OK, this story is a bit off-topic for this blog, but it’s just too cool not to post. The Antikythera Mechanism, a 2100-year-old device that calculated and illustrated the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, has been reconstructed. The working replica was built by Michael Wright, who used to work at the Science Museum in London and who studied the device for years. You can read about it in Wired’s blog. There’s also a video of Wright demonstrating the device.
I’ve been thinking about why the story of the Antikythera Mechanism haunts me so. For starters, it’s about astronomy, and about the history of how we (small animals in a big place) learned about our surroundings. The device is beautiful in and of itself, especially if you like orreries and other astronomical gadgets and are fascinated by the patterns of various solar system cycles as seen from Earth. It represents some surprisingly advanced technology for its time, and prompts what-if thoughts about how it would have been if we hadn’t lost that technology (not to mention questions about the fragility of our current knowledge, and a sense of appreciation for the way we currently share and preserve what we know). It’s also a compelling object because it’s one reflection of the aggregate contents of the human mind with respect to knowledge of the solar system at the time, one that made its way to us despite being lost on the sea floor for centuries. As science stories go, it’s one of the more satisfying ones.
