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Before a single stone was placed, they watched. Finding a location with a clear, unobstructed view of the horizon was the first step. Then came years of observation - tracking where the sun rose and set throughout the year, identifying the repeating pattern, and establishing the solar calendar encoded...

17,154 次观看 • 4 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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In 1901, divers pulled a lump of corroded bronze out of a two thousand year old shipwreck. It took the next century to understand what it was, and the answer broke the timeline of human history. It's called the Antikythera Mechanism, and it is the oldest known computer on earth. It was built by the ancient Greeks, around 100 BC, and it should not exist. Nothing else of its sophistication would appear anywhere in the world for more than a thousand years after it... It was found by sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera, in the wreck of a trading ship that had sunk in the first century BC, surrounded by bronze statues and pottery. The corroded fragments looked like nothing at first, and sat largely ignored in a museum in Athens. Only over the following decades, and especially with modern X-ray and CT scanning in our own century, did researchers finally see inside it. What they found was a machine. Behind its bronze face was a system of at least thirty interlocking precision gears, cut and arranged with a sophistication that would not be matched until the geared astronomical clocks of medieval Europe, well over a thousand years later. It was, in the words of the team that studied it, a mechanical computer that worked by turning astronomical theory into bronze... And it did extraordinary things. You turned a hand crank on the side, and the mechanism calculated the positions of the sun, the moon, and the five planets the Greeks knew. It tracked the phases of the moon. It predicted solar and lunar eclipses years in advance. It even displayed the four-year cycle of the ancient Olympic Games. A person standing in the ancient world could set this device to a date and watch the heavens be calculated in front of them, by gears, by hand. Roughly a third of the original survives, in 82 corroded fragments. We still do not know who designed it, or how a civilization without anything resembling industrial machinery achieved this level of precision engineering. What is certain is that it was not a one-off accident. A device this refined implies a tradition behind it, generations of knowledge and earlier attempts that have been lost completely. The Antikythera Mechanism is proof of how much the ancient world knew, and how much of what human beings have achieved has simply vanished without a trace, leaving us to stumble on a single piece of it at the bottom of the sea...

James Lucas

240,632 次观看 • 2 天前