https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...
But…
The first couple of minutes of Episode 9 amaze me. There is a section where two gears with slightly offset axis are joined with a pin and slot to approximate the nonlinear angular movement of the moon caused by its elliptical orbit.
It makes one wonder about the sheer number of observations and quantity of analysis they must have done >2000 years ago to work out the motion of the moon and translate the math into bronze.
[1] https://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/ua/BeforeCopernicus.html
The artifacts that we have found represent a small fraction of what these people produced and used. Are there going to be any iPhones (or Commodore 64’s)that will survive to thousands of years from now? If so, will future archaeologists be able to turn one on?
I have bouts of insomnia, and when I do, I found that listening to either Chris (or Bob Ross) while lying in bed help me tremendously to get calm enough to fall asleep.
https://greece.greekreporter.com/2018/11/15/has-a-missing-pi...
Additionally, recently they found some kind of inscription in it [1], which describes the way that it works. What is fascinating to me is that they also fixed a bug with the periodicity of an event and wrote it down. According to the tour guide, this signifies that it was massively produced. I still find it incredibly difficult to create a new gear without modern tools and also fix a 'bug' by creating a new, better gear to replace the old one that approximates an astronomical event with better accuracy.
[1] https://currentepigraphy.org/2008/09/24/inscriptions-on-the-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism
The oldest estimates for the Antikythera Mechanism are 205 BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
So it is very well possible, if not likely, that the builders of the Antikythera Mechanism were aware of the heliocentric model.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Ar...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus#Distance,_parallax,...
Even Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather) discussed evolution but Charles really filled in the gaps.
So it might have been an early developing model with discussion among contemporaries before it really "landed".
While Rome fell, Byzantium continued on. The state even continued to refer to themselves as Roman.
Certain construction items change and have good explanation, such as the Roman concrete - it’s volcanic components were no longer accessible to Byzantine builders, so the use became impractical.
But how did we manage to lose the knowledge behind the Antikythera device and why was it not recorded?
the classical greek period 600-350 bce
the Hellenistic Greek period 350 - 150 bce
the 'imperial' period 150 bce - whenever ce
Virtually all of the great scientific and technical achievements of antiquity were from the Hellenistic Greek society - the society of euclid, eratosthenes, archimedes, ctesibius, hipparchus, chrysippus, herophilus, supported by the Ptolemies in north Africa.
All this scientific work came to an abrupt end around 150bce due to the roman conquests, and the political atmosphere they created. Carthage (itself a cosmopolitan center of learning with close ties to the greek world) was not he only north african city razed to its foundations by Rome. Its easier to list the survivors: (1) Alexandria and (2) Rhodes. This completes the list. And the academics didn't survive: in 145bce Ptolemy VIII persecuted the city's greek elite so all the intellectuals fled, and the romans made a hobby of enslaving greek intellectuals, to have them work as copyists and teach their children to read.
Thus in a very short span of time, virtually all of the physical books were destroyed when the cities were destroyed, and the intellectual culture that understood the ideas was eliminated. There was a partial renaissance during the Pax Romana (ptolemy, galen, etc), but the understanding of the science was much more primitive and quickly faded with no state and cultural support.
As for technology - roman engineering was typically less advanced than greek engineering, and for technically difficult things the latin writing are both crude and wrong: their scientific engineering was done by importing engineers from the east. The antikythera mechanism (late 2nd century bce) is a good example of the decline: there is nothing of comparable mechanical complexity from the roman period, neither in archeology or in Heron.
See Russo[1] for very readable up to date academic scholarship on this kind of thing.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Revolution-Science-Born-Reb...
The idea that one should share ones inventions is not universal. While other wrote profusely, other ancient sages often guarded their discoveries fairly jealously.
I'm pretty sure lot of pre-20th century discoveries have been discovered several times by various people, but the surrounding society has not benefitted from their knowledge for various reasons.
An excellent example is Leonardo da Vinci. If this question irks you, I warmly suggest you read Isaacson's biography of him.
Leonardo discovered several scientific principles hundreds of years before his time, including Newton's third law, and the fluid dynamic operation of the human hearts aortic valve.
But since he never published anything, references to these were dug out only by latter day historians, and did not benefit his contemporaries.
It mentioned the archimedes sphere in the story
"Rehm suggested that it might possibly be the legendary Sphere of Archimedes, which Cicero had described in the first century B.C. as a kind of mechanical planetarium, capable of reproducing the movement of the sun, the moon, and the five planets that could be seen from Earth without a telescope—"
According to Wikipedia, they only had that kind of clocks since the middle ages, but if they were building a mechanism with gears to keep track of other planets in ancient times, surely they must also have done so for local time?
Another thing to consider is that the concept of doing things at a specific time may not have matter to much of the worlds population at the time and, even though they were capable; there was no demand.
To give it a title as the first computing device, I think there should be some analysis of operations that it can perform and whether they can constitute as a universal turing machine.
Otherwise, we can call stones as computers. They can do addition and subtraction by the virtue of counting. I am not familiar with Turing's thesis on a theoretical basis (having only read the popular "Turing's Vision" by Chris Bernhardt), is it possible to determine turing completeness of this mechanism?
Of course it isn't. Just like many analogue computers put together for the computation of ballistic trajectories or some other physical modeling task are not Turing complete. That doesn't mean they are not computers, just not general purpose computers.
PS Gears and cog wheels were only invented a century or two before the antikythera mechanism; scientific progress during the Hellenistic era was very rapid! Then the decline after the roman conquest was quite rapid as well - by the imperial period (eg Heron's writings) techniques like differential gears had already been lost, and they wouldn't be reinvented till (i think?) the 18th century!
But "Turing Complete" is relatively clear cut. To make a long story short, it means it has the equivalent of IF statements and loops. The first such device proposed is probably one of Charles Babbage's devices, which he was never able to complete. The first known to be actually completed is the German electromechanical "Z3" by Konrad Zuse in the early 1940's. In theory you could run Windows programs on both devices; IF you have tons of patience, storage tape, and time. (And want to build an x86 emulator for them.)
It elevates the machine to a common capability level that can solve any computable problem. Therefore, it is important to understand turing completeness.
b.) I wish people today would stop thinking people back then war "stupid", people have the same intelligence for the last 10k years and the same thought processes (e.g. when reading Sumerian texts) but not the same tools or knowledge. So someone from old Greece would come up to speed very fast and then make inventions in our time frame based on our knowledge. You could argue with him the same way you can argue with todays scientist.
