Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Katie explore the puzzle of the "world's first computer", and what it might have calculated.
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Hey Katie, what was your favorite subject at school other than of course biology?
Well, firstly lunch and then after that maybe recess, and then I guess it's a tie between English and art.
And do you think you remember those subjects well enough to like, maybe help your future hypothetical children with their homework.
I guess it depends on when those future children arrive. If it happens in the next few years, maybe.
Well, my son is sixteen and he's taken chemistry right now, and it is a challenge for me.
Is that because chemistry is hard because you've forgotten most of it, or because of the explosions.
I love the explosions. The problem for me is that chemistry feels more like memorization than actual conceptual understanding.
Oof. Yeah, I hope our former chemistry teachers are not listening in on this conversation.
I hope my former high schoolchemistry teacher has forgotten as much about me as I've forgotten about chemistry.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm very glad I don't teach chemistry.
I'm Katie Golden. I have a podcast on animal biology, and whenever I have to talk about chemistry on that show, it is rough.
Hoof No, Well, it's interesting because you're in biology and I'm in physics, and some people might say, like chemistry is right in between them, so maybe between us literally we should be able to understand chemistry in theory.
Yes, if knowledge worked that way, if knowledge worked like even diagram, yes, absolutely.
Well, it's amazing to me how much I've learned and how much I have forgotten along the way. But since chemistry, in my view, is mostly memorization, it's basically all been forgotten.
Yeah. I don't do so well with memorizing things when it's just this sort of wrote memorization, you know, like what's it called. When you're trying to like come up with some like system to memorize something, it's like, oh, you know, like maybe these letters mean something to me. I'm terrible at that. I cannot do that.
I think that's called biology. Isn't biology mostly memorization? This part of the plant is called this, This part of the plant is called that.
Oh I'm bad at that, yes, which is why I write things down.
I see. Well, it always seems strange to me that we're testing kids on their ability to memorize stuff when nobody in the field memorizes anything. I mean, we just use references, like when I'm doing physics, I never remember the values of any of the constants I look them up, so I never understood the focus on memorization.
Yeah, I think all tests should let you google. Have even seen doctors googling stuff. You're at their office and you ask them a question like, huh, I'm trying to remember that, and then you see them on Google and they think they're all slick about it. But I see that all right.
Well, before we start googling our symptoms, let me welcome you to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which we do our best to mentally google the entire universe. We want to understand how everything out there works. We want to take you on the journey of building a human understanding to describe the entire universe in our minds. That includes physics and chemistry and biology and maybe even history and psychology. We want to understand everything.
And I just remembered it's mnemonic devices. That's that memory thing that I forgot, but now I remember, So I need a mnemonic device for remembering. Mnemonic devices super mnemonics or pneumonic squared.
And of course humans have been building knowledge about the world, not just chemistry and biology and physics, but astronomy and geology and all sorts of stuff. And it's tempting to think about that journey as sort of a linear path. It's like starting from not really knowing very much as we look out into the world and developing into our now very sophisticated understanding of the nature of matter. We sometimes think about that as like climbing steps towards understanding, but really it's a very forked path. There are many, many branches there, and many times when knowledge has been lost.
I mean, this sounds like we're about to rediscover Atlantis or something, a lost civilization full of like computers and robots made out of rocks and twigs. I'm here for that.
Well, it's a very compelling idea to imagine that the ancients may have known things that are now for and have been lost. And of course it's fertile ground for pop archaeology and frankly, conspiracy theories. There are all these shows about like ancient archaeology and ancient aliens and all sorts of crazy stuff because history is lost to us, right, because most of it is not available, right, we don't know what people were thinking and doing and talking about at the time. We only know what we can find now.
I do like that it's so inconceivable to our modern brains that ancient people could do something like move rocks or figure out the sun, and so we just have to come up with aliens came down and did it for us.
Yeah, and there's an unfortunate shadow of racism there, doubting that ancient peoples could not have done what we imagine we could do. But there is also a kernel of truth to this, because we know that there is a lot that has been lost. You know, some of the ancient writers we know about only because of other ancient writers. You know, we all know about Plato mostly because a lot of his writings survived, But his famous teacher, Socrates, almost nothing of his has survived, and we know mostly about him because of what other people have written about him. Imagine if we could access the writings of Socrates, like, what could we learn about the way the Greeks thought about the world.
This is why it's really important to make friends and influence people, because imagine if everything about you is lost except for what people know about you, and what if they're like Yeah, that's Socrates. He was a real jerk and a drunk.
And not just make friends, but also be careful with your notes. I was reading about Aristotle, and though we have some of Aristotle's works, it turns out that all we have from Aristotle are the things he did not intend to publish. Like everything he actually published is gone, is lost. All we have are like his drafts and his notes basically, you know, basically the draft unsent messages from his email folder.
I think that's everyone's literal nightmare.
Essentially his diary. You know, like I got so mad at Plato today because he said, blah blah blah, his stupid solids.
You don't want history to see your drafts folder.
Never And on the podcast, we mostly focus on what we do and don't know about the universe today, but sometimes we do like to dive into the history of knowledge to understand why we think things we think today. How did we discover this, How do we actually know photons are real? Why do we think this is the case? Where did this idea come from? Because I think it's important to understand that a lot of the way that we think about the world has been shaped by the ways other people have thought about the world. We sort of have made a slow journey into this mental space, but we could have taken other journeys. Right, there are lots of lost paths in the history of science, and if we go back and try to uncover some of them, we can understand the choices that we didn't make, or some of the directions that we didn't take that we might have taken that could have influenced the way we think about the world.
It's like a branching tree ma out of human brains over centuries, which now, okay, it sounds a little grosser than I intended, but still.
Exactly And as we dig into what the ancients knew and didn't know, we do find some surprises, some things that don't quite make sense to us, that give us glimpses into how they thought about the world and what they were capable of.
So there's so many lost things, like what are some of these aspects of ancient life that we have recovered that could guide our understanding of like whether they knew stuff that seems inconceivable to us that they would have known things and that may have gotten lost to history.
Well, we're going to dig into exactly that question on the podcast today when we talk about what people have referred to as the world's first computer. So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question, what does the endicothea mechanism do?
Boy, are we actually going to talk about robots matter rocks?
Robots made out of rocks? Is that some video game that you're playing?
No, No, it's just how I imagine, like the ancient Lost city of Atlantis. You got all these high tech things, they're just man out of rock.
I see. It's like the original steampunk, right, It's like the steampunk of steampunk.
Rock punk, rock punk exactly, Flenstone Chic.
Exactly. So this is a really fascinating bit of archaeology that intersects not only with the history of science, but the history of physics and the history of astronomy, and gives us a window into what the Greeks were thinking about the world and the universe, and also how they were able to calculate it and predict it. So, as usual, I was curious if people had heard about this particular archaeological object, so I went out there into the internet too ask people if they knew what this thing was. So thanks very much to everybody who participates in this segment of the podcast, and if you like to answer weird and tough questions for everybody else's educational amusement, please don't be shy write to me to questions at Danielanjorge dot com. So before you hear these answers, think to yourself, do you know what the anti Cathera mechanism actually does. Here's what people had to say.
I think this is a very old mechanism. It's supposed to be one of the earliest things that can be called a computer. Maybe I believe it was used to predict celestial events, maybe like when planets meet, stuff like that. Otherwise, I think it's not fully understood and there are still some stuff we might find out about it.
Thera mechanism has been guarded for thousands of years by a secret sisterhood of astronomers. It is a defense against the of the Chi Thera, a many headed planet eating space gorgan. Day by day, the cai Thera draws nearer, and the Antikythera mechanism has been guarded for thousands of years by a secret sisterhood of astronomers. It is our only defense against the coming of the chi Thera, a many headed planet eating space gorgan. Day by day, the chi Thera draws nearer, and day by day her hunger grows.
I honestly have no clue. It sounds like something from magic to Gathering or star wars. I'm going to say it's anti magic, just trolling. I have no clue.
I guess the anticular mechanism was the one found in the agene See, which was used to find the planets and the stars for navigation purposes.
So I've never seen this word before, and so my first impression is that it's some sort of medieval torture device. But given the context of this podcast, I'm going to guess that it's some sort of mechanism that describes the reaction between elementary particles.
I do agree with the person who said it sounds like an ancient torture device, especially because there were so many weird torture devices back in the day, like iron Maidens and the Pair of Despair. It was pretty pretty messed up. But yeah, I remember hearing about the anti Caathera mechanism and there was a lot of buzz about just like, what does this do? Is this some kind of like doomsday prediction device. Is it unlocking the secrets of the world. It felt like a huge deal, like if we could figure out this mechanism somehow, it would reveal some secret about the world.
Well, when I heard evil torture device, I thought, maybe this is part of ancient chemistry homework. This thing like turns out chemistry problems.
Or something organic chemistry homework. Yes, that's right.
Exactly, And you're right that this object really has captured the imagination of a lot of historians and archaeologists. And the object itself comes from ancient history and has its own really fascinating history of how it was discovered and how people started to figure out what it might be and what it means about ancient Greek society.
So this was confirmed to be from ancient Greece, When was it discovered? And then when did they think it was from?
So it's a really fascinating story. It was discovered just over one hundred years ago, around nineteen oh one, and it's called the Antikythera mechanism because it was found near one of the Greek islands called Antikatha. They don't think it's from that island. They found a wreckage of a trading ship that sank more than two thousand years ago, so that's where it was found. But it was sort of found by accident. There was a ship that was diverted near this island because of a storm, and when the storm passed, they were in this protected bay and they decided, Hey, let's just do some diving here while we're stopped. So the divers went down and they found this crazy number of statues. The first divers that came up said that they thought that the water was filled with dead naked people.
Oh God, it's interesting because it feels so much like Kismet that they would find this place. But if the storm drove them there, I wonder if it's some kind of repeated sort of current that brings things in that direction. So maybe it's not as coincidental as it seems like it was.
Yeah, perhaps maybe it's like a ship graveyard or something. For thousands of years, it's been like eating ships. It's certainly possible.
The Antikythera quadrangle.
I don't know exactly exactly, and you have to cast your mind back to like nineteen hundred when they were exploring the water. They didn't have the kind of scuba technology that we have now, So you have to imagine people in like canvas diving suits with like these big brass helmets, you know, going underwater. And it's actually a bit tragic because they didn't understand the idea of water pressure and com slely to avoid the bends. So some of the divers involved in this expedition actually suffered quite badly. But they discovered this incredible wreckage. It's some huge ship had sunk there and left coins and jewelry and statues, and for a long time they thought that was the most interesting thing about this discovery. It was an incredible discovery of all sorts of artifacts, but it took them a long time to even notice the antiko, the mechanism among the wreckage.
Well yeah, I mean, gosh, that's such a spooky kind of visual I'm getting of all these divers and these old diving suits with the big heads and then just roaming among these sunken statues. And of course that's going to be hard to spot this mechanism because when you first look at it, it's just kind of like a tray with some gizmos on it, so it's not super noticeable. But I'm really glad they ended up picking that up.
Yeah. Fortunately they were a thorough about it, and as you said, first they paid most attention to the jewelry and the coins, and the coins helped them date this ship back to around the time of Julius Caesar, and the speculation is that this was a really huge trade ship, too big for most tarbors to even take, and so they think it probably was on its way to Rome, maybe for all these spoils to be displayed in some parade for Caesar himself.
So if this was sort of data to Caesar, how did we know that this was of Greek origin and not of Roman origin.
Yeah, it's a great question. And for a while people weren't even sure that it belonged with the ship. They thought it was so shocking in the advanced that maybe it like fell overboard later and became intermingled with it. But it has Greek letters on it, like there is Greek writing on it once you take the thing apart. So they're pretty sure that it was made sometime between one hundred and one hundred and fifty BC.
My god, that's really old.
It's really old.
Is it completely impact or is it kind of only partially impact.
It's mostly lost, actually, which makes it challenging to understand what it is and what it did. And it's not even that obviously an interesting thing. Like they gathered all of this stuff up, and there was one chunk that was just like a big rock with like a piece of metal sticking out of it. And you know, these archaeological digs proceed pretty slowly, and this thing actually went unnoticed for two years. It was just like a lump of stuff until somebody noticed that it had a gear sticking out of it. And they're like, wait a second, a gear. And you have to understand, like gears, small precise metal gears had never been seen before in antiquity, like we have seen them in like the fourteenth century or fifteenth century in medieval Europe. But archaeologists didn't believe that the Greeks could also make these like very small gears thousands of years ago.
Yeah, because they didn't have wrist watch, because they had risk sun dials back then. But yeah, no, that is shocking. So they just were basically using this thing as a paper weight and then they saw it had gear sticking out, and so how did they proceed from there? Did they kind of start to open up this rock and what fell out of it.
So the thing was basically ignored for a couple of years as they were working on the more obvious treasures, and because it wasn't treated very well, it sort of fell apart, and as it fell apart, you could see more inside of it, and that actually helped them discover what it was, though it's a little bit tragic because some damage was also done because it wasn't being stored properly. But it was a challenge at the time. Some people are like, oh, look at these gears, this must be some sort of clock, some sort of complicated astronomical clock. Was the original idea, but this idea was dismissed by archaeologists at the time, right because they thought it was impossible. Like the Greeks, they had things like big wooden gears that you could use to turn windmills like. So the concept of like gears is rotating circles that are meshing together and turning each other existed, but not the ability to make these things very very small. So it sort of just sat in the museum for decades while people were like, huh, nobody really understands that question mark.
So finally, we must have decided to look at it. More So, when did we do that? And who basically decided, Hey, why don't we give this thing a second look?
So it wasn't until the fifties when a British physicist and historian of science named Derek Price started to look into this, and they tried to look inside of this thing, and they took these radiographic images basically X rays, and what they saw inside this thing shocked them. It wasn't just one coroda gear stuck in a lump. This thing had a lot of gears inside of it. There were at least thirty different gear wheels in this lump.
That's crazy because if you have so many it and this is just part of it, that implies this was an incredibly complicated thing.
It was really incredibly complicated, and it was really impressive because it was so small. The size of this thing is inches like reconstructions of what this thing might have looked like originally suggests that it might have been like about the size of a shoe box. So this is a very small, very intricate device. It's really impressive and really confusing for people. How the Greeks were able to make this and to understand exactly what it might have done for them.
Yeah, because gears have to be somewhat precise, right for a thing to function fluidly, especially if you have a small precise object like to produce those gears. To have the technology to create these really precise gears that work fluidly, that it doesn't all just kind of jam and break down. That seems really difficult, and it's not something I would have expected people would be capable of doing at that time.
Yeah, And it's not something that's like molded. This is something that's like stamped out of a bronze sheet. So imagine putting this thing together. And as you say, it has to be very very precise. If you're going to use this to like predict the eclipses or the phases of the moons, then it can't be a sloppy piece of machinery, right. It's essentially something that they're going to try to capture your understanding of how the universe works so that you could sort of run the universe forward in time. That's why they call it potentially like the world's first computer, because it's like a physical device that's supposed to be representing the calculations you might otherwise make, and do it for you. They imagine that the thing might have had like a hand crank on the front of it, and as you crank this thing, various knobs and dials word and pointed in various ways and told you things about what might happen in the skies in the future, which at the time was very powerful information if you were hoping to like, not attack your enemy on the date of an eclipse, for example.
That's really really interesting. So let's take a break while I pick up the pieces of my mind that have been blown off the floor, and when we return, let's talk more about what it did, because I'm having trouble conceiving of something just made out of gears being able to predict things like eclipses.
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All right, so I have reassembled my mind and now I'm ready to learn how could this thing have done things like predict the movement of celestial bodies just with these gears and something that was made in ancient times that it's hard for me to believe.
Well, it's really fascinating to sort of think about what the philosophy of a computer is, like, what do we use computers for. Computers are little physical machines, and you know, they can be digital or they can be analog whatever, but essentially they're physical machines that carry out calculations, right, that do things for us. And these days we have very very very flexible computers that can do all sorts of things. But back in the early days, computers were designed to do like one specific task. So you take the mathematics problem you have, maybe you want to predict where your cannonball is going to fly or something, and you figure out a way to represent it physically so that the laws of physics how things move and touch each other end up cranking out the answer for you.
So, why do we think this was some form of astronomical calculator rather than something like a music box or for fun?
There is I think a lot of room for skepticism there. I don't know if you follow archaeology, but I feel like when archaeologists don't know what something is, they're like, oh, it's a religious symbol, or oh maybe it predicted the sun and the moon.
Right.
It seems to be like sort of their go to explanation for we don't know what this was, and it makes me wonder about, like, you know, stuff in our world. If they're going to pick up like a Nintendo game bowl and be like, oh, this must have been the center of a religious ritual, or maybe this predicted eclipses or.
Something just a Greek pinball machine exactly.
And so in order to come to this conclusion, you have to solve two puzzles simultaneously. One is you have to understand what did the Greeks think was going on in the sky, what was their cosmology, how did they think the universe worked? And then the second puzzle is how could this little bronze device represent that or did it reflect their cosmology, because you know, the Greeks had a very very different view of what was happening up there in the sky than we did. So you can't look at this device and say, hey, does this represent our understanding of the cosmos how we think the Moon moves and how we think Jupiter moves, because that's not what they could have been calculating. They didn't know our idea of the cosmos. They had their own weird Obviously now we understand to be wrong ideas for how the universe worked, So we have to unravel what they thought was happening and then figure out if this thing is reflecting their sort of early understanding or misunderstanding of the universe.
Yeah, because they thought that guy like Apollo pulled the Sun in his chariot, right, So what exactly other than the Greek mythology, what was their view of the universe.
So the Greeks believed that the Earth was at the center of the Solar system, and basically they were looking up at the sky and they were trying to track like how the stars moved, and how the planet's mood and how the moon moved. But it was a geocentric theory of the way that the world worked. It's what we call the Ptolemaic system. It's really ancient, the idea that the Earth is at the center of everything and everything else moves around it. And to us that seems sort of like obviously wrong now, but it's easy to discard that in the light of history. Right, But if you go back to like who they were and what they were seeing, it's not a totally bonker's way to think about the universe to think that the Earth might have been at the center of everything.
Right, Because when you are tracking the night sky and you're standing there from Earth, every thing rotating around you, so it feels very much like you are at the center of this rotation, right.
It really does. Like that is our perspective, in the same sense that like, before you measure the Earth's curvature, you might think, oh, yeah, sure, it makes sense for the Earth to be flat. It's consistent with what you see. So let's not like just dismiss the ancient geniuses. Let's try to understand what they were thinking. And you know, they considered the idea that maybe the Earth was moving and maybe it was rotating around the Sun, and so they considered that theory, but they thought they had disproved it. They thought that if the Earth was moving around the Sun, they would be able to tell. They thought, if you looked up at the night sky, you would be able to tell that the Earth was moving because the stars would be wiggling.
Huh, why would they think the stars were wiggling.
The same way that like if you paint a bunch of stars on the walls of your room and then walk around, your view of the stars changes, right, because as your perspective changes, what you see changes. And they thought that the stars were much much closer than they actually were. They didn't realize the stars were suns that were super bright and super distant. They thought they were sort of in their neighborhood, and so if the Earth was moving around the Sun, then we would get a different view of those stars. This is what we now know is like parallax. And because they didn't have the technology to detect that the stars actually did wiggle a little bit as the Earth moved, and they thought the stars were much much closer, they dismissed this idea.
I mean, it makes sense, like when you look at the stars, they're so bright. The idea that something is so many light years away from you that could produce that light, that would be so hard to speculate about them being so far away.
Yeah, and it's a really powerful lesson in sort of the history of physics that you can hold onto one assumption. In this case, they were assuming that the stars were not super far away, and that led them to make a second wrong conclusion right, that the Earth was stable and was at the center of everything. So you should always be like on the lookout for these assumptions that might have closed doors that have truth behind them. But we can't blame them too much. It's a difficult thing to observe. The stars are super duper far away, and so their position in the sky does wiggle a little bit as we go around the Sun, and we can use that to measure the distance to the stars. It's sort of like if you hold your finger in front of you and you look at it with your left eye and your right eye, you see a different picture, And as your finger gets closer and closer, your left eye and your right eye see more differences than if your finger is further and further away. So the closer something is, the more differences you'd see. It from different points of view, So as the Earth goes around the Sun, we get different views of the stars, but mostly for the closer stars.
I used to do that a lot as a kid, hold my finger right out in front of my nose, close one eye open the other one vice versa, because it felt like magic, like my finger was jumping around. But yeah, that's I mean, it's so interesting that they really got close, right, like, had these correct ideas, but they just because they had this assumption of the stars being closer, they just missed it. But they were right about other things too, like things being spears and not flat, right.
Yeah, exactly. The Greeks understood that the Earth was a sphere and the planets were spears and all this kind of stuff. And it wasn't until Kepler and Copernicus, you know, more than a thousand years later, that we understood the things didn't move in circles around the Earth, but instead that they moved in ellipses with the Sun at the center. And then it wasn't until the nineteenth century we were actually able to measure this parallax effect to see that the stars really were wiggling as we went around the Sun. And so you know, no shade on the Greeks for not having figured that out, especially because you know, still there's a lot of folks out there that don't seem to have absorbed this knowledge. I was shocked to read that there was a survey by the NSF in twenty fourteen that asked Americans whether the Sun went around the Earth or the Earth went around the Sun, and twenty six percent of Americans believed that the Sun went around the Earth.
Oh boy, Well, maybe they're time travelers from ancient Greece and they're just trying to blend in.
Maybe they are. So the key concepts that the Greeks had that were wrong that we need to have in our minds as we think about the Antikathera mechanism is that things moved in circles and that everything went around the Earth instead of around the Sun. And these two concepts made their calculations actually much much more complicated than they had to be.
That's interesting. So they were just making the work harder for themselves. So do we see evidence of that on the anti ca ethera mechanism of these weird views of the Earth being the center and orbits being circles.
We absolutely do because gears are actually a nice way to describe circles, because the gears are themselves circles. But the problem is if you look up in the sky and try to describe the motion of planets just using circles, it doesn't really work right, Like Jupiter doesn't move around the Earth in a simple circle, because what's actually happening is both of them are moving around the Sun. Sometimes Jupiter appears to be going around the Earth, and sometimes it sort of changes direction and seems to go the other way. And you can see this pretty clearly if you look at the heliocentric model for the Solar System, where the Earth and Jupiter are both moving around the Sun, and you think about what happens from the Earth's point of view. Sometimes it looks like Jupiter's going one way around the Earth, and sometimes it looks like it's going the other way, because they're both really moving in circles around the Sun. And so the Greeks puzzled about this for a long time, and what they decided was happening was that the planets were embedded in these crystal spheres of ether. But there wasn't just one crystal sphere. There was like several crystal spheres, So like Jupiter was moving in this crystal sphere, but then there was a second sphere that also moved it. So instead of having one circle, that had two circles, a big one and a little one, and those two working together would explain the retrograde motion. So these are called epicycles.
Interesting also about like the fact that they used these circular gears for the whole thing. I guess it does make sense that you'd want to be looking for something like a cam or some oblong shape, because I know that for automatons that were made in like the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, they would actually use like these cams that had these like complex oblong shapes, so they can make these movements that are not perfect circles. So if you didn't see any of that, that's such an interesting hint to like what their conception of the universe was.
Yeah, And one of the biggest clues that confirmed that this thing might be an astronomical clock, which is counting the number of teeth on these gears. So they found pairs of gears, big ones and small ones that had gear reissues that lined up perfectly with the Greek's concept of these cycles. So the Greeks, for example, thought that Venus moved on two cycles, two different circles, and these circles had a ratio of one one five one to set twenty. But it's like almost impossible to make a gear with like one thousand and fifty one teeth in it. What they found instead were other smaller gears with almost exactly the same ratio, like an approximation. So they found gears, for example, with like two hundred and eighty nine and four hundred and sixty two teeth in it, which has like almost the same ratio as what the Greek thought was the exact ratio of seven twenty to eleven fifty one. And so they found all of these pairs of gears that reflect what the Greeks thought was happening in the sky, these ratios of the size of these crystalline spheres, and that was a very strong clue that this thing was a computer for predicting astronomical locations.
That's really interesting. So instead of trying to make it tinier and more precise, they just used that same ratio with their still impressively delicate, but larger, more crude gears.
Yeah, that's exactly right, And this thing shows a really impressive sort of engineering. Eat those because sometimes they would make these approximations, and the approximations would let them use the same gear for multiple things. Like if you could have a gear with seventeen teeth in it, and seventeen appeared in two of these ratios, then you only needed one of those gears, and it could drive two other gears. You could like do two calculations at the same time. So as they take this thing apart and understand what the gears are and try to understand what the gears can do, they phased a big challenge and like actually reproducing Greek calculations, like it's one thing to say, okay, it's got some symbols of the moon on it and the sun on it, and it's got some gears, but actually putting it together to see how it works turned out to be a huge challenge, and there are still puzzles today about what this thing exactly did and how it worked.
This is why I never undo the Rubik's cube. When I get it, I just leave it as it is, so people think I know how to do it, but you know, it's just like, oh yeah, I did that this morning, but you leave it as it comes out of the box and then you never have to redo it.
Or what if this whole thing was just like one of their email drafts, it wasn't actually finished.
We'll talk more about whether we can reproduce the anti Caathera mechanism after a quick break where I'm totally gonna do a Erubik's cube.
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All right, So just did a Rubik's cube blindfolded behind my back. No need to check my work. So let's talk a little more about this antithera mechanism and why it's so difficult to reproduce it.
So some of the puzzles were worked out by price in the middle of the last century, some of the sort of easier ones, you know. For example, there were gears that we noticed that had like two hundred and thirty five teeth or one hundred and twenty seventeeth and some of these things you can understand based on the Greek understanding of how things worked. So, for example, there's a bit of an awkward disconnect between how the moon cycles and how the sun cycles. Right, So for example, it takes like twenty nine and a half days to go from new moon to new moon, which is like almost one twelfth of a solar year, but not exactly right. Twelve times twenty nine and a half gives you three hundred and fifty four days, eleven days short of the solar year. So if you have these two calendars, they sort of naturally go out of sink, but every nineteen years things sort of come back into sink, and every nineteen years there are two hundred and fifty four orbits of the moon around the Earth. Now two hundred and fifty four again is a large number of years. Half of that is one hundred and twenty seven. So these are the sort of like mathematical puzzles that went through to figure out like what could this gear potentially mean? Where's the number one hundred and twenty seven mean to the Greeks. So in this case we think maybe it was a way to connect the solar year with the lunar year.
Yeah, I feel like I'm in a Dan Brown book right now. All we need is some cult members to chase us and try to kill us, so that yeah, I mean that's they had such complex problems they had to figure out with this thing made out of all these gears. You know, I'm not an engineer. I like to think I'm somewhat crafty, but it is so hard for me to imagine being able to figure out how to manage these gears in a way that they're doing all these calculations and things like making up for that difference between the lunar and solar calendars. It's so hard for me to understand how they would have done that.
It's really tricky, and for a long time it was sort of like vaguely understood. But around twenty years ago people wanted to dig in deeper. They wanted to like actually developed models of this thing that lined up number one with like what we had found archaeologically, that had pieces that represented things we had actually found and predicted what we understood the Greek cosmology to do. And it wasn't really successful. You know, there's a lot of missing pieces. You know, we think we've maybe discovered like a third of this thing. So it's like trying to figure out how a game boy worked if you only had a third of the pieces, right. And also, the thing is like stuck inside of a blob and you only really have fuzzy pictures of it.
And there's like an inscription that's saying blow in the cartridge and you have no idea what that means.
That's right up, up, down down abab specialistic codes. And so around twenty years ago they decided to take more data because now we had more advanced technology and we had fancy computers, so you could do things like basically put this thing in xCT scan. A CT scan is like three D X rays. You put this thing inside a powerful beam of X rays so you can image the inside of it, and then you rotate it, put it on a turntable and you spin it around and you get all these three D X ray images and then the computer sifts them together and makes like a three D model of what's inside this thing. So instead of just having these like radiographic images, about twenty years ago we got these like three D tomography. It's like idea of what's really going on inside of it, and that was a huge step forward.
I just had that done to my teeth to get a mouthguard in not so fancy, are you now? And look if they're a mechanism, that's right.
The mystery of what's going on in Katy's teeth is just as deep a question science.
What happened here arguably more spooky.
You've been chewing rocks to get Katie, but this particular rock is very delicate. Right. You don't just like take this thing out of the museum in Athens and ship it over to the X ray machine, right. Instead, what they had to do was build a special, extra powerful machine and bring it to Athens, because they didn't want to this thing at all. So they built like an eight ton version of this three D X ray machine and had to like drive it through the streets of Athens and like lower it down into the basement and museum with special cranes. The whole thing was a big project, but it give us like a real glimpse of the interior of this thing. And based on that, a bunch of different groups are trying still to piece together what they think happened, And there's like papers on this from like, you know, a couple of years ago, people are still speculating, Oh, maybe this gear went with that gear, or maybe there was a missing piece here. Right, There's a lot of guessing involved, a lot of people trying to develop theories that describe what they thought this thing did and also that was consistent with what they thought the Greeks could do, right.
Because I was thinking, like, is this just one genius prodigy person making this thing or was this reflective of the society at the time being able to make things like this? Because it's it's odd to me how this mechanism is such as standout among archaeological finds, Like it's not like we're finding gears all over the place in ancient Greece. So like, was this the work of the Einstein of Greece, like the Manhattan Project of Greece, but less destructive, or was this something like is there a whole aspect of ancient Greece we are completely missing?
It's a great question. We have some hints from ancient writings. There were some descriptions of these kinds of machines, people describing the existence of them, these boxes that could be used to predict the motion of the moon and the sun. So there are contemporariest writings that suggest they exist, but not lots of them, right, very few mentions, And so we don't know how many other ways this kind of technology might have been used in Greek society. We sort of should have known about it from these writings, but didn't even accept it when we saw one because of our preconceived notions of like primitive Greek technology. It does really require us to reimagine what the Greeks might have done. The kind of technology we're talking about here is really kind of impressive. They've estimated that building this thing, according to one of the models of how it works, requires complex and precise machining to within millimeters. It's nothing compared to what we can do today. But two thousand years ago, I mean, we didn't see that kind of thing in Europe until like the fourteen fifteen hundreds, with very complex medieval clocks, and so it is sort of shocking, and it does make you wonder what else they might have used that technology for. What else is out there waiting in shipwrecks that we haven't yet uncovered.
Yeah, I mean, this is a society that hadn't even invented the days, yet so very very ancient.
And it's a really fun archaeological puzzle, right, not just to figure out what this thing might have done, but to figure out how they might have made it, Like what technology did they use to create these things? The same way people like to ask questions about how did the Egyptians build those pyramids? Like it forces you to try to uncover their technology and their stratategy for solving these problems without our tools, and so of course people speculate, you know, maybe this is the signature of some advanced civilization that's been lost. I even read this quote from a mechanical engineer that said quote, unless it's from outer space, we have to figure out a way in which the Greeks could have made it. Which is not to suggest that it's from outer space or that the Greeks were aliens or anything like that. It's just a sign that we should keep our minds open when we think about these ancient societies and what they were capable of. We have a very very narrow view of what happened there and what they were doing and what they were capable of, and we shouldn't let that narrow view close our minds to what else they might have done.
My theory is a secret race of giants and this is just some gears from their huge risk watches.
Maybe these were riskwatches they used to cheat on their chemistry tests. I think to bring it all together, there's a nice link between how this thing was originally lost for us to discover and how this thing was then later discovered. As you said, it's a story of sot of two storms, one that sank this ship that had the mechanism on it, and then one that diverted the ship that later found it. And I don't know if storms are likely or unlikely in that part of the world, but if it hadn't been for those two storms, this thing might still be on the bottom of the ocean.
So what you're saying is probably aliens caused the storms to gently guide humanity in a journey of self discovery.
You know, I'm not saying it, but it's possible that alien contrails in the atmosphere due to the advanced mechanisms of their propulsion devices, might be causing storms that lead to great archaeological finds. I'm definitely not saying that.
You've just started a new doom stay called. I hope you're happy.
No, But I do like digging into the history of technology and the history of science and getting an understanding for how people thought the universe worked. And remember that our concept of the universe might also contain like blindingly silly assumptions, things we think are obvious that we don't even question, and then lead us to make all sorts of other mistaken assumptions and mistaken conclusions. The history of physics is filled with these moments when we peeled back the blinders and saw the universe was very different from the way we imagined it had been. So cast your mind back to the ancient Greeks and think about how they saw the universe and how things might have gone differently for our science if so much of their knowledge hadn't been lost.
Yeah, I mean, if they just hadn't dumped their stuff overboard in favor of the booze. You know, that's what happened. We got to lose some ballast. It's got to be this cool mechanism and not all of our wine.
And think about how close we came to not having any of their knowledge. You know, so much of what the Greeks did was only preserved because of the Islamic world and Islamic scholars which recorded and captured and propagated and built on all of this work, specifically these mechanical ideas. There are writings that suggest that in the Arabic world there were similar mechanical devices, sort of like in the year five hundred or so, and that maybe this technology and this know how came back to Europe in the thirteenth century when the Arab Morris came through Spain, and that's what led to this flowering of these medieval clocks. And so it's really only because of the Islamic world that we even have any of this knowledge. Imagine if it hadn't been right, Imagine how different the history of at least Europe would be without preserving this ancient knowledge.
I mean, we'd probably still be using Roman numerals, which suck. So I am happy about the Arabic numerals for sure. And yeah, I mean it is interesting because, like our history of knowledge and technology is not a straight line. It's kind of more like silly string strewn all over the place.
Absolutely it is we are wandering almost blind through a room full of treasures, hoping to discover stuff, and it's frustrating to think about how much work has been done, that has been law, and to wonder how much of what we've discovered will be lost, like our understanding of particles and black holes and stuff. How long will that preserve if society crumbles and our civilization falls apart the way the Greeks and the Romans did. Will that be preserved somehow in some caches of knowledge for later humans to unpack from the wreckage, or will it be gone forever? Or will later humans be surprised to discover what we were capable of because they thought we were even more primitive than we are.
I mean, I think the main takeaway is you got to waterproof your devices.
And will future humans figure out a way to do chemistry and biology without so much memorization? All right, Thanks very much for joining us on this journey into the history of science and discovery and remembering that ancient peoples knew a lot more about the universe than we often give them credit to, and let's hope future humanity gives us some credit. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain The Universe is a production of iHeartRadio For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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