Originally published at: Scientists propose radical new model of the Antikythera Mechanism | Boing Boing
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“Unless it’s from outer space, we have to find a way in which the Greeks could have made it,” he concluded. “That’s the next stage and the exciting bit is, I think that’s the final piece of the jigsaw.”
I’m surprised that these folks aren’t doggedly watching the work of the Clickspring dude. Neither he nor his co-authors seem to be cited in this paper.
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Beat me too it. Also, he got his paper published on the mechanism, dealing with the Egyptian social calendar.
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Yeah, that was the article (or at least, those authors) I was checking for in the Nature one linked here. I have a feeling there might be some continental and/or impact-factor chauvinism going on with the authors, but I don’t really have evidence for that.
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Being in research, I assume that it’s just two different groups working on the Antikythera mechanism. Looking at the references would give you a better idea if it’s two different groups working in parallel, or if there is some deeper rivalry.
That being said, the work from Chris is really new too, and might not have been taken into account with the peer review process. Look at all of the names on both papers first, and previous papers as well.
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Good point; if this research were running in parallel the Nature article might still have been in edits/preprint/etc when the HJ article came out. At a guess I’d assume the publication timeline for Nature is a lot longer than HJ, though if both teams are working in the same area I’m surprised not to see any authors from Chris’s group listed in the Nature article. It might also be indicative of a divide between disciplines: I bet horologists are looking at archaeological research regularly, but the reverse might be relatively rare, even in a subfield where horology would be relevant.
(disclaimer: I did not check the HJ article for the authors from Nature because I’m lazy and doing this kind of stuff is too close to my day job.)
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Scientists propose radical new model of the Antikythera Mechanism
That’s what I hate about technology. You buy a piece of equipment and after just a couple of thousand years you are expected to upgrade to the new model.
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Virtually nothing from this front section survived, and “no previous reconstruction has come close to matching the data” that does exist, according to the study.
Makes me think of the Archeology Today intro
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Antikythera Mechanism
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I’m curious how this machine can be so precise, given that an eclipse prediction would be so sensitive to the longitude/latitude of the user. (Wouldn’t the creators of such a device would know that it was location-sensitive?)
Obviously, its hard to know anything about its creator(s), its construction, its owner(s) and use. But we do know it was on a ship, being transported somewhere. Such a sophisticated device probably was made near a population center, and the island of Antikythera in the middle of the Aegean probably wasn’t it.
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Was it meant to be moved around? If the user was always at the same location, it shouldn’t be a problem.
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Nature can move pretty quickly. The novelty value of things they publish is quite a big part of their business model, so once they’re interested it can tick along quite fast. And if they reject, that can happen almost instantly…
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Why? We don’t generally find a lot of clocks.
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It is a device to accurately plot the precise location of Stonehenge.
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There is a connection with Hewlett-Packard Labs that helped reveal some of the original wording in 2006. Unlocking Antikythera: HP Labs imaging technology helps decode ancient Greek artifact
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From the earlier Freeth work, the mechanism could calculate lunar eclipses and predict solar eclipse possibilities. So it could say “theres a possibility of a solar eclipse on such-a-day for the general area”. A precise time and location predictor for solar eclipses was not accomplished until Newton did it in the 17th century.
If the general area was "the greek speaking part of the Mediterranean " that could be precision enough.
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More precisely: I bet the kind of horologists that are researching the Antikythera mechanism are looking at archaeological research into the Antikythera mechanism and related topics, more than the contrary.
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That goes a long way to explaining some of the half-baked crap they publish.
They’ve always had a rather uncritical thing for paleontology, so extremely highly baked crap can also make it in:
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