A fter 2,000 years under the sea, three flat, misshapen pieces of bronze at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens are all shades of green, from emerald to forest. From a distance, they look like rocks with patches of mold. Get closer, though, and the sight is stunning. Crammed inside, obscured by corrosion, are traces of technology that appear utterly modern: gears with neat triangular teeth (just like the inside of a clock) and a ring divided into degrees (like the protractor you used in school). Nothing else like this has ever been discovered from antiquity. Nothing as sophisticated, or even close, appears again for more than a thousand years. Experts have been working to decipher inscriptions hidden inside the mechanism, in particular to understand the mechanism’s missing pieces, some destroyed, some probably still at the bottom of the sea. Hi, I recenty purchased a lenovo thinkpad e530 through laptop authority. When I first turned it on it asked if i wanted to activate windows, which i said no too as i. Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism, the First Computer. Moon and planets with impressive accuracy. One investigator dubbed it “an ancient Greek computer.”. How to activate the camera already installed in Windows 7 VAIO. Skip to main content. How can I activate the camera installed in my computer? How to re-activate Windows 10 after a hardware change. I'm not going to install ancient Win8. You want to deactivate your old computer and activate this one. In the fictional universe of Stargate, a number of technologically advanced races and societies have produced a variety of highly advanced weapons, tools, and spacecraft. By liaising with these races and learning from them, Earth too has begun to create its own futuristic technology. All such technology is SCI-classified top secret, and is used. Though the pointers on the front face don’t survive, Alexander Jones, a historian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York, says an inscription reveals that they carried colored balls: fiery red for Mars, gold for the Sun. Also missing are the parts that drove the planetary pointers, leading to debate about exactly how they moved. Because planets orbit the Sun, when viewed from Earth they appear to wander back and forth in the sky. The Greeks explained this motion with “epicycles”: small circles superimposed on a larger orbit. According to Michael Wright, a former curator at London’s Science Museum who has studied the mechanism longer than anyone, it modeled epicycles with trains of small gears riding around larger ones. Though some experts have dismissed this as beyond the Greeks’ abilities, Jones says he will publish evidence supporting the idea later this year. Other inscriptions hint at where the mechanism was made. Paul Iversen, a classicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, reports that the calendar includes month names used in Corinth and its colonies in northwest Greece. A dial that displayed the timing of major athletic festivals, including the Olympics, lists Naa, a festival held in northwest Greece, and Halieia, held to the south on the island of Rhodes. Perhaps the mechanism hailed from Rhodes and was being shipped north. The ancient philosopher Posidonius had a workshop in Rhodes that could have been the source; according to Cicero, Posidonius made a similar model of the heavens in the first century B.C. The tradition of making such mechanisms could be much older. Cicero wrote of a bronze device made by Archimedes in the third century B.C. And James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, thinks that the eclipse cycle represented is Babylonian in origin and begins in 205 B.C. Maybe it was Hipparchus, an astronomer in Rhodes around that time, who worked out the math behind the device. He is known for having blended the arithmetic-based predictions of Babylonians with geometric theories favored by the Greeks. Regardless, the Antikythera mechanism proves that the ancient Greeks used complex arrangements of precisely cut wheels to represent the latest in scientific understanding. It’s also a window into how the Greeks saw their universe. They came to believe that nature worked according to predefined rules, like a machine—an approach that forms the basis of our modern scientific views. Edmunds argues that this “mechanical philosophy” must have developed as a two-way process. The ancient mechanics who captured the cosmos in bronze weren’t just modeling astronomical theories but were also inspiring them. Item 15087 wasn't much to look at, particularly compared to other wonders uncovered from the shipwreck at Antikythera, Greece, in 1901. The underwater excavation revealed gorgeous bronze sculptures, ropes of decadent jewelry and a treasure trove of antique coins. Amid all that splendor, who could have guessed that a shoebox-size mangled bronze machine, its inscriptions barely legible, its gears calcified and corroded, would be the discovery that could captivate scientists for more than a century? ' In this very small volume of messed-up corroded metal you have packed in there enough knowledge to fill several books telling us about ancient technology, ancient science and the way these interacted with the broader culture of the time,' said, a historian of ancient science at New York University's I nstitute for the Study of the Ancient World. 'It would be hard to dispute that t his is the single most information-rich object that has been uncovered by archaeologists from ancient times.' Jones is part of an of archaeologists, astronomers and historians who have labored for the past 10 years to decipher the mechanism's many mysteries. The results of their research, including the text of a long explanatory 'label' revealed through X-ray analysis, were just published in a, which examines the history and philosophy of science. The findings substantially improve our understanding of the instrument's origins and purpose, Jones said, offering hints at where and by whom the mechanism was made, and how it might have been used. It looks increasingly like a 'philosopher's guide to the galaxy,' as the put it — functioning as a teaching tool, a status symbol and an elaborate celebration of the wonders of ancient science and technology. [] In its prime, about 2,100 years ago, the Antikythera (an-ti-KEE-thur-a) Mechanism was a complex, whirling, clockwork instrument comprising at least 30 bronze gears bearing thousands of interlocking tiny teeth. Powered by a single hand crank, the machine modeled the passage of time and the movements of celestial bodies with astonishing precision. It had dials that counted the days according to at least three different calendars, and another that could be used to calculate the timing of the Olympics. Pointers representing the stars and planets revolved around its front face, indicating their position in relation to Earth. A tiny, painted model of the moon rotated on a spindly axis, flashing black and white to mimic the real moon's waxing and waning. The sum of all these moving parts was far and away the most sophisticated piece of machinery found from ancient Greece. Nothing like it would appear again until the 14th century, when the earliest geared clocks began to be built in Europe. For the first half century after its discovery, researchers believed that the Antikythera Mechanism had to be something simpler than it seemed, like an astrolabe. How could the Greeks have developed the technology needed to create something so precise, so perfect — only to have it vanish for 1,400 years? But then Derek de Solla Price, a polymath physicist and science historian at Yale University, traveled to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens to take a look at the enigmatic piece of machinery. In a, he posited that the Antikythera Mechanism was actually the world's first known 'computer,' capable of calculating astronomical events and illustrating the workings of the universe. Over the next two and a half decades, he described in meticulous detail how the mechanism's diverse functions could be elucidated from the relationships among its intricately interlocked gears. 'Nothing like this instrument is preserved elsewhere. Nothing comparable to it is known from any ancient scientific text or literary allusion,' he wrote. That wasn't completely accurate — Cicero wrote of a instrument made by the first century BCE scholar Posidonius of Rhodes that 'at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night.' But it was true that the existence of the Antikythera Mechanism challenged all of scientists' assumptions about what the ancient Greeks were capable of. 'It is a bit frightening to know that just before the fall of their great civilization the ancient Greeks had come so close to our age, not only in their thought, but also in their scientific technology,' Price said. Still, the degree of damage to the ancient plates and gears meant that many key questions about the the instrument couldn't be answered with the technology of Price's day. Many of the internal workings were clogged or corroded, and the inscriptions were faded or covered up by plates that had been crushed together. [] Enter X-ray scanning and imaging technology, which have finally become powerful enough to allow researchers to peer beneath the machine's calcified surfaces. A decade ago, a diverse group of scientists teamed up to form the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP), which would take advantage of that new capability. Their initial results, which illuminated some of the complex inner workings of the machine, were exciting enough to persuade Jones to jump on board. Fluent in Ancient Greek, he was able to translate the hundreds of new characters revealed in the advanced imaging process. 'Before, we had scraps of the text that was hiding inside these fragments, but there was still a lot of noise,' he said. By combining X-ray images with the impressions left on material that had stuck to the original bronze, 'it was like a double jigsaw puzzle that we were able to use for a much clearer reading.' The main discovery was a more than 3,500-word explanatory text on the main plate of the instrument. It's not quite an instruction manual — speaking to reporters, Jones's colleague Mike Edmunds compared it to the long label beside an item in a museum display, according to the. “It’s not telling you how to use it. It says, ‘What you see is such and such,’ rather than, ‘Turn this knob and it shows you something,’ ' he explained. Visualizations showing how researchers enhanced images of the eroded inscriptions on the Antikythera Mechanism.
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