The Antikythera mechanism reveals new secrets

Chris Budiselic and colleagues also wrote a paper https://bhi.co.uk/antikytheramechanism/ proposing that the front dial might be a 354-day lunar calendar rather than a 365-day solar calendar.

Clickspring is an absolute delight. The videos are straight up machining porn and the stuff that he builds is fascinating in its own right, the Antikythera mechanism being a perfect example. I cannot recommend this channel enough.

https://www.youtube.com/c/Clickspring/

This series is so good but it is unfinished with the last video being uploaded 5 years ago. I want for Chris to finish it so badly.

i'm 5m in to the first video and already hooked. incredible work... i saw the actual device in athens and the craftsmanship is still visible, and this is a fitting tribute. :)

Tools from that age? I’m on video 2, and it looks like he’s using a bunch of modern tools that wouldn’t have been available 2000+ years ago?

There are some rather compelling theories positing that ancient Egyptians discovered how they could make a type of glass that they moulded in to a lens at least 5M in diameter. At that size, the focused light from the sun gets hot enough to melt granite (among other things).

I thin you’re right that they likely would not have had the clarity to make those smaller optics useful, but it feels interesting enough to add here.

Scientists build on what they know, not what they speculate. "We" don't look down on ancient peoples, it's just that history didn't show any devices this complicated so this "unique" device has captured everyone's attention. No one is looking down on the Greeks. Ancients humans were as smart as we are, they just didn't have as much data to draw from to create new things or come up with new theories.

I'm not sure in general "scientists" do what you suggest. Not all scientists are required to take them, but there are courses in the history of science. I took two semesters and it was quite enlightening. The texts we used were replete with admonishments against the sort of chauvinism you suggest.

At the same time, if we discover some feat of engineering or scrap of insight that was heretofore thought unknown in the period it was created in, it's worth noting: it permits us to revise what we know about the investigators of the time and what they actually knew to begin with.

The ancient Greeks did the same thing. They believed that the walls of Mycenae were built by cyclops because they couldn't imagine how their forefathers built them - and so they dubbed it cyclopean masonry. Ancient aliens for ancient Greeks.

If you enjoy this kind of rabbit hole, check out Randall Carlson. People tend to dismiss him but what I like about him, is that he tries to put everything into the correct context, as time goes back. He is not just looking at a tiny slice of what/how things could have been in one domain (say, climate change or ancient structures or math) but tries to put all of it into context of everything else around it & regarding timelines. He also seem to not go out of his way to attribute historical findings to fantastical causes (aliens, gods, giants, reptiles etc) - he tends to boil them down to the simplest explanations (as boring as that is vs aliens etc) and also tries to imagine the mindset and the way the ancient peoples thought about things, how they gathered and transferred knowledge etc. Even if he is incorrect, most of what he claims seems very plausible and it is very humbling to reflect on what our home (the earth) has endured, how much our ancestors and other animals & plants have endured and just how perfect our planet is for us. We must cherish and protect it by all means if we can, but we must also protect knowledge and pass it forward. And then ultimately we need a way to store/send knowledge and life off-planet to somehow ensure we can repopulate the earth if things go sideways (again)(and it will, just a matter of time).

As I said, very nice rabbit hole to fall into. Randall Carlson and Paul Stamets are my two favourite bearded story tellers of our time, about our relationship to our home, our place in the universe & consciousness. They are our Gandalfs. They are perhaps not super accepted by mainstream science or all scientists, but they play a very valuable role.

Anyone else reading this, do you have any other Gandalfs that you can recommend?

> why can't we just admit that we don't know what ancient civilizations were capable of, rather than assuming they were incapable of simple tasks?

A quirk of humans CS Lewis calls "Chronological Snobbery" - that what we know and generate now is obviously superior to what they knew and generated then - because if they were so smart like we were, they'd have invented the stuff we did.

It falls apart with the slightest interaction with actual history (even the known bits - Roman cement and aquaducts are obvious examples that stick out), but since we don't really teach history, and that which we do teach is a bit "religion of progress" biased ("From the caves, to the stars, through us, always onward and upward!" - again, doesn't match reality, but nobody seems to care).

The gizmos we have now are mostly a function of the energy resources we've cracked open in the past few hundred years, which were related to some quirks of a small island to the west of the European continent a few hundred years back, and so on back through time.

Human nature hasn't changed for much of recorded history, and neither has human intelligence. It's been used in different ways in different times, for different goals, but if anything, we've spent the past 30+ years finding ways to destroy the human ability to focus in pursuit of profits - look at any modern smartphone app. Great profit, for someone else, because it destroys your attention. Oral epics and such are just a different focus from what we currently value, which is mostly "How can I capture and process behavioral surplus to generate prediction products to sell advertisements?" (to paraphrase Zuboff).

Never underestimate what a bored machinist can accomplish in their spare time.

Then you’d might find the axial cycle interesting, and this sculpture depicting it.

The plaza’s terrazzo floor is actually a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.

https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-26-000-year-a...

The Metonic cycle likely is the connection. No matter where you are on earth, if you start tracking the years (from the repetition of the seasons) and months (from the lunar phases), you’ll noticed the location of the moon (and, hence, eclipses) repeats itself after 19 years (it’s “almost repeats”, but discovering that takes either over a lifetime of observations or fairly precise measurements and trust in them)

I went to that museum last summer and I spent 90% of my visit at exhibits related to it. It's super cool, and well-presented, IMO.

More than a decade ago, Diomidis Spinellis created an implementation running on the OLPC, written in Squeak:

https://www.spinellis.gr/sw/ameso/

Backwards engineering the front and back and how it all came together and passed though has me picturing this as a possibly the earliest front end/back end development situation. It even included documentation. A software version would be neat to see.

I feel like I saw one on the F-Droid app repository

I was thinking the same thing! I 3D model would be really neat to watch and pick apart.

I have one on mu iPad. There are 2 in the App Store, I think.

It does make me curious. I mean, while I'm sure a machine like this would be rare even then, there have HAD to be more of them, or similar, simpler machines with cogs and dials, because these things usually don't exist in a vacuum.

We just don't know how much has been lost due to decay or re-melting stuff. I mean just look around and see how much stuff from, say, 500 years ago is still around. Tools and household items, I mean. It's limited to a few museum pieces. And if you look at some big upheavals / iconoclasms (always wanted to use that word) from recent years in for example the middle east, or the cultural revolution in China, a lot of these historical collections end up destroyed or lost for one reason or another. I mean some people were doing book burnings in the US not long ago.

The article proposes the explanation that because bronze was expensive if some gear broke the bronze was melted and reused maybe for something similar IF you had the skills to make a new one, but as likely used for something else.

Also it seems like a major undertaking creating such a machine. Perhaps they had just a few of them like we have just a few big particle accelerators.

The article does not get into how much effort and wealth it would have required to build such a machine assuming you had the people who could a) create the gears with high enough precision and b) assemble it. If you ever took a mechanical alarm clock apart and tried to re-assemble it you know what I mean.

This realization hit me after spending a few weeks in Italy seeing the remains of the Roman Empire. I had a building sense that they were awfully close to the industrial revolution, that there was no particular reason it couldn’t have happened thousands of years ago in the face of a highly organized, long lived, innovative empire with enormous resources. I think it’s an accident of history that it happened in England instead.

Really dumb question, but one I must ask after reading this article and then your post. Could it be possible that humans had some pretty awesome technology even farther in the past than we know (beyond earliest recorded history), but due to some extinction event all records of society from that time were wiped out?

For example if we had some crazy extinction event, the dark ages that would follow are pretty scary to think about. I would feel like the researchers trying to understand what I'm looking at, and they mention there's some sort of user manual inscription. If we are reduced to small tribes again, with no access to internet, electricity, running water, etc. I can't imagine us actually recovering to the current state without thousands of years. Most people have no idea how anything works, we just buy it on amazon and it arrives tomorrow or stream the latest movie. Just thought I'd throw my dumb question out there lol.

Their insight was great as well.

Most people today are familiar with Aristotle and Plato because the early Christian church embraced Neoplatonism's "perfect design" - but there was a very popular school of philosophy frequently overlooked because it was declared heretical.

The Epicureans not only were the first we know of in history to theorize that light was made up of tiny quantized parts moving quickly (the experiment showing this is what Einstein won his Nobel Prize for), they also thought the reason life existed was that out of chaos there were a great many worlds out in the void many which didn't have life at all and we just happened to be on a world with life.

They even thought that the first living creatures didn't have any senses at all, and through intermediary "freaks" eventually beings like us came to exist.

So there were ancient minds pondering quantized light, the anthropic principle, and evolution.

They just didn't have any ways to demonstrate who was actually right, and the group that eventually seized power declared much of what ended up being correct heretical and banned it.

They had BOTH insight and ingenuity. What they didn't have was the security or indispensability to protect those qualities from the masses who had neither.

I find it to be a good reminder that whatever complexity we have managed to create today likely won't last for 1000s or even 100s of years. We initially didn't believe that precision gears were possible for the time period this device comes from.

Sometimes I think about how I might present a progression from electricity and transistors to fully functional computers for a future society that somehow lost the knowledge. Most of our computing devices won't last 100 years. The ones that do might be older equipment with a little more "silicon redundancy" or even materials that are more resistant to corrosion... if they aren't mined for it first. Given that we store almost all of our current knowledge in electronic form, corroding/losing the ability to retrieve it will likely mean the end of the art.

You comment reminds me of one of my favorite short stories, Harry Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken": https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

Honestly, one of the biggest missteps we have had in the last 100 years is stopping the Apollo program. We would have probably been on Mars in the 80's and reaching out past that by now for sure. In general, I think a lot of people have lost their sense of curiosity and wonder, that need for adventure and discovery.

He used to build two of everything.

Once to figure out how to make it, and again to film it.

So he may end up with two of each project, one to keep, another to give away.

At the time the two fields weren't seen as separate things as they are now.

Astrology and astronomy were pursued by the same figures, much as Newton pursued alchemy as well as physics.

Probably just different material (not bronze)

> It is inconceivable for us to imagine a rapid regression today

To the contrary, I'm finding it increasingly likely that I will see the collapse of civilization within my lifetime, and I'm 57. I see two prospective tipping points on the horizon: the collapse of democracy in the U.S. leading to nuclear war, and climate change leading to world-wide food shortages. The former seems likely within 5-10 years, and the latter within 20-30.

(And BTW, I am not feeling anywhere near as sanguine about this as the text above makes it sound.)

    Another renaissance to recreate our civilization from 
    our published work would be nearly impossible. Or, 
    take centuries to accomplish.

We've long since used up the "easy" sources of energy on this planet - all of the fossil fuels conveniently located near the earth's surface have long been depleted. By the time they could possibly be replenished, the Sun will be nearing the end of its life. So we probably won't be bootstraping our way back to an advanced society via a second fossil fuel-powered industrial revolution similar to the first one.

The remaining energy sources are generally pretty tricky to harness.

For example, even if the knowledge to build nuclear reactors or solar panels is not lost during a civilization collapse, it will be awfully tough to actually get those power sources back online without an existing industrial infrastructure to mine/refine/transport all of the necessary ingredients.

If we get a "second chance" at this civilization thing, the road there is going to be insanely hard even if we're lucky enough to start out with all of the science-y stuff that our first civilization figured out eons ago.

> The Antikythera mechanism is a strong indicator of technological regression in human beings.

Is it evidence of widespread technological regression, or "this small group with strong leadership did amazing things, too bad nobody can do that anymore", or just people not wanting it anymore?

For centuries after it was built, there was no large scale collapse that could bring a widespread regression (there were many localized ones, including on the place that built it), and clockmaking was never considered a lost art or anything like that.

You might like Jonathan Blow's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

Also, is your name a reference to the Mars trilogy? Reading that now (:

And yet even in antiquity there were people thinking that the nature of their own existence was a recreation of the past from within the future.

We are actually performing early versions of such recreations as we speed towards both destroying ourselves and developing a lifeform that makes us obsolete, and yet many still don't examine the present moment against the past and future.

As for the Bronze Age collapse - in Alexandria around the 2nd century BCE following the conquest of Alexander the Great you had a ton of cultures of the Mediterranean comparing notes on their respective histories.

Most of those notes have been lost to us, but we have the general conclusions they drew which was that an Exodus from Egypt had occurred, it had been many different people and not just one, and they had conquered most of the Mediterranean.

And indeed, there's striking parallels between Ramses II, the Lybian appearing Pharoh with 50 sons, and stories like the Lybian king Danaus as part of Diodorus Siculus's Exodus fleeing Egypt from Aegyptus, his brother with 50 sons.

We know Ramses II captured many different peoples in battle, and that many of the groups captured later appeared as sea peoples, initially allied together with Lybia against Egypt during Ramses II's successor.

It only remains a mystery because of the reluctance of one group to think things occurred at all different to what's written in a single book scribed centuries later, and the reluctance of anyone not in that group to entertain that aspects of what's written in that book are a continuation of an oral history of actual events (though notably altered).

>If you were to send a time capsule forward with the recipes to remake our modern world, including eUV technology. How would you do it?

Acknowledging that I'm being edgy here...

"What do you get the man who has everything? Might I suggest a gravestone inscribed with the words: so what?” — Simon Munnery

I think I probably just wouldn't do it. In part because I suspect the main motivation is our existential angst more than a genuine desire to help unknown future persons.

Reminds me of Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

"Seldon explains that his science of psychohistory foresees many alternatives, all of which result in the Galactic Empire eventually falling. If humanity follows its current path, the Empire will fall and 30,000 years of turmoil will overcome humanity before a second Empire arises. However, an alternative path allows for the intervening years to be only one thousand"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series#Foundation_(...

It's the normal progression of civilizations. When one gets too rusty, it dies to lets its small and better offspring live: those people start from scratch, but they retain knowledge and rebuild all bells and whistles very quickly. We are the fifth. America will be home for the sixth and then, in a thousand years, it will become a history too. This is what Revelation 17:10 talks about, but in a more poetical form.

If you're interested in the subject, I'd recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast which digs into various civilizations and their decline: https://www.patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcast

Or, even better documented, the civilizational collapse in the aftermath of the fall of Western Roman Empire. It recovered in the second half of the medieval period, but in the West, the first few centuries after the fall were truly Dark Ages indeed.

Some of my friends believe the covid vaccines are part of a depopulation scheme. If they're right then the collapse of our civilization would be happening right now though we might not be conscious of it yet.

I think there was an attempt in FlashForward, but the series got cancelled.

I think the downvotes are because you are making a very low effort criticism (even with your clarification). If you expand a bit on why it sounds "narrative-fallacy" to you, you might get more traction.

I am sure he mention the engaging a 38 tooth gear that meant a 19 year cycle was done at half the speed first thought was needed.