[jws]

It's a beautiful device, and for some reason I could watch Mr. Clickspring file brass for hours. Most of the device is clockwork – gears and bearings, so… physical manifestations of multiplication and division.

But…

The first couple of minutes of Episode 9 amaze me. There is a section where two gears with slightly offset axis are joined with a pin and slot to approximate the nonlinear angular movement of the moon caused by its elliptical orbit.

It makes one wonder about the sheer number of observations and quantity of analysis they must have done >2000 years ago to work out the motion of the moon and translate the math into bronze.

[utopcell]

The modelling for the movement was simple: The Moon rotated on a cycle, whose center was itself rotating on a cycle centered at Earth (see [2] from [1],) but the part of the antikythera mechanism that was devised to simulate this was purely brilliant!

[1] https://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/ua/BeforeCopernicus.html

[2] https://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/ua/Epicycle.png

[basementcat]

Every advanced ancient civilization had astronomical observatories and political leaders routinely relied upon personnel at these facilities for information about when to plant and harvest crops. If your livelihood depends on this sort of thing, there may be an incentive to invest in improving instruments and models.

The artifacts that we have found represent a small fraction of what these people produced and used. Are there going to be any iPhones (or Commodore 64’s)that will survive to thousands of years from now? If so, will future archaeologists be able to turn one on?

[utopcell]

The problem is not that we don't have more of these devices but rather that little written remains of them. It's as if references to them were systematically destroyed. Mind you, we wouldn't even know about the Antikythera mechanism where it not for its accidental discovery.

[jstanley]

Electron microscopes already exist today. It's impossible to predict what advances in microscopic imaging might be made in the next 3000 years, but if we assume they at least don't regress, I think there's a fair chance that a dug-up integrated circuit could be recreated in software based on an image of the die.