What is Indiana Jones’ Antikythera Mechanism? – 06/30/2023 – Science

After fifteen years, Harrison Ford returns to the big screen as the intrepid archaeologist Indiana Jones.

Accompanied by a new partner, played by the British Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Indy puts on the hat again and takes the whip that accompany him since the adventures began in 1981 in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.

On this occasion, the artifact he seeks to seize from the Nazis is the one that gives the film its title: the “Relic of Destiny”, which the characters in the film also call Archimedes’ Machine.

It is based on a real object, an ancient Greek device discovered by archaeologists in the 1900s: the Antikythera Mechanism.

It is unlikely that this mechanism – almost 2,000 years old – had the power to go back in time, as it happens in the film.

But what was the Antikythera mechanism really about? What was it designed for? And what relationship does he have with the famous Greek mathematician mentioned in the film?

Discovery

Had it not been for a storm on the rocky Greek island of Antikythera just over a century ago, one of the most intriguing and complex objects in the ancient world might never have been discovered.

After taking refuge on the island, sponge hunters decided to see if they had any luck in those waters.

They found the remains of a Roman vessel that had sunk in another storm 2,000 years ago, when the Roman Empire began conquering the Greek colonies in the Mediterranean Sea.

On the sand at the bottom of the sea lay the largest cargo of Greek treasure ever found.

And, in the midst of beautiful copper and marble statues, there was the most intriguing object in the history of technology.

Made of corroded bronze, the size of a modern notebook, it was manufactured 2,000 years ago in Ancient Greece.

The device is known as the Antikythera mechanism. And it became a kind of machine of the future.

“If it hadn’t been discovered in 1900, nobody would have guessed, or even believed, that something like this existed. It’s so sophisticated!” mathematician Tony Freeth told the BBC.

Incredible

“Imagine: someone, somewhere in ancient Greece, made a mechanical computer”, said Greek physicist Yanis Bitzakis – who, like Freeth, is part of the international team researching the incredible artifact.

“It’s a really amazing engine of genius,” added Freeth.

And they are not exaggerating.

It took about 1,500 years for something like the Antikythera mechanism to emerge, in the form of Europe’s first mechanical astronomical clocks.

However, understanding what the mysterious object was took time, knowledge and a lot of effort.

One of the problems was his anachronism.

The first expert to examine the 82 recovered fragments in detail was the English physicist and father of scientometrics Derek J. de Solla Price.

He began the work in the 1950s, and in 1971, together with the Greek nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos, he used radiographs and gamma rays to obtain images of the parts.

From there, it was discovered that there were 27 cogs or gears inside the device, which was tremendously complex.

important numbers

Experts were able to date some of the other pieces found, with considerable accuracy, between 70 BC and 50 BC.

But such an extraordinary object could not date from that time. Maybe he was much more modern and had fallen in the same place, several experts thought.

Price figured that counting the teeth on each wheel might give some clue as to how the machine worked.

With the help of two-dimensional images, the wheels overlapped, which made the task difficult. But he managed to establish two numbers: 127 and 235.

“These two numbers were very important in ancient Greece,” says astronomer Mike Edmunds.

Was it possible that they were using them to track the Moon’s motion?

The idea was so revolutionary and advanced that Price doubted the authenticity of the object.

“If ancient Greek scientists could produce these gear systems two millennia ago, the entire history of Western technology would have to be rewritten,” Freeth said.

The Greece of two millennia ago was one of the most creative cultures that ever existed, so there was no question of how magnificent its development was in all fields – even Astronomy, considered then as a branch of Mathematics.

They knew how celestial bodies moved in space, could calculate distances between them, and knew the geometry of celestial bodies’ orbits.

But would they be able to put complex astronomy and mathematics into a contraption and program it to follow the Moon’s motion?

The number 235 that Price had found was the key to the mechanism for calculating the Moon’s cycles.

“The Greeks knew that an average of 29.5 days passed between one new moon and another. But this was problematic for the 12-month calendar, because 12 times 29.5 equals 354 days, 11 days less than necessary”, explained to the BBC Alexander Jones, historian of ancient astronomy.

“The seasons and the calendar would be out of sync.”

perfect tune

However, the Greeks also knew that 19 solar years almost equals 235 lunar months—a cycle whose name is Metonic.

“That means that if you have a 19-year cycle, in the long run, your calendar is perfectly tuned to the seasons,” Jones noted.

And, to connect all these points, specialists found in one of the fragments of the Antikythera mechanism precisely the Metonic cycle.

Thanks to counting the teeth on the gears, the mechanism began to reveal secrets.

Moon phases were immensely useful at that time.

According to them, this information helped to determine when to sow, what strategy to use in battle, what day the religious festivals were, when to pay debts or if it was possible to make night trips.

The other number, 127, helped Price to understand one more function related to our natural satellite: the device also showed the Moon’s revolutions around the Earth.

After 20 years of intense research, Price concluded that he had already solved the riddle.

However, there were more pieces of the puzzle to fit.

three-dimensional images

The next step in the research required a bespoke technology — and an international team of experts dedicated to investigating the Antikythera mechanism.

The team managed to convince Roger Hadland, an X-ray engineer, to design and bring to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, a special machine to make three-dimensional images of the mechanism.

And, through another device that improved the inscriptions that cover most of the fragments, the researchers found a reference to gears and another key number: 223.

Three centuries before the golden age of Athens, ancient Babylonian astronomers discovered that 223 Moons after an eclipse (18 years and 11 days, known as the Saros cycle), the Moon and Earth return to the same position, so there will likely be another one. similar phenomenon on that date.

“When there was a lunar eclipse, the Babylonian king would step down and a replacement would take over, then the bad omens would go to him. Then they would kill him and the king would take over again,” said John Steele, a Babylonian expert at the British Museum in London.

And it turns out that 223 was the number of another of the wheels on the Greek contraption.

In a sense, the Antikythera mechanism could see into the future by predicting eclipses.

The device determined not only the day but the time, the direction the shadow would cross, and the color of the Moon that would be seen.

The importance of the moon

As if that wasn’t amazing enough, scientists have discovered yet another wonder.

The eclipse cycle depended on the lunar motion pattern, and “nothing about the Moon is simple,” explained Freeth.

“Not only is its orbit elliptical — so it travels faster when it’s closer to Earth — but this ellipse also rotates slowly, over a period of 9 years,” he detailed.

Could the Antikythera mechanism track this floating path of the Moon?

Sure enough: two smaller gear wheels, one with a tweezers to regulate the speed of rotation, accurately reproduced the time it takes the Moon to orbit, while another, with 26 and a half teeth, compensated for the variation in displacement.

And, as if that were not enough, when examining what was left of the front of the device, the team of specialists concluded that it once had a planetarium, as the system was understood at the time: with the Earth in the center and five planets revolving around it.

“It was an extraordinary idea: taking the scientific theories of the time and mechanizing them to see what would happen days, months and many decades later”, emphasizes the mathematician.

One riddle wrapped in another

“It was essentially the first time the human race had created a computer,” Freeth noted.

“It’s really amazing that a scientist at the time figured out how to use bronze gears to track the complex motions of the Moon and planets.”

But who was the inventor of the device?

Once again, experts explored what was left of the fabulous contraption to find an answer.

A clue was in another of his roles.

The Antikythera mechanism also predicted the exact date of the Panhellenic Games: the Olympic Games, the Pythian Games, the Isthmian Games, and the Nemean Games.

The curious thing is that, although the Olympic Games were the most prestigious, the Isthmian Games, in Corinth, appear in much larger letters on the relic.

Furthermore, the researchers had already noticed that the names of the months that appeared in another wheel had to do with Corinth.

Evidences pointed out that the creator of the play was Corinthian and lived in the richest colony governed by that city: Syracuse.

And Syracuse was home to the most brilliant of Greek mathematicians and engineers: Archimedes.

Archimedes?

Perhaps it was the work of the most important scientist of classical antiquity, the man who determined the distance to the Moon, discovered how to calculate the volume of a sphere, described the fundamental number π (Pi) and guaranteed that, with a lever, he could move the world .

“Only a mathematician as brilliant as Archimedes could have designed the Antikythera mechanism,” Freeth opined.

The truth is that Archimedes was in Syracuse when the Romans came to conquer it – and General Marco Claudio Marcelo ordered them not to kill him, but a soldier did.

Syracuse was sacked and the local treasures were sent to Rome. General Marcelo took with him only two pieces, both by Archimedes.

The research team thinks the parts were older versions of the engine.

A clue is found in the description given by the formidable orator Cícero of one of the Archimedean machines that he saw in the house of the grandson of General Marcelo.

“Archimedes found a way to accurately represent in a single device the varied and diverging movements of the five planets with their different speeds, so that the same eclipse occurs both in the device and in reality.”

But what happened to the brilliant Greek technology that produced the first computer?

Why wasn’t it developed more? Why did it end up lost?

Like so much else, with the fall of the Greeks and then the Romans, knowledge “migrated” to the East, where it was stored for a time by the Byzantines and then passed on to Arab scholars.

The second oldest known bronze contraption is from the 5th century and bears inscriptions in Arabic.

And, in the 13th century, the Moors brought this knowledge back to Europe.

Previous investigations established that the mechanism was housed in a wooden box, which has not survived the test of time.

A box that gathered all the knowledge of the world, time, space and the Universe.

“It is a little intimidating to realize that, just before the fall of a great civilization, the ancient Greeks came so close to our era, not just in thought but also in scientific technology,” concluded Derek J. de Solla Price.

This text was originally published here.