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Lost in the excitement over the Antikythera Mechanism's Olympic calendar widget was news of its potential link to Archimedes, the greatest scientist of antiquity.
Consisting of intricately linked dials that foretold the future positions of the sun, moon and possibly stars, the 2100-year-old Mechanism was recovered in 1900 from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. Though its function took decades to determine, scientists assumed that it came from Rhodes, a center of ancient Greek astronomy.
But in addition to finding a tiny dial indicating Olympic locations, researchers from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project also realized that another dial was inscribed with month names in Corinthian script, suggesting its construction in an unexpected part of the Greek world – perhaps by the intellectual descendants of Archimedes.
"It probably doesn't come from Corinth itself, which had been devastated by the Romans in 146 B.C., but possibly from the island that's now Corfu, or possibly even Sicily. And the island of Sicily, with its capital of Syracuse, gives us a tenuous but possible connection with Archimedes," said Tony Freeth, co-author of a study published yesterday in Nature. "Not that he made this – he died in 212 B.C., long before the mechanism was made, but because he was the greatest scientist of antiquity, and made a similar instrument. It could have been a tradition of instrument-making, a heritage that came from him."
But Freeth was quick to qualify himself, calling this no more than a "plausible conjecture."
All we know for certain, he said, is that the Mechanism's maker "was a person of extraordinary stature."
Some 1600 years would pass before Copernicus further developed theories of a universe without Earth at its center, and only centuries after that were European craftsmen able to build machines as complex and precise as the Mechanism.
Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism [Nature]
Images:
Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, who also produced this – video with Nature*.*
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