Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer--and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets
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Synopsis About this title In Decoding the Heavens , Jo Marchant tells for the first time the full story of the hundred-year quest to decipher the ancient Greek computer known as the Antikythera Mechanism. About the Author : Jo Marchant is a science journalist who has worked as a staff reporter and editor for Nature and New Scientist , where she is currently a consultant. From Publishers Weekly : Starred Review. Buy New Learn more about this copy. Other Popular Editions of the Same Title. Search for all books with this author and title.
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Amidst the fabulous sculptures, pottery and other ancient relics in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, there rests a strange looking collection of mostly corroded bronze fragments known as the Antikythera device. Email address:. The curator of the London Science Museum spent 20 years, using only ancient Greek tools, trying to reconstruct the device. Email Newsletter. Churchill Infantry Tank New Vanguard. Jo Marchant.
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The story falls into 4 parts: 1. Pre first world war: Greek archeologists Valerios Stais, John Svoronos, Pericles Rediadis intuitively understood the deep significance of the mechanism. However, they were unable to give a coherent explanation as they were limited by the current state of technology and scholarship. Inter-war period. Although little progress was made during this period, two scholars fell under the spell of the Antikythera: Theophanidis, a rear admiral in the Greek navy became so obsessed that he sold family property in Athens to pursue his research.
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Post-war period. Derek de Solla Price. C" in Price's account represented a huge breakthrough. However, a curator at the London Science Museum, Michael Wright, became increasingly dissatisfied with the details of Price's explanations.
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It seemed that Price had massaged cog wheel counts in order to get the gear ratios he needed for his thesis. Wright entered into an uneasy partnership with the Australian historian of technology, Alan G Bromley who was also involved in the reconstruction of Babbage's engine. Increasingly accurate measurements allowed Wright to create a model that showed the Antikythera was used to predict the movements of the planets. Ironically, the success of this current round of research validates Price's other contribution to the history of science: the exponential growth of scientific discovery Networks of Scientific Papers: Science The efforts of Price, Bromley and Wright were very much in the tradition of the individual researcher jealously guarding the results of their investigations.
The latest venture has all the hallmarks of collaborative, internet based, interdisciplinary work: 4 universities, 4 private companies and 2 government agencies. Publications on the Antikythera mechanism have also grown exponentially. The latest research shows that the mechanism could be used to predict eclipses and the dates of Olympic games. Each phase of the research has revealed that the Antikythera was even more sophisticated that had been assumed by the previous generation.
At the same time, modern archeology has led to a deepening understanding of Greek culture that allows us to specify the date and provenance of the Antikythera with greater accuracy: first century BC and probably from Syracuse or Rhodes. Why did Greek science and technology lapse so dramatically?
Probably because of the Romans, who had little interest in either. So the Antikythera challenges another myth, namely: the Greeks were scientists while the Romans were engineers. By this new account, the Greeks were both and the Romans were neither. Amidst the fabulous sculptures, pottery and other ancient relics in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, there rests a strange looking collection of mostly corroded bronze fragments known as the Antikythera device.
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Named for the tiny island near which it was found by Greek sponge divers in , in a Roman shipwreck, this artefact changes everything we thought we understood about the technology of the ancient Greeks. Consisting of at least 30 gears, the mechanism is an example of an ancient clockwork, dating from the second half of the second century BCE.
Nothing of this sophistication had previously been seen before the emergence of mechanical clocks, in Europe, in the fourteenth century. The book is essentially a detective story.
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The author describes, in lively prose, the exciting discovery and recovery of this ancient device, and the history of subsequent attempts to understand its purpose and function. Only recently, with the use of much modern imaging technology, have the secrets hidden inside the artefact come to light.
Much new information appears in a Nature article by a multidisciplinary team of mathematicians, historians and scientists. While our understanding of the precise functioning of the Antikythera device has evolved with continuing study, the basic principles involved in eliciting the details of its operation remain the same. One tries to understand how the various gears must have fitted together, and how the ratios of the counts of teeth on the gears could have modeled astronomical phenomena, as understood at the time. One must constantly bear in mind that, at the time the device was constructed, the Archimedian view that the earth was the centre of the universe prevailed.
The Copernican notion that the earth revolved around the sun was known already to the ancient Greeks, but was eventually discarded by all but a few adherents of that theory. The basis of the gear mechanism is the so-called Metonic cycle, which is a nineteen year cycle that attempts to bring into line a whole number of lunar months the time interval between one new moon and the next and the solar year. It turns out that lunar months is very close to 19 solar years. Several other such mathematical relationships between other sets of gears in the device have been worked out and discovered to model other similar astronomical relationships.
The device was ultimately a demonstration of various astronomical phenomena, and could model the orbiting of the earth, sun and moon, possibly the five then-known planets, and could be used to predict eclipses.