Antikythera Mechanism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

by EndXA • 7 years ago

83 35 7 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

jhalstead• 7 years ago

For anyone interested, the Clickspring YouTube channel is recreating the Antikythera Mechanism.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA

utopcell2• 7 years ago

The Clickspring creator hasn't provided updates for months on his Antikythera reconstruction, but recently he updated his patreon supporters of the reason why: He has discovered something new about the mechanism, previously unknown, that he is working on publishing. Fascinating!

minxomat• 7 years ago

Ohh exciting. I saw this thread and wondered what happened to that project.

TheOtherDave2• 7 years ago

Cool!

std_throwaway• 7 years ago

Not only is he recreating the mechanism, he's also exploring antique methods and materials that were possibly used.

drexlspivey• 7 years ago

This guy on youtube is crowdsourcing a series where he is recreating the mechanism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...

dang2• 7 years ago

Plenty of previous discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Antikythera%20comments%3E0&sor...

djmips• 7 years ago

And how does posting a Wikipedia article link make it to near the top of Hacker news?

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

Firstly someone has to create a mechanical calculating technology that is lost to history before being discovered in a shipwreck by a society that has globally networked its modern equivalent. After that it gets complicated.

dang2• 7 years ago

As long as they're interesting Wikipedia submissions, they are on topic. Why wouldn't they be?

sgt1013• 7 years ago

I like the fact that these devices were well attested in history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_...) but still such a surprise when they appeared in archeology.

utopcell2• 7 years ago

It is as if knowledge about them was methodically wiped off history, or more likely (since history is written by non-engineers) it was not understood well enough to write about it.

sgt1013• 7 years ago

I think - just not of interest !

empath75• 7 years ago

It seems like only a handful of people ever made them and it probably didn’t even last for very long after Archimedes died. It was essentially an extraordinarily expensive toy.

ken• 7 years ago

No need to posit a conspiracy here. People died, and there weren't enough new people entering the field to learn it all before the critical mass of knowledge died with them.

I believe that the bulk of knowledge, in most fields, is passed from person to person through active practice, not through books. Books, as a cheap way to widely distribute knowledge, are relatively recent innovation, and most of what I know about any topic is not written in books. Or if it is, it's almost an afterthought, not the primary method of knowledge transfer. What book did you read to learn to tie your shoes, or drive a standard transmission?

On a related note: what is humanity's Bus Factor for creating a CPU? I know a little about semiconductors from school but I certainly wouldn't know where to start, even for a tiny 8-bit one. I doubt Intel writes down everything they've figured out. Could 2 or 3 especially unlucky "city-killer" asteroids send us back to a pre-information-age society?

analog31• 7 years ago

It could be that the thing just had no use, or that it became obsolete. I can imagine prediction of the seasons being useful for agriculture and trade, but people may have figured out how to do that without a calculating machine. Astrological uses would have depended on the particular astrology being in use.

goto11• 7 years ago

Information from antiquity is lost by default. It is only preserved if there has been is a continuous line of people preserving it.

summner• 7 years ago

On my recent vacations to Athens I visited National Archeological Museum where the Antikythera is displayed. I highly recomend seeing this device and its recreations live there.

Especially seeing the recontructioned devices gave me completely new perspective about ancient Greece.

person_of_color2• 7 years ago

Any 3D printed versions?

6thaccount2• 7 years ago

There is a really cool LEGO version someone built and you can see on YouTube.

walrus01• 7 years ago

For people that want to try this with a good quality 3d printer:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1821540

I recommend 0.1 layer height and conservative settings for a slow, but high quality print.

glangdale• 7 years ago

I had a friend in honours year computer science who did a project on tomography of the antikythera mechanism (working on image analysis software to remove ghost images of other layers), and helped discover why his advisor's previous model of the mechanism was mechanically immobile (when you turned it, it locked). He'd discovered that an axis seen end-on was actually 2 axes, if I remember correctly.

Amazingly enough he forgot to mention this in the end of year presentation of his work, so I got to ask that question to remind him... talk about burying the lede.

akkartik• 7 years ago

Jonathan Blow draws some interesting implications of discoveries like this one in a recent talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

Antikythera Mechanism

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