its design and execution strongly indicate that it is the product of many years perhaps even generations of complex clock making that predates Western European mechanical Clocks by over a thousand years the Precision of the mechanism also strongly indicates that the Greeks were beyond the Babylonians in astronomy and time keeping it had previously been assumed that most of the Greek understanding of astronomy had been learned from the observations of Babylonian astronomers centuries previously but the anticothera mechanism which includes complications in the orbits of Venus and Saturn which were unknown to the Babylonians also proved the Greeks had surpassed their inherited knowledge of the heavens these findings present a great mystery what happened to all the other evidence of these profound Technical and intellectual gifts possessed by the ancient Greeks one answer maybe as simple as it is frustrating it may be that devices like the Antica through a mechanism constructed of relatively soft bronze and subject to inevitable tarnishing and mechanical fouling were probably never intended to last for centuries to begin with the Greeks may have invented horology the making of clocks but they may also have invented planned obsolescence the thing that keeps other examples like the mechanism from reaching us through the Mists of time and it may be the same reason it's hard to find an original iPod they just weren't valuable enough to be preserved if they stopped working it may just been cheaper to build another this all leads us to ask what other Secrets remain buried in the Seas of the Mediterranean or indeed all over the world just waiting to be unlocked [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 483,042

Keywords: ancient computer, ancient greek, ancient greece, ancient artifacts, ancient technology, what is the antikythera mechanism, antikythera mechanism, secrets of the antikythera mechanism, antikythera, who made the antikythera

Id: -I_Ns7O35cE

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022