Hot off the presses…
2100-year-old computer is working again.
“The Antikythera’s user interface is deceptively simple, operated by a simple knob on the side. This conceals the intricacy within, amounting to a complex mathematical model, tracking the movements of planetary bodies and incorporating a series of submechanisms to account for the eccentricities of their rotation”.
Here is the video:
This suggests how little we know about the knowledge of the time, and how it was suppressed by the power struggles that followed (Romans, early Christianity, etc.). There is so much more in the Antikythera mechanism than meets the eye…
An Ancient Solution to the Longitude Problem?
The Antikythera mechanism indicates that the ancients had the necessary knowledge for navigating in the open sea (or the open desert).
To determine one’s exact position (in the absence of visible landmarks), one needs to know their latitude (their distance from the equator – north, south) and their longitude (their distance from a known location across the path traveled by the sun – east, west).
Latitude is relatively easy to determine by measuring the sun’s angle relative to the equator. (Or the difference between (a) the sun’s angle at the traveler’s home during this season, and (b) the sun’s angle at the traveler’s current location.) We know that the ancients had instruments to measure such angles.
However, longitude is harder to calculate [1].
- One solution requires detailed star charts and moon phases. This solution was being explored by Halley and others in the 1700s (through measurements and studies of ancient charts).
- Another solution requires the ability to keep perfect time while traveling (a clock set at the home port’s time), and the another adjusted every day to the local time based on the sun’s east-west position (when is noon here?).
These solutions were not available until a couple of hundred years ago. Consider Columbus, for example, who was off by a whole hemisphere (on the east-west axis – longitude) when he landed in America.
The Antikythera mechanism indicates that the ancients (Greeks?, Phoenicians?) had detailed star charts and moon phases. It is perhaps no coincidence that they were known as great navigators.
Also (considering how Pythagoras studied in Egypt and Babylon before he returned to Greece as an old man to teach his mathematics to a few select students), one cannot help but think of the three Persian magi, who navigated the dessert three hundred years later, guided by the appearance of a new star.
Also see the earlier post, “Antikythera Mechanism: The First Known Computer?“.
Reference
- Dava Sobel, “Longitude“, Walker & Company, 1995.
Posted by Bill Manaris 
