Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I saw a US article recently about a thing that's
It's been known for a while, but it just came
to my attention recently about something that some folks are
calling the oldest computer, the oldest known computer. That doesn't
begin to capture just how incredible this thing is.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Joining us to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Tony Freete is a PhD mathematician and he's Managing director
at Images First, in England's film and TV production He's
also an honorary professor at University College London and founding
member of University College's antikythera research team. The antikytherra mechanism
(00:47):
is what we're here to talk about, and let me
just tell listeners before we jump into the conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
If you find this.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Even a little bit interesting, go to my website at
Rosskominski dot com, where I have links to Tony's papers,
video and all kinds of stuff that'll go way beyond
what we're gonna have time to talk about today. So Tony,
thank you for joining us from London today. I appreciate
your making the time for us.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
You're welcome.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
When don't we start by just describing this thing and
just paint a picture for listeners.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Well, perhaps if I describe how it was discovered.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
In nineteen hundred, a great party of Greek sponge divers
left a tiny island called Seami in the eastern Mediterranean.
They traveled westward across the Mediterranean to their customary sponge
fishing grounds, which are actually in North Africa, because the
sponges have been fished out in the Mediterranean. And when
(01:47):
they reached a tiny island called Antikythera, which is an
island between Crete and mainland Greece, they encountered a severe
storm and they had shelter from the storm, and when
the storm subsided, the captain, Captain Kondos, sent down the
youngest diver ilies stady artists, to look for sponges in
(02:08):
the local waters. And a few minutes later he came
down from it, up from his dive, and he was
quivering in fear, and he said he'd seen a heap
of dead naked people under water. And so the captain
then went down himself and he found that the dead
naked people were sculptures scattered on the seafloor. And what
(02:31):
they discovered was an ancient wreck, very large ship. It
was about one hundred meters long, and it was full
of ancient treasures. Basically the captain then covered a bronze arm.
They went back to their home and debated whether they
(02:53):
should perhaps plunder the site next year.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Or tell the authorities.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
And for so I don't quite know how it happened,
but the authorities were told about this, and they actually
commissioned the same divers to dive on the wreck in
the later in nineteen hundred, and they had a gunboat
standing byed at Looters, and to start with it was
(03:20):
stormy weather. But by nineteen oh one they were still
working on it and the weather subsided and they started
to bring up tons of really fascinating ancient Greek objects.
You know. There were beautiful bronzes, there were superb glass,
there was jewelry, There was amfori, which were vessels for
carrying wine or olive oil. There was a bronze lyre,
(03:43):
there was table wearing so on. It was a very
rich find. And one thing they discovered which they brought
up was the thing just about the size of a
large dictionary, almost certainly in one piece at that stage,
and they probably recovered it because it looked a bit green,
(04:04):
you know when bronze corrodes. Underwater, it produces green compounds,
so it looked a bit green. Everything was taken back
to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and then it
was particular a heap of stuff to be examined later.
And in fact, about it year later, a man called
(04:27):
Stice noticed that the object has split apart and inside
there were these gear wheels, tiny little gear wheels. They
were about the size of coins, with teeth about a
millimeter long, very tiny teeth, very surprising for ancient Greece.
In fact, it was a complete shock this discovery, because
(04:53):
these such gears shouldn't have existed in ancient Greece. They
knew about gears from water mills and windmills, but these
are precision gears, gears sometimes called mathematical gears, gears used
for calculating and so on.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
And it caused a huge.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
Amount of excitement and a lot of distinguished experts started
to look at it. But and they had all sorts
of speculations about what it was, you know, was it
a sort of clock, or a navigation instrument or an
astrolib advice were looking at the stars, but they didn't
really make much progress until a German language expert called
(05:36):
Albert Reim started to look at the object it was
by then it was split into fragments, and started to
make some very interesting discoveries about it. He found verous
astronomical inscriptions on it, and I identified these as a
star calendar. He found a lot of gears, but he
(06:00):
didn't really have enough data to make good sense of it.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
But he suggested that.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
The machine was an astronomical calculating machine for calculating the
positions of the Sun, Moon, planets and other astronomical parameters.
And Albert Reen left a set of notes. He didn't
publish them because he couldn't really make full sense of
(06:26):
it all, and these were so his work. He did
publish a couple of papers, but he didn't really his
ideas were far richer than what he published. They were
buried in his research notes. And it wasn't until fifty
years later that a British physicist called Derek de Sola Price,
(06:48):
who ended up at Yale University as a professor of
the history of science. He started to get interested in
it and started to make some more progress from what
REM's original work, and.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
He developed.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
A model of all the gearing He was the first
person to actually X ray the surviving fragments with a
Greek radiologist called Curriculous and Curriculous and his wife Emily
estimated the tooth cunts. You know, if it was clearly
a geared mechanism with machine gears mashing bronze gears. And
(07:30):
if you want to know what a mechanism like that calculates,
you need to count the teeth of the gears to
see what ratios it's producing.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
By mashing the gears. But they.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
At that stage, to be honest, they got a lot wrong.
And Price developed a gear diagram for it, which has
proved to be mostly wrong. Though he did discover one
very important thing, which was a cycle of the moon,
an ancient cycle of the moon from Babylonian astronomy, which
(08:06):
is a nineteen year cycle of the moon. And that's
the basis, one of the basis for how the machine
calculates the positions of the moon in the zodiac.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
So so let me just jump in.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Let me just jump in the in the interest of time,
because there's I mean, we can and you do talk
about this.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
For hours or weeks, because you know.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
So much and the whole thing is so complicated, but
you know, we only have maybe eight more minutes, so
I want to try to get in.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
What we can so as a as a thing that.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
You know, modern people might be able to think of
that could be a little bit similar. Putting aside the
automation of the power, maybe one might imagine a very
complex watch. That is, you know, one of these watches
with complications that shows not just the time and not
(08:58):
just the date, but the moon phase and some other
thing and some other thing and time in some other place,
like one of the most complicated watches you could ever imagine,
but not with automatic power. But the other stuff is
that sort of close and if it is, give us.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
A yes, I think that's a very good analogy of
a watch with many complications. Nowadays you get these superb
watches with astronomical calculations. But the anti Kitthra mechanism did
this not on the scale of a watch, but more
of a mechanical clock, and it did it two thousand
years ago. So yeah, that's the extraordinary thing about this
(09:35):
technology is that it comes from ancient Greece, but when
you start to look at it, it has so many
ideas that you would think were for much later in history.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
It's a completely unique object.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
I mean, folks, if you saw if you saw the
the recreations that are done with computer simulations of this device,
and you didn't know anything else about it, you might
think that it was, you know, the most clever invention
of Leonardo da Vinci, right, like some Renaissance due who
(10:11):
figured out all this stuff and hear the planets, and
it's just it's incredible, And it's still a geocentric model
of the Solar system rather than a heliocentric model of
the Solar system.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
But it's just in a way that makes the.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Story more incredible that they kind of worked around that
they had the wrong underlying model and still made something
that sort of worked. I want to answer one listener
question here, Tony, and make sure I have this right.
A listener is asking about the approximate year of this thing.
Is it about one hundred BC?
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Well, we don't really know the data.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Bit we think it's between the late third century BC
and the middle of the first century BC. It can't
be later than that because the wreck has been very
well dated to the middle of the first century BC.
But actually the exact date is still a puzzle. We're
working on it. Very difficult puzzle, and I don't know
(11:02):
what the answer is going to be. They've been various
trends of thinking it was late third century PC, and
then other people saying no.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
It's closer to the date of the wreck. But we
don't actually know the answer to that, all right.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So for this listener who asked, is somewhere between roughly
two thousand and twenty four hundred years years old. Now
are there you mentioned this to me and I don't
know the answer. Are there any mentions of this device
or a device even like it in ancient literature?
Speaker 4 (11:33):
Well, the most interesting mentions, I think are the ones
which Price found, which were in the writings of Manchel Cicero,
who is a famous Roman orators, statesman, and lawyer. And
Cicero wrote about two devices which Archimedes had made. Archimedes
(11:57):
was the greatest scientist from ancient times, one of the
greatest scientists from all time. Died in two hundred and
twelve BC, late third century BC. But Cicero describes how
he made two devices, and when you look at the descriptions,
they sound very like the anti kidar mechanism. They don't
(12:18):
even say that they had bronze gear wheels, but it's
difficult to see how you could construct such a thing
without that. And this this makes you think, well, is
this that one of the devices that Archimedes made? And
I think people think it's a bit later than Archimedes,
but it's my own personal feeling is it's very likely
(12:41):
that it follows a design of Archimedes. It was so
famous in the ancient world. And just as the ancient
Greeks copied temples, famous temples like the Parthenon in Athens
and reproduce that throughout Greek emperor, I think if they
were going to make one of these mechanisms, they'd have
looked at archimedes design and probably copied it, maybe even
(13:03):
quite close closely.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
But we don't know really.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
I mean, if if Cicero was actually writing about this,
then it had to be at least I don't remember
the year fifty years forty or fifty BC when Cicero died.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I know, I know for sure.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Cicero was assassinated before Jesus came around, So if he
was writing about it, then that.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Is this isn't Caesar, this is Cicero.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah, Caro died like forty He died forty BC or
something like that.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
Cicero did, I can't remember. He was first century BC.
He also describes another machine made by somebody he knew
very well called Posidonius, who was a philosopher in Rhodes
Stoke philosopher in Rhodes, and Cicero studied under him, So
this is almost certainly a first hand account. And he
describes again a mechanism that sounds just slightly anti mechanism
(13:57):
that Posidonis made on rhads. But we don't think the
anti Kuper mechanism is that either, you know.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
So amazing, So look we have we have just a
few minutes left and I want to what I want
to give listeners a sense of Here is the complexity
of this device. And folks, remember that that Tony just
described this, and if you're just joining. By the way,
Tony Freeth is a founding member of the anti Kithra
(14:24):
research team at University College London, does a bunch of
other things as well, PhD mathematician and one of the
world's leading experts on this, all kinds of papers about it.
So imagine something the size Tony called it the size
of maybe a large dictionary from over two thousand years ago,
full of gears, like a complex watch again two thousand
(14:46):
years ago. Tony tell us some of the things that
based on your research, you believe this device displayed to
the user.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Good, Well, imagine this book and it's crammed full of gears,
c really crammed together. Our latest model has at least
seventy gears in it, which is extraordinary. And these are
branching networks of gears, and it uses extraordinary gearing called
epicyclic gearing, where gears move attached to other gears. And
(15:18):
it calculated the position of the Sun and the Moon
in the zodiac of stars, and the phase of the moon,
and also the positions of all the planets. And it
also discovered it also calculated eclipses, when eclipses would happen,
the hour of day of the eclipse, the color of
the eclipse, characteristics of eclipses. It is just quite extraordinarily
(15:43):
clever device, you know, quite remarkably ingenious device. And it
was almost certainly created not to show the current positions
of things, that to be able to predict, say a
year ahead, where the moon would be. And you turn
to handle side almost certainly hand turn to the date
(16:03):
you wanted to know where all the astronomical bodies were,
and then it would display these on these beautiful displayed
dials on the front and back of the device.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Are you aware of any Let's just put aside the
level of accuracy, right, I mean, it probably was pretty accurate,
especially given that they had the wrong model of the
structure of the solar system.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
I bet it was pretty good.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
So are you aware of any device ever made later
in history before the computer age? Put aside computers that
calculated all of this using a mechanical method.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
Well, to find another device that's known about, you have
to go another fifteen hundred years later in history to
the fourteenth century when they were building astronomical clocks. There's
a very famous one called Giovanni Didundi's Astraeum, which calculated
everything the anti kithra mechanism did, but.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Produce more, much more accurate calculations.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
But you have to go that much later in history
to find something of comparable complexity. And there are really
deep questions about what happened in the history of science
and technology that this extraordinary invention, this extraordinary device didn't
produce more development and expansion of technology at a much
(17:33):
earlier stage, you.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Know, yeah, I mean, maybe it's the kind of thing where,
you know, every once in a while throughout history, you
get a mind that is so far beyond everybody else's mind, right,
you get Newton and you get Einstein, and it's not
once a generation, it's once a century if you're lucky.
And maybe that's what this was, except it was once
(17:57):
in a millennium right until into somebody was able in
the fourteenth century or fifteenth century to disseminate the concept
and other people could copy it. But maybe this was
just the product of that kind of mind that wasn't
reproduced for a thousand years. So I just have thirty
seconds left with you, Tony. And here's my last question
for you. If if I gave you a bottle with
(18:21):
a genie in it, but he was a cheap genie
and he only granted one wish instead of three, and
you could have the genie answer any one question about
the antikythera mechanism. What is the question that you most
want to know the answer to?
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Well, I think the key unsoul problems now are exactly
where and when it was made and by who and
we can. We have evidence, but we don't have any
definitive answers to those really basic questions. I would say
to your audience, I'd urge you to look on the internet,
explore the links that you got on your website and
(19:00):
any other links. There's a lot of videos out there,
there's a lot of misinformation out there actually, but there's
a lot of good stuff as well, and explore it
because the more you look into it, the more fascinating
it becomes.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
I watched half an hour video of this yesterday and
then said, all right, that's not enough, and I found
another hour and a half video to watch.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
I didn't get through all of it, but I'm still
going this thing, the.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Anti Kithra mechanism is one of the most fascinating things
I've ever seen in my life. And nobody knows more
about it than Tony Freeth. And I'm very, very grateful
for your time, and it's just such fascinating work. I'm
a little I'm a little envious of you that you
get to do this for a living. It's just fabulous.
So thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Okay, well, thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Glad to do it
I saw a US article recently about a thing that's
It's been known for a while, but it just came
to my attention recently about something that some folks are
calling the oldest computer, the oldest known computer. That doesn't
begin to capture just how incredible this thing is.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Joining us to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Tony Freete is a PhD mathematician and he's Managing director
at Images First, in England's film and TV production He's
also an honorary professor at University College London and founding
member of University College's antikythera research team. The antikytherra mechanism
(00:47):
is what we're here to talk about, and let me
just tell listeners before we jump into the conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
If you find this.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Even a little bit interesting, go to my website at
Rosskominski dot com, where I have links to Tony's papers,
video and all kinds of stuff that'll go way beyond
what we're gonna have time to talk about today. So Tony,
thank you for joining us from London today. I appreciate
your making the time for us.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
You're welcome.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
When don't we start by just describing this thing and
just paint a picture for listeners.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Well, perhaps if I describe how it was discovered.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
In nineteen hundred, a great party of Greek sponge divers
left a tiny island called Seami in the eastern Mediterranean.
They traveled westward across the Mediterranean to their customary sponge
fishing grounds, which are actually in North Africa, because the
sponges have been fished out in the Mediterranean. And when
(01:47):
they reached a tiny island called Antikythera, which is an
island between Crete and mainland Greece, they encountered a severe
storm and they had shelter from the storm, and when
the storm subsided, the captain, Captain Kondos, sent down the
youngest diver ilies stady artists, to look for sponges in
(02:08):
the local waters. And a few minutes later he came
down from it, up from his dive, and he was
quivering in fear, and he said he'd seen a heap
of dead naked people under water. And so the captain
then went down himself and he found that the dead
naked people were sculptures scattered on the seafloor. And what
(02:31):
they discovered was an ancient wreck, very large ship. It
was about one hundred meters long, and it was full
of ancient treasures. Basically the captain then covered a bronze arm.
They went back to their home and debated whether they
(02:53):
should perhaps plunder the site next year.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Or tell the authorities.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
And for so I don't quite know how it happened,
but the authorities were told about this, and they actually
commissioned the same divers to dive on the wreck in
the later in nineteen hundred, and they had a gunboat
standing byed at Looters, and to start with it was
(03:20):
stormy weather. But by nineteen oh one they were still
working on it and the weather subsided and they started
to bring up tons of really fascinating ancient Greek objects.
You know. There were beautiful bronzes, there were superb glass,
there was jewelry, There was amfori, which were vessels for
carrying wine or olive oil. There was a bronze lyre,
(03:43):
there was table wearing so on. It was a very
rich find. And one thing they discovered which they brought
up was the thing just about the size of a
large dictionary, almost certainly in one piece at that stage,
and they probably recovered it because it looked a bit green,
(04:04):
you know when bronze corrodes. Underwater, it produces green compounds,
so it looked a bit green. Everything was taken back
to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and then it
was particular a heap of stuff to be examined later.
And in fact, about it year later, a man called
(04:27):
Stice noticed that the object has split apart and inside
there were these gear wheels, tiny little gear wheels. They
were about the size of coins, with teeth about a
millimeter long, very tiny teeth, very surprising for ancient Greece.
In fact, it was a complete shock this discovery, because
(04:53):
these such gears shouldn't have existed in ancient Greece. They
knew about gears from water mills and windmills, but these
are precision gears, gears sometimes called mathematical gears, gears used
for calculating and so on.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
And it caused a huge.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
Amount of excitement and a lot of distinguished experts started
to look at it. But and they had all sorts
of speculations about what it was, you know, was it
a sort of clock, or a navigation instrument or an
astrolib advice were looking at the stars, but they didn't
really make much progress until a German language expert called
(05:36):
Albert Reim started to look at the object it was
by then it was split into fragments, and started to
make some very interesting discoveries about it. He found verous
astronomical inscriptions on it, and I identified these as a
star calendar. He found a lot of gears, but he
(06:00):
didn't really have enough data to make good sense of it.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
But he suggested that.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
The machine was an astronomical calculating machine for calculating the
positions of the Sun, Moon, planets and other astronomical parameters.
And Albert Reen left a set of notes. He didn't
publish them because he couldn't really make full sense of
(06:26):
it all, and these were so his work. He did
publish a couple of papers, but he didn't really his
ideas were far richer than what he published. They were
buried in his research notes. And it wasn't until fifty
years later that a British physicist called Derek de Sola Price,
(06:48):
who ended up at Yale University as a professor of
the history of science. He started to get interested in
it and started to make some more progress from what
REM's original work, and.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
He developed.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
A model of all the gearing He was the first
person to actually X ray the surviving fragments with a
Greek radiologist called Curriculous and Curriculous and his wife Emily
estimated the tooth cunts. You know, if it was clearly
a geared mechanism with machine gears mashing bronze gears. And
(07:30):
if you want to know what a mechanism like that calculates,
you need to count the teeth of the gears to
see what ratios it's producing.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
By mashing the gears. But they.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
At that stage, to be honest, they got a lot wrong.
And Price developed a gear diagram for it, which has
proved to be mostly wrong. Though he did discover one
very important thing, which was a cycle of the moon,
an ancient cycle of the moon from Babylonian astronomy, which
(08:06):
is a nineteen year cycle of the moon. And that's
the basis, one of the basis for how the machine
calculates the positions of the moon in the zodiac.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
So so let me just jump in.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Let me just jump in the in the interest of time,
because there's I mean, we can and you do talk
about this.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
For hours or weeks, because you know.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
So much and the whole thing is so complicated, but
you know, we only have maybe eight more minutes, so
I want to try to get in.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
What we can so as a as a thing that.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
You know, modern people might be able to think of
that could be a little bit similar. Putting aside the
automation of the power, maybe one might imagine a very
complex watch. That is, you know, one of these watches
with complications that shows not just the time and not
(08:58):
just the date, but the moon phase and some other
thing and some other thing and time in some other place,
like one of the most complicated watches you could ever imagine,
but not with automatic power. But the other stuff is
that sort of close and if it is, give us.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
A yes, I think that's a very good analogy of
a watch with many complications. Nowadays you get these superb
watches with astronomical calculations. But the anti Kitthra mechanism did
this not on the scale of a watch, but more
of a mechanical clock, and it did it two thousand
years ago. So yeah, that's the extraordinary thing about this
(09:35):
technology is that it comes from ancient Greece, but when
you start to look at it, it has so many
ideas that you would think were for much later in history.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
It's a completely unique object.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
I mean, folks, if you saw if you saw the
the recreations that are done with computer simulations of this device,
and you didn't know anything else about it, you might
think that it was, you know, the most clever invention
of Leonardo da Vinci, right, like some Renaissance due who
(10:11):
figured out all this stuff and hear the planets, and
it's just it's incredible, And it's still a geocentric model
of the Solar system rather than a heliocentric model of
the Solar system.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
But it's just in a way that makes the.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Story more incredible that they kind of worked around that
they had the wrong underlying model and still made something
that sort of worked. I want to answer one listener
question here, Tony, and make sure I have this right.
A listener is asking about the approximate year of this thing.
Is it about one hundred BC?
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Well, we don't really know the data.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Bit we think it's between the late third century BC
and the middle of the first century BC. It can't
be later than that because the wreck has been very
well dated to the middle of the first century BC.
But actually the exact date is still a puzzle. We're
working on it. Very difficult puzzle, and I don't know
(11:02):
what the answer is going to be. They've been various
trends of thinking it was late third century PC, and
then other people saying no.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
It's closer to the date of the wreck. But we
don't actually know the answer to that, all right.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So for this listener who asked, is somewhere between roughly
two thousand and twenty four hundred years years old. Now
are there you mentioned this to me and I don't
know the answer. Are there any mentions of this device
or a device even like it in ancient literature?
Speaker 4 (11:33):
Well, the most interesting mentions, I think are the ones
which Price found, which were in the writings of Manchel Cicero,
who is a famous Roman orators, statesman, and lawyer. And
Cicero wrote about two devices which Archimedes had made. Archimedes
(11:57):
was the greatest scientist from ancient times, one of the
greatest scientists from all time. Died in two hundred and
twelve BC, late third century BC. But Cicero describes how
he made two devices, and when you look at the descriptions,
they sound very like the anti kidar mechanism. They don't
(12:18):
even say that they had bronze gear wheels, but it's
difficult to see how you could construct such a thing
without that. And this this makes you think, well, is
this that one of the devices that Archimedes made? And
I think people think it's a bit later than Archimedes,
but it's my own personal feeling is it's very likely
(12:41):
that it follows a design of Archimedes. It was so
famous in the ancient world. And just as the ancient
Greeks copied temples, famous temples like the Parthenon in Athens
and reproduce that throughout Greek emperor, I think if they
were going to make one of these mechanisms, they'd have
looked at archimedes design and probably copied it, maybe even
(13:03):
quite close closely.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
But we don't know really.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
I mean, if if Cicero was actually writing about this,
then it had to be at least I don't remember
the year fifty years forty or fifty BC when Cicero died.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I know, I know for sure.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Cicero was assassinated before Jesus came around, So if he
was writing about it, then that.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Is this isn't Caesar, this is Cicero.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah, Caro died like forty He died forty BC or
something like that.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
Cicero did, I can't remember. He was first century BC.
He also describes another machine made by somebody he knew
very well called Posidonius, who was a philosopher in Rhodes
Stoke philosopher in Rhodes, and Cicero studied under him, So
this is almost certainly a first hand account. And he
describes again a mechanism that sounds just slightly anti mechanism
(13:57):
that Posidonis made on rhads. But we don't think the
anti Kuper mechanism is that either, you know.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
So amazing, So look we have we have just a
few minutes left and I want to what I want
to give listeners a sense of Here is the complexity
of this device. And folks, remember that that Tony just
described this, and if you're just joining. By the way,
Tony Freeth is a founding member of the anti Kithra
(14:24):
research team at University College London, does a bunch of
other things as well, PhD mathematician and one of the
world's leading experts on this, all kinds of papers about it.
So imagine something the size Tony called it the size
of maybe a large dictionary from over two thousand years ago,
full of gears, like a complex watch again two thousand
(14:46):
years ago. Tony tell us some of the things that
based on your research, you believe this device displayed to
the user.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Good, Well, imagine this book and it's crammed full of gears,
c really crammed together. Our latest model has at least
seventy gears in it, which is extraordinary. And these are
branching networks of gears, and it uses extraordinary gearing called
epicyclic gearing, where gears move attached to other gears. And
(15:18):
it calculated the position of the Sun and the Moon
in the zodiac of stars, and the phase of the moon,
and also the positions of all the planets. And it
also discovered it also calculated eclipses, when eclipses would happen,
the hour of day of the eclipse, the color of
the eclipse, characteristics of eclipses. It is just quite extraordinarily
(15:43):
clever device, you know, quite remarkably ingenious device. And it
was almost certainly created not to show the current positions
of things, that to be able to predict, say a
year ahead, where the moon would be. And you turn
to handle side almost certainly hand turn to the date
(16:03):
you wanted to know where all the astronomical bodies were,
and then it would display these on these beautiful displayed
dials on the front and back of the device.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Are you aware of any Let's just put aside the
level of accuracy, right, I mean, it probably was pretty accurate,
especially given that they had the wrong model of the
structure of the solar system.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
I bet it was pretty good.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
So are you aware of any device ever made later
in history before the computer age? Put aside computers that
calculated all of this using a mechanical method.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
Well, to find another device that's known about, you have
to go another fifteen hundred years later in history to
the fourteenth century when they were building astronomical clocks. There's
a very famous one called Giovanni Didundi's Astraeum, which calculated
everything the anti kithra mechanism did, but.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Produce more, much more accurate calculations.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
But you have to go that much later in history
to find something of comparable complexity. And there are really
deep questions about what happened in the history of science
and technology that this extraordinary invention, this extraordinary device didn't
produce more development and expansion of technology at a much
(17:33):
earlier stage, you.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Know, yeah, I mean, maybe it's the kind of thing where,
you know, every once in a while throughout history, you
get a mind that is so far beyond everybody else's mind, right,
you get Newton and you get Einstein, and it's not
once a generation, it's once a century if you're lucky.
And maybe that's what this was, except it was once
(17:57):
in a millennium right until into somebody was able in
the fourteenth century or fifteenth century to disseminate the concept
and other people could copy it. But maybe this was
just the product of that kind of mind that wasn't
reproduced for a thousand years. So I just have thirty
seconds left with you, Tony. And here's my last question
for you. If if I gave you a bottle with
(18:21):
a genie in it, but he was a cheap genie
and he only granted one wish instead of three, and
you could have the genie answer any one question about
the antikythera mechanism. What is the question that you most
want to know the answer to?
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Well, I think the key unsoul problems now are exactly
where and when it was made and by who and
we can. We have evidence, but we don't have any
definitive answers to those really basic questions. I would say
to your audience, I'd urge you to look on the internet,
explore the links that you got on your website and
(19:00):
any other links. There's a lot of videos out there,
there's a lot of misinformation out there actually, but there's
a lot of good stuff as well, and explore it
because the more you look into it, the more fascinating
it becomes.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
I watched half an hour video of this yesterday and
then said, all right, that's not enough, and I found
another hour and a half video to watch.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
I didn't get through all of it, but I'm still
going this thing, the.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Anti Kithra mechanism is one of the most fascinating things
I've ever seen in my life. And nobody knows more
about it than Tony Freeth. And I'm very, very grateful
for your time, and it's just such fascinating work. I'm
a little I'm a little envious of you that you
get to do this for a living. It's just fabulous.
So thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Okay, well, thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Glad to do it
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