This is absolutely minor to your point but: I think epicycles get a bad rap! They are essentially just Fourier expansions of planet's trajectories, which is no small bit of machinery. Of course...
This is absolutely minor to your point but:
Epicycles were, however, considered the proper way to model stellar and planetary motion until Kepler.
I think epicycles get a bad rap! They are essentially just Fourier expansions of planet's trajectories, which is no small bit of machinery. Of course this is what made them difficult to shake - any smooth function like a planet's apparent motion in the sky can be approximately arbitrarily well with enough terms in your Fourier expansion. Obviously they are not the best model for planetary motion but they're pretty neat nonetheless.
I realised only a couple of years ago that I'm not more clever than your average caveman, and that is humbling indeed ;-) Neolithic Revolution and all that. As for the "wrongness" of the...
I realised only a couple of years ago that I'm not more clever than your average caveman, and that is humbling indeed ;-) Neolithic Revolution and all that.
As for the "wrongness" of the geocentric model, this opens avenues for what if thinking. First, who care if the model is wrong when it gives good enough predictions for navigation or agriculture or impressing the unwashed masses ? Then, had this "astrocomputer" been multiplicated and used by many astronomers, it wouldn't have taken 15 centuries to spot that error. With the knowledge of heliocentrism, judaism, christianism and islam would have been something totally different and that is mind-blowing.
There's a guy on youtube that tries to remake it using ancient techniques. If think it's safe to say that anything they did back then we know how to do better, but there's certainly some...
There's a guy on youtube that tries to remake it using ancient techniques. If think it's safe to say that anything they did back then we know how to do better, but there's certainly some uncertainty on how they did things exactly (because there's often several ways to make a given piece, and we also don't have the same limitations).
He not only tries to replicate the tools/techniques, but he also made a fully-functional replica of the Antikythera mechanism, and has himself co-authored a paper on it as well. Clickspring...
He not only tries to replicate the tools/techniques, but he also made a fully-functional replica of the Antikythera mechanism, and has himself co-authored a paper on it as well.
Nice update on this fascinating artifact.
What if, one might wonder, what if the knowledge and know-how here materialised had not been lost ?
This is absolutely minor to your point but:
I think epicycles get a bad rap! They are essentially just Fourier expansions of planet's trajectories, which is no small bit of machinery. Of course this is what made them difficult to shake - any smooth function like a planet's apparent motion in the sky can be approximately arbitrarily well with enough terms in your Fourier expansion. Obviously they are not the best model for planetary motion but they're pretty neat nonetheless.
I realised only a couple of years ago that I'm not more clever than your average caveman, and that is humbling indeed ;-) Neolithic Revolution and all that.
As for the "wrongness" of the geocentric model, this opens avenues for what if thinking. First, who care if the model is wrong when it gives good enough predictions for navigation or agriculture or impressing the unwashed masses ? Then, had this "astrocomputer" been multiplicated and used by many astronomers, it wouldn't have taken 15 centuries to spot that error. With the knowledge of heliocentrism, judaism, christianism and islam would have been something totally different and that is mind-blowing.
Incidently, a
was the intent that guided the invention of the WWW in 1991, but sadly not what fueled its evolution since.
There's a guy on youtube that tries to remake it using ancient techniques. If think it's safe to say that anything they did back then we know how to do better, but there's certainly some uncertainty on how they did things exactly (because there's often several ways to make a given piece, and we also don't have the same limitations).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIUAdINXZmQ
He not only tries to replicate the tools/techniques, but he also made a fully-functional replica of the Antikythera mechanism, and has himself co-authored a paper on it as well.
Clickspring playlists (highly recommend watching) - Machining The Antikythera Mechanism & Antikythera Fragments