In 1900, divers brought back vases, statues, jewelry, and pottery from a wreck dating back to 65 BC. BC, stranded off the Greek island of Antikythera. In the middle of this treasure, a piece of corroded wood and bronze goes almost unnoticed. It was not until 1902 that an archaeologist noticed the sprockets of this strange mechanism … the beginning of the long investigations that revealed the astonishing complexity of what would henceforth be called a machine (or mechanism)Antikythera. For some, it is a calculator intended to predict the date of the eclipse and the movements of the moon and the sun. The problem: Dozens of articulated cogwheels make it a very elaborate machine for its time, a kind of temporal artifact that doesn’t reveal all of these secrets.
The secret of the ancient Greeks
The Antikythera Machine didn’t begin to reveal its secrets until the 1970s when British researcher Derek de Sola Price and Greek physicist Charalambos Karacalos X-rayed it, yielding an initial view of the highly intricate gears of the remains. Then several teams tried to rebuild it, including another Briton, Michael Wright, who had studied it for years. Gradually, the idea that this was an astronomical calendar began to gain credence and is now the opinion of the majority of scientists who study it.
Based on this premise, a Greek team wanted to establish the calibration date of the machine, which is Day 0. Any measuring mechanism requires calibration, whether it is a matter of bathroom scales or powerful space telescopes for space agencies. If the Antikythera was indeed an orbital-calculating machine, it must have undergone the same modification. Authors who have submitted their work on a pre-publication site arXiv We believe the machine runs according to the Saros cycle as suggested by a dial with 223 sections located on its back face. The Saros cycle corresponds to a period of 223 moons that begins with an eclipse and at the end of it the moon, Earth and the sun find themselves in the same position and where a similar eclipse occurs afterwards, heading towards the west from 120 ° in a time of 8 hours. Greek scholars such as Hipparchus (described below), Pliny the Elder, or Ptolemy were familiar with this episode.
In 1900, divers brought back vases, statues, jewelry, and pottery from a wreck dating back to 65 BC. BC, stranded off the Greek island of Antikythera. In the middle of this treasure, a piece of corroded wood and bronze goes almost unnoticed. It was not until 1902 that an archaeologist noticed the sprockets of this strange mechanism … the beginning of the long investigations that revealed the astonishing complexity of what would henceforth be called a machine (or mechanism)Antikythera. For some, it is a calculator intended to predict the date of the eclipse and the movements of the moon and the sun. The problem: Dozens of articulated cogwheels make it a very elaborate machine for its time, a kind of temporal artifact that doesn’t reveal all of these secrets.
The secret of the ancient Greeks
The Antikythera Machine didn’t begin to reveal its secrets until the 1970s when British researcher Derek de Sola Price and Greek physicist Charalambos Karacalos X-rayed it, yielding an initial view of the highly intricate gears of the remains. Then several teams tried to rebuild it, including another Briton, Michael Wright, who had studied it for years. Gradually, the idea that this was an astronomical calendar began to gain credence and is now the opinion of the majority of scientists who study it.
Based on this premise, a Greek team wanted to establish the calibration date of the machine, which is Day 0. Any measuring mechanism requires calibration, whether it is a matter of bathroom scales or powerful space telescopes for space agencies. If the Antikythera was indeed an orbital-calculating machine, it must have undergone the same modification. Authors who have submitted their work on a pre-publication site arXiv We believe the machine runs according to the Saros cycle as suggested by a dial with 223 sections located on its back face. The Saros cycle corresponds to a period of 223 moons that begins with an eclipse and at the end of it the moon, Earth and the sun find themselves in the same position and where a similar eclipse occurs afterwards, heading towards the west from 120 ° in a time of 8 hours. Greek scholars such as Hipparchus (described below), Pliny the Elder, or Ptolemy were familiar with this episode.
After 3 cycles of Saros, the eclipse is repeated in the same place. This long period also has a name: the Exeligmos cycle. To complicate it a bit more, another orbital rhythm enters the calculations, the Metonic cycle which has 235 concurrent lunar months. In short: By taking into account all these parameters, the team of Aristeidis Voulgaris of Thessaloniki’s Culture and Tourism direction decided that the Antikythera instrument should be calibrated from a specific event: an annular solar eclipse that occurs when the moon is at its zenith relative to the Earth. By searching NASA calendars, the authors have identified a date that might make sense: December 23, 178 B.C. Thus, JC corresponds to a long annular eclipse but also to the winter solstice, whose symbol is engraved on the front face of the machine.
many doubts
Of course this advanced date is by no means certain, other authors speak of 204 BC. In addition, the study is still under review by professionals before it can eventually be accepted for publication. And even if this is indeed the case, let’s bet this won’t stop the wars of history. Such is the case with the Antikythera Machine, the complexity of which will spark controversy for a long time to come. However, if this date is correct, then it was made at a later time, because for orbital calculations it is better to rely on past events. by whom? The ambiguity surrounding the builder of this mechanism is tenacious: some have evoked a feat by Archimedes, others see it as the work of disciples of Hipparchus, the inventor of trigonometry, while science fiction authors attribute to extraterrestrials as Christoph Beck does in the Prometheus series. But this question will probably never be answered, and most surprisingly, no similar machine was built for centuries, until the first astronomical clocks in the fourteenth century in Europe.