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What does the Antikythera Mechanism do? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Katie, what was your favorite subject at school other
0:11
Speaker 1: than of course biology. We'll firstly lunch, and then after
0:15
Speaker 1: that maybe recess, and then I guess it's a tie
0:20
Speaker 1: between English and art, and you think you remember those
0:25
Speaker 1: subjects well enough to like, maybe help your future hypothetical
0:29
Speaker 1: children with their homework. I guess it depends on when
0:32
Speaker 1: those future children arrive. If it happens in the next
0:35
Speaker 1: few years, maybe, Well, my son is sixteen and he's
0:39
Speaker 1: taking chemistry right now, and it is a challenge for me.
0:43
Speaker 1: Is that because chemistry is hard, because you've forgotten most
0:46
Speaker 1: of it, or because of the explosions. I love the explosions.
0:51
Speaker 1: The problem for me is that chemistry feels more like
0:53
Speaker 1: memorization than actual conceptual understanding. Oof. Yeah, I hope our
0:59
Speaker 1: former chemistry teachers are not listening in on this conversation.
1:03
Speaker 1: I hope my former high school chemistry teacher has forgotten
1:05
Speaker 1: as much about me as I've forgotten about chemistry. Hi.
1:24
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at
1:27
Speaker 1: UC Irvine, and I'm very glad I don't teach chemistry.
1:30
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Golden. I have a podcast on animal biology
1:34
Speaker 1: and whenever I have to talk about chemistry on that show,
1:38
Speaker 1: it is rough. Hoof No, Well, it's interesting because you're
1:45
Speaker 1: in biology and I'm in physics, and some people might say,
1:48
Speaker 1: like chemistry is right in between them, so maybe between
1:51
Speaker 1: us literally we should be able to understand chemistry in theory. Yes,
1:56
Speaker 1: if knowledge worked that way, if knowledge worked like been diagram, yes, absolutely.
2:02
Speaker 1: Well it's amazing to me how much I've learned and
2:04
Speaker 1: how much I have forgotten along the way. But since chemistry,
2:07
Speaker 1: in my view, is mostly memorization, it's basically all been forgotten. Yeah.
2:11
Speaker 1: I don't do so well with memorizing things when it's
2:16
Speaker 1: just this sort of wrote memorization, you know, like what's
2:20
Speaker 1: it called. When you're trying to like come up with
2:22
Speaker 1: some system to memorize something, it's like, oh, you know,
2:26
Speaker 1: like maybe these letters mean something to me. I'm terrible
2:30
Speaker 1: at that. I cannot do that. I think that's called biology.
2:33
Speaker 1: Is biology mostly memorization. This part of the plant is
2:36
Speaker 1: called this, This part of the plant is called that.
2:39
Speaker 1: Oh I'm bad at that, yes, which is why I
2:42
Speaker 1: write things down. Oh, I see, Well, it always seems
2:44
Speaker 1: strange to me that we're testing kids on their ability
2:47
Speaker 1: to memorize stuff. When nobody in the field memorizes anything.
2:50
Speaker 1: I mean, we just use references. Like when I'm doing physics,
2:53
Speaker 1: I never remember the values of any of the constants
2:55
Speaker 1: I look them up, So I never understood the focus
2:58
Speaker 1: on memorization. Yeah, I think goal tests should let your Google.
3:03
Speaker 1: I've even seen doctors googling stuff. You're at their office
3:06
Speaker 1: and you ask them question like, huh, I'm trying to
3:09
Speaker 1: remember that, and then you see them on Google and
3:11
Speaker 1: they think they're all slick about it. But I see
3:13
Speaker 1: that all right. Well, before we start googling our symptoms,
3:16
Speaker 1: let me welcome you to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge
3:20
Speaker 1: explain the universe of production of iHeartRadio, in which we
3:24
Speaker 1: do our best to mentally google the entire universe. We
3:28
Speaker 1: want to understand how everything out there works. We want
3:31
Speaker 1: to take you on the journey of building a human
3:34
Speaker 1: understanding to describe the entire universe in our minds. That
3:38
Speaker 1: includes physics and chemistry and biology and maybe even history
3:42
Speaker 1: and psychology. We want to understand everything. And I just
3:46
Speaker 1: remembered it's neumonic devices. That's that memory thing that I forgot,
3:52
Speaker 1: but now I remember, So I need a nemonic device
3:55
Speaker 1: for remembering pneumonic devices, superneumonics, orneumonic square. And of course
4:02
Speaker 1: humans have been building knowledge about the world, not just
4:05
Speaker 1: chemistry and biology and physics, but astronomy and geology and
4:09
Speaker 1: all sorts of stuff. And it's tempting to think about
4:12
Speaker 1: that journey a sort of a linear path. It's like
4:14
Speaker 1: starting from not really knowing very much as we look
4:17
Speaker 1: out into the world, and developing into our now very
4:20
Speaker 1: sophisticated understanding of the nature of matter. We sometimes think
4:23
Speaker 1: about that as like climbing steps towards understanding, but really
4:27
Speaker 1: it's a very forked path. There are many many branches there,
4:30
Speaker 1: and many times when knowledge has been lost. I mean,
4:33
Speaker 1: this sounds like we're about to rediscover Atlantis or something,
4:37
Speaker 1: a lost civilization full of like computers and robots made
4:43
Speaker 1: out of rocks and twigs. I'm here for that. Well,
4:47
Speaker 1: it's a very compelling idea to imagine that the ancients
4:50
Speaker 1: may have known things that are now forgotten and have
4:52
Speaker 1: been lost, and of course that it's fertile ground for
4:55
Speaker 1: pop archaeology and frankly conspiracy theories. There are all these
4:59
Speaker 1: shows about like ancient archeology and ancient aliens, and all
5:03
Speaker 1: sorts of crazy stuff because history is lost to us, right,
5:06
Speaker 1: because most of it is not available. Right, we don't
5:09
Speaker 1: know what people were thinking and doing and talking about
5:12
Speaker 1: at the time. We only know what we can find now.
5:15
Speaker 1: I do like that it's so inconceivable to our modern
5:19
Speaker 1: brains that ancient people could do something like move rocks
5:23
Speaker 1: or figure out the sun, and so we just have
5:27
Speaker 1: to come up with aliens came down and did it
5:29
Speaker 1: for us. Yeah, and there's an unfortunate shadow of racism.
5:33
Speaker 1: They're doubting that ancient peoples could not have done what
5:36
Speaker 1: we imagine we could do. But there is also a
5:39
Speaker 1: kernel of truth to this, because we know that there
5:42
Speaker 1: is a lot that has been lost. You know, some
5:45
Speaker 1: of the ancient writers we know about only because of
5:47
Speaker 1: other ancient writers. You know, we all know about Plato
5:50
Speaker 1: mostly because a lot of his writing survived, But his
5:53
Speaker 1: famous teacher, Socrates, almost nothing of his has survived, and
5:57
Speaker 1: we know mostly about him because of what other people
6:00
Speaker 1: have written about him. Imagine if we could access the
6:03
Speaker 1: writings of Socrates, like, what could we learn about the
6:06
Speaker 1: way the Greeks thought about the world. This is why
6:08
Speaker 1: it's really important to make friends and influence people, because
6:12
Speaker 1: imagine if everything about you is lost except for what
6:15
Speaker 1: people know about you, and what if they're like, yeah,
6:19
Speaker 1: that's Socrates. He was a real jerk and a drama
6:23
Speaker 1: and not just make friends, but also be careful with
6:26
Speaker 1: your notes. I was reading about Aristotle, and though we
6:29
Speaker 1: have some of Aristotle's works, it turns out that all
6:32
Speaker 1: we have from Aristotle are the things he did not
6:34
Speaker 1: intend to publish. Like everything he actually published is gone,
6:38
Speaker 1: is lost. All we have are like his drafts and
6:41
Speaker 1: his notes basically, you know, basically the draft unsent messages
6:45
Speaker 1: from his email folder. I think that's everyone's literal nightmare,
6:51
Speaker 1: essentially his diary, you know, like I got so mad
6:54
Speaker 1: at Plato today because he said, blah blah blah, his
6:57
Speaker 1: stupid solids. You don't want his story to see your
7:00
Speaker 1: drafts folder. Never and on the podcast, we mostly focus
7:04
Speaker 1: on what we do and don't know about the universe today,
7:06
Speaker 1: but sometimes we do like to dive into the history
7:09
Speaker 1: of knowledge to understand why we think things we think today.
7:13
Speaker 1: How did we discover this, How do we actually know
7:15
Speaker 1: photons are real? Why do we think this is the case?
7:18
Speaker 1: Where did this idea come from? Because I think it's
7:21
Speaker 1: important to understand that a lot of the way that
7:23
Speaker 1: we think about the world has been shaped by the
7:26
Speaker 1: ways other people have thought about the world. We sort
7:29
Speaker 1: of have made a slow journey into this mental space,
7:32
Speaker 1: but we could have taken other journeys. Right There are
7:34
Speaker 1: lots of lost paths in the history of science, and
7:38
Speaker 1: if we go back and try to uncover some of them,
7:40
Speaker 1: we can understand the choices that we didn't make, or
7:43
Speaker 1: some of the directions that we didn't take that we
7:45
Speaker 1: might have taken that could have influenced the way we
7:48
Speaker 1: think about the world. It's like a branching tree made
7:51
Speaker 1: out of human brains over centuries, which, now, okay, it
7:56
Speaker 1: sounds a little grosser than I intend it, but still exactly.
8:00
Speaker 1: As we dig into what the ancients knew and didn't know,
8:03
Speaker 1: we do find some surprises, some things that don't quite
8:06
Speaker 1: make sense to us, that give us glimpses into how
8:08
Speaker 1: they thought about the world and what they were capable of.
8:11
Speaker 1: So there are so many lost things, like what are
8:15
Speaker 1: some of these aspects of ancient life that we have
8:18
Speaker 1: recovered that could guide our understanding of whether they knew
8:23
Speaker 1: stuff that seems inconceivable to us that they would have
8:26
Speaker 1: known things and that may have gotten lost to history. Well,
8:30
Speaker 1: we're going to dig into exactly that question on the
8:32
Speaker 1: podcast today when we talk about what people have referred
8:35
Speaker 1: to as the world's first computer. So today on the podcast,
8:39
Speaker 1: we'll be asking the question, what does the endicathera mechanism do?
8:49
Speaker 1: Oh boy, are we actually going to talk about robots
8:51
Speaker 1: made out of rocks? Robots made out of rocks? Is
8:55
Speaker 1: that some video game that you're playing? No, No, it's
8:58
Speaker 1: just how I imagine like the ancient law city of
9:01
Speaker 1: Atlantis got you got all these high tech things, they're
9:04
Speaker 1: just man out of rock. I see. It's like the
9:06
Speaker 1: original steampunk, right, It's like the steampunk of steampunk, rock punk,
9:12
Speaker 1: rock punk exactly, chek exactly. So this is a really
9:19
Speaker 1: fascinating bit of archeology that intersects not only with the
9:23
Speaker 1: history of science, but the history of physics and the
9:26
Speaker 1: history of astronomy, and gives us a window into what
9:29
Speaker 1: the Greeks were thinking about the world and the universe,
9:32
Speaker 1: and also how they were able to calculate it and
9:35
Speaker 1: predict it. So, as usual, I was curious if people
9:38
Speaker 1: had heard about this particular archaeological object so I went
9:42
Speaker 1: out there into the internet too as people if they
9:45
Speaker 1: knew what this thing was. So thanks very much to
9:48
Speaker 1: everybody who participates in this segment of the podcast. And
9:51
Speaker 1: if you would like to answer weird and tough questions
9:54
Speaker 1: for everybody else's educational amusement, please don't be shy right
9:58
Speaker 1: to me to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
10:01
Speaker 1: So before you hear these answers, think to yourself, do
10:04
Speaker 1: you know what the anticotheram mechanism actually does? Here's what
10:08
Speaker 1: people had to say. I think this is a very
10:12
Speaker 1: old mechanism. It's supposed to be one of the earliest
10:16
Speaker 1: things that can be called a computer. Maybe I believe
10:19
Speaker 1: it was used to predict celestial events, maybe like when
10:25
Speaker 1: planets meet, stuff like that. Otherwise, I think it's not
10:28
Speaker 1: fully understood and there are still some stuff we might
10:32
Speaker 1: find out about it. Era A mechanism has been guarded
10:35
Speaker 1: for thousands of years by a secret sisterhood of astronomers.
10:39
Speaker 1: It is a defense against the of the Kai Theora,
10:43
Speaker 1: a many headed planet eating space gorgan. Day by day,
10:47
Speaker 1: the Kai Theora draws nearer and the anti Kai Theoram
10:51
Speaker 1: mechanism has been guarded for thousands of years by a
10:54
Speaker 1: secret sisterhood of astronomers. It is our only defense against
10:58
Speaker 1: the coming of the Kai theory, a many headed planet
11:02
Speaker 1: eating space gorgan. Day by day, the Kai Theora draws nearer,
11:07
Speaker 1: and day by day her hunger grows. I honestly have
11:10
Speaker 1: no clue. It sounds like something from magic to Gathering
11:12
Speaker 1: or star Wars. I'm going to say it's anti magic,
11:17
Speaker 1: just trolling. I have no clue. I guess the anticular
11:20
Speaker 1: mechanism was the one found in the agene c which
11:25
Speaker 1: was used to find the planets and the stars for
11:30
Speaker 1: navigation purposes. So I've never seen this word before, and
11:33
Speaker 1: so my first impression is that it's some sort of
11:35
Speaker 1: medieval torture device. But given the context of this podcast,
11:40
Speaker 1: I'm going to guess that it's some sort of mechanism
11:41
Speaker 1: that describes the interaction between elementary particles. I do agree
11:46
Speaker 1: with the person who said it sounds like an ancient
11:48
Speaker 1: torture device, especially because there were so many weird torture
11:52
Speaker 1: devices back in the day, like iron Maidens and the
11:57
Speaker 1: Pair of Despair. It was pretty pretty messed up. But yeah,
12:01
Speaker 1: I remember hearing about the antikatheram mechanism, and there was
12:06
Speaker 1: a lot of buzz about just like what does this do?
12:09
Speaker 1: Is this some kind of like doomsday prediction device? Is
12:13
Speaker 1: it unlocking the secrets of the world. It felt like
12:16
Speaker 1: a huge deal, like if we could figure out this
12:19
Speaker 1: mechanism somehow, it would reveal some secret about the world. Well,
12:24
Speaker 1: when I heard evil torture device, I thought, maybe this
12:26
Speaker 1: is part of like ancient chemistry homework. This thing like
12:31
Speaker 1: turns out chemistry problems or something organic chemistry homework. Yes,
12:36
Speaker 1: that's right exactly, And you're right that this object really
12:40
Speaker 1: has captured the imagination of a lot of historians and archaeologists.
12:45
Speaker 1: And the object itself comes from ancient history and has
12:48
Speaker 1: its own really fascinating history of how it was discovered
12:52
Speaker 1: and how people started to figure out what it might
12:55
Speaker 1: be and what it means about ancient Greek society. So
12:58
Speaker 1: this was confirmed to be from ancient Greece, When was
13:03
Speaker 1: it discovered? And then when did they think it was from?
13:06
Speaker 1: So it's a really fascinating story. It was discovered just
13:09
Speaker 1: over one hundred years ago, around nineteen oh one, and
13:11
Speaker 1: it's called the Antikothera mechanism because it was found near
13:15
Speaker 1: one of the Greek islands called Antikothera. They don't think
13:18
Speaker 1: it's from that island. They found a wreckage of a
13:20
Speaker 1: trading ship that sank more than two thousand years ago,
13:24
Speaker 1: so that's where it was found. But it was sort
13:26
Speaker 1: of found by accident. There was a ship that was
13:29
Speaker 1: diverted near this island because of a storm, and when
13:32
Speaker 1: the storm passed, they were in this protected bay and
13:35
Speaker 1: they decided, hey, let's just do some diving here while
13:38
Speaker 1: we're stopped. So the divers went down and they found
13:41
Speaker 1: this crazy number of statues. That first divers that came
13:45
Speaker 1: up said that they thought that the water was filled
13:47
Speaker 1: with dead naked people. Oh god. It's interesting because it
13:52
Speaker 1: feels so much like Kismet that they would find this place.
13:55
Speaker 1: But if the storm drove them there, I wonder if
13:58
Speaker 1: it's some kind of repeat, a sort of current that
14:02
Speaker 1: brings things in that direction. So maybe it's not as
14:05
Speaker 1: coincidental as it seems like it was. Yeah, perhaps maybe
14:10
Speaker 1: it's like a ship graveyard or something. For thousands of years,
14:13
Speaker 1: it's been like eating ships. It's certainly possible. The Antikathera quadrangle,
14:18
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly exactly, And you have to cast
14:22
Speaker 1: your mind back to like nineteen hundred when they were
14:24
Speaker 1: exploring the water. They didn't have the kind of scuba
14:27
Speaker 1: technology that we have now, so you have to imagine
14:29
Speaker 1: people in like canvas diving suits with like these big
14:32
Speaker 1: brass helmets, you know, going underwater. And it's actually a
14:35
Speaker 1: bit tragic because they didn't understand the idea of water
14:38
Speaker 1: pressure and coming up slowly to avoid the bends. So
14:42
Speaker 1: some of the divers involved in this expedition actually suffered
14:45
Speaker 1: quite badly. But they discovered this incredible wreckage. It's some
14:49
Speaker 1: huge ship had sunk there and left coins and jewelry
14:53
Speaker 1: and statues, and for a long time they thought that
14:56
Speaker 1: was the most interesting thing about this discovery. It was
14:58
Speaker 1: an incredible discover of all sorts of artifacts. But it
15:02
Speaker 1: took them a long time to even notice that the
15:04
Speaker 1: antiicotheram mechanism among the wreckage. Wow. Yeah, I mean, gosh,
15:08
Speaker 1: it's such a spooky kind of visual I'm getting of
15:11
Speaker 1: all these divers and these old diving suits with the
15:15
Speaker 1: big heads and then just roaming among these sunken statues.
15:20
Speaker 1: And of course that's going to be hard to spot
15:23
Speaker 1: this mechanism because when you first look at it. It's
15:26
Speaker 1: just kind of like a tray with some gizmos on it,
15:30
Speaker 1: so it's not super noticeable, but I'm really glad they
15:35
Speaker 1: ended up picking that up. Yeah. Fortunately they were a
15:37
Speaker 1: thorough about it, and as you said, first they paid
15:40
Speaker 1: most attention to the jewelry and the coins, and the
15:42
Speaker 1: coins helped them date this ship back to around the
15:45
Speaker 1: time of Julius Caesar, and the speculation is that this
15:49
Speaker 1: was a really huge trade ship, too big for most
15:52
Speaker 1: harbors to even take, and so they think it probably
15:54
Speaker 1: was on its way to roam, maybe for all these
15:56
Speaker 1: spoils to be displayed in some parade for season or himself.
16:00
Speaker 1: So if this was sort of dated to Caesar, how
16:05
Speaker 1: did we know that this was of Greek origin and
16:08
Speaker 1: not of Roman origin. Yeah, it's a great question. And
16:11
Speaker 1: for a while people weren't even sure that it belonged
16:14
Speaker 1: with the ship. They thought it was so shockingly advanced
16:17
Speaker 1: that maybe it fell overboard later and became intermingled with it.
16:21
Speaker 1: But it has Greek letters on it, like, there is
16:24
Speaker 1: Greek writing on it once you take the thing apart,
16:26
Speaker 1: So they're pretty sure that it was made sometime between
16:30
Speaker 1: one hundred and one hundred and fifty BC. Oh my god,
16:33
Speaker 1: that's really old. It's really old. Is it completely impact
16:37
Speaker 1: or is it kind of only partially impact. It's mostly lost, actually,
16:41
Speaker 1: which makes it challenging to understand what it is and
16:43
Speaker 1: what it did. And it's not even that obviously an
16:47
Speaker 1: interesting thing. Like they gathered all of this stuff up
16:50
Speaker 1: and there was one chunk that was just like a
16:52
Speaker 1: big rock with like a piece of metal sticking out
16:54
Speaker 1: of it. And you know, these archeological digs proceed pretty slowly,
16:58
Speaker 1: and this thing actually went iced for two years. It
17:01
Speaker 1: was just like a lump of stuff until somebody noticed
17:04
Speaker 1: that it had a gear sticking out of it, and
17:06
Speaker 1: they're like, wait a second, a gear. And you have
17:08
Speaker 1: to understand, like gears, small precise metal gears had never
17:13
Speaker 1: been seen before in antiquity, like we have seen them
17:15
Speaker 1: in like the fourteenth century or fifteenth century in medieval Europe.
17:19
Speaker 1: But archaeologists didn't believe that the Greeks could also make
17:22
Speaker 1: these like very small gears thousands of years ago. Yeah,
17:25
Speaker 1: because they didn't have wrist watch because they had wrist
17:29
Speaker 1: sundials back then. But yeah, no, that is shocking. So
17:33
Speaker 1: they just were basically using this thing as a paperweight,
17:36
Speaker 1: and then they saw it had gear sticking out, and
17:40
Speaker 1: so how did they proceed from there? Did they kind
17:43
Speaker 1: of start to open up this rock and what fell
17:46
Speaker 1: out of it? So the thing was basically ignored for
17:48
Speaker 1: a couple of years as they were working on the
17:50
Speaker 1: more obvious treasures, and because it wasn't treated very well,
17:54
Speaker 1: it sort of fell apart, and as it fell apart,
17:57
Speaker 1: you could see more inside of it, and it actually
17:59
Speaker 1: helped them discover what it was, though it's a little
18:01
Speaker 1: bit tragic because some damage was also done because it
18:04
Speaker 1: wasn't being stored properly. But it was a challenge at
18:06
Speaker 1: the time. Some people are like, oh, look at these gears,
18:08
Speaker 1: this must be some sort of clock, some sort of
18:11
Speaker 1: complicated astronomical clock. Was the original idea, but this idea
18:14
Speaker 1: was dismissed by archaeologists at the time, right because they
18:18
Speaker 1: thought it was impossible. Like the Greeks, they had things
18:21
Speaker 1: like big wooden gears that you could use to turn
18:24
Speaker 1: windmills like so the concept of like gears is rotating
18:28
Speaker 1: circles that are meshing together and turning each other existed,
18:31
Speaker 1: but not the ability to make these things very very
18:33
Speaker 1: small so it sort of just sat in the museum
18:36
Speaker 1: for decades while people were like, huh, nobody really understands
18:40
Speaker 1: that question mark. So finally we must have decided to
18:45
Speaker 1: look at it. More So, when did we do that?
18:47
Speaker 1: And who basically decided, Hey, why don't we give this
18:50
Speaker 1: thing a second look? So it wasn't until the fifties
18:53
Speaker 1: when a British physicist and historian of science named Derek
18:57
Speaker 1: Price started to look into this and they tried to
18:59
Speaker 1: look inside of this thing, and they took these radiographic
19:02
Speaker 1: images basically X rays, and what they saw inside this
19:06
Speaker 1: thing shocked them. It wasn't just one corroded gear stuck
19:10
Speaker 1: in a lump. This thing had a lot of gears
19:12
Speaker 1: inside of it. There were at least thirty different gear
19:15
Speaker 1: wheels in this lump. That's crazy because if you have
19:18
Speaker 1: so many, and this is just part of it, that
19:21
Speaker 1: implies this was an incredibly complicated thing. It was really
19:24
Speaker 1: incredibly complicated, and it was really impressive because it was
19:27
Speaker 1: so small. The size of this thing is inches like.
19:30
Speaker 1: Reconstructions of what this thing might have looked like originally
19:34
Speaker 1: suggest that it might have been like about the size
19:36
Speaker 1: of a shoe box. So this is a very small,
19:39
Speaker 1: very intricate device. It's really impressive and really confusing for
19:42
Speaker 1: people how the Greeks were able to make this and
19:45
Speaker 1: to understand exactly what it might have done for them,
19:47
Speaker 1: because gears have to be somewhat precise, right for a
19:51
Speaker 1: thing to function fluidly, especially if you have a small
19:55
Speaker 1: precise object to produce those gears. To have technology to
20:00
Speaker 1: create these really precise gears that work fluidly, that it
20:04
Speaker 1: doesn't all just kind of jam and break down. That
20:06
Speaker 1: seems really difficult, and it's not something I would have
20:09
Speaker 1: expected people would be capable of doing at that time. Yeah,
20:13
Speaker 1: and it's not something that's like molded. This is something
20:16
Speaker 1: that's like stamped out of a bronze sheet. So imagine
20:19
Speaker 1: putting this thing together. And as you say, it has
20:21
Speaker 1: to be very very precise. If you're going to use
20:24
Speaker 1: this to predict the eclipses or the phases of the moons,
20:27
Speaker 1: then it can't be a sloppy piece of machinery, right.
20:30
Speaker 1: It's essentially something that they're going to try to capture
20:32
Speaker 1: your understanding of how the universe works so that you
20:36
Speaker 1: could sort of run the universe forward in time. That's
20:39
Speaker 1: why they call it potentially like the world's first computer,
20:42
Speaker 1: because it's like a physical device that's supposed to be
20:45
Speaker 1: representing the calculations you might otherwise make and do it
20:49
Speaker 1: for you. They imagine that the thing might have had
20:51
Speaker 1: like a hand crank on the front of it, and
20:54
Speaker 1: as you crank this thing, various knobs and dials word
20:57
Speaker 1: and pointed in various ways and told you think about
21:00
Speaker 1: what might happen in the skies in the future, which
21:03
Speaker 1: at the time was very powerful information if you were
21:06
Speaker 1: hoping to like not attack your enemy on the date
21:09
Speaker 1: of an eclipse, for example. That's really really interesting. So
21:13
Speaker 1: let's take a break while I pick up the pieces
21:16
Speaker 1: of my mind that have been blown off the floor,
21:19
Speaker 1: and when we return, let's talk more about what it did.
21:23
Speaker 1: Because I'm having trouble conceiving of something just made out
21:27
Speaker 1: of gears being able to predict things like eclipses. All right,
21:43
Speaker 1: So I have reassembled my mind, and now I'm ready
21:47
Speaker 1: to learn how could this thing have done things like
21:51
Speaker 1: predict the movement of celestial bodies just with these gears
21:56
Speaker 1: and something that was made in ancient times that it's
22:00
Speaker 1: hard for me to believe. Well, it's really fascinating to
22:03
Speaker 1: sort of think about what the philosophy of a computer is, Like,
22:07
Speaker 1: what do we use computers for. Computers are little physical machines,
22:12
Speaker 1: and they can be digital or they can be analog whatever,
22:15
Speaker 1: But essentially they're physical machines that carry out calculations, right,
22:19
Speaker 1: that do things for us. And these days we have
22:22
Speaker 1: very very flexible computers that can do all sorts of things.
22:25
Speaker 1: But back on the early days, computers were designed to
22:28
Speaker 1: do like one specific task. So you take the mathematics
22:31
Speaker 1: problem you have. Maybe you want to predict where your
22:33
Speaker 1: cannonball is going to fly or something, and you figure
22:36
Speaker 1: out a way to represent it physically so that the
22:39
Speaker 1: laws of physics how things move and touch each other
22:43
Speaker 1: end up cranking out the answer for you. So why
22:46
Speaker 1: do we think this was some form of astronomical calculator
22:50
Speaker 1: rather than something like a music box or for fun?
22:56
Speaker 1: There is I think a lot of room for skepticism there.
22:59
Speaker 1: I don't know if you follow archaeology, but I feel
23:01
Speaker 1: like when archaeologists don't know what something is, they're like, oh,
23:04
Speaker 1: it's a religious symbol, or oh maybe it predicted the
23:07
Speaker 1: sun and the moon. Right, it seems to be like
23:09
Speaker 1: sort of their go to explanation for we don't know
23:12
Speaker 1: what this was, and it makes me wonder about, like,
23:15
Speaker 1: you know, stuff in our world. If they're going to
23:17
Speaker 1: pick up like a Nintendo game bow and be like, oh,
23:19
Speaker 1: this must have been the center of a religious ritual,
23:22
Speaker 1: or maybe this predicted eclipses or something just a Greek
23:26
Speaker 1: pinball machine exactly. And so in order to come to
23:30
Speaker 1: this conclusion, you have to solve two puzzles simultaneously. One
23:34
Speaker 1: is you have to understand what did the Greeks think
23:38
Speaker 1: was going on in the sky, what was their cosmology,
23:42
Speaker 1: how did they think the universe worked? And then the
23:45
Speaker 1: second puzzle is how could this little bronze device represent
23:49
Speaker 1: that or did it reflect their cosmology? Because you know,
23:53
Speaker 1: the Greeks had a very very different view of what
23:55
Speaker 1: was happening up there in the sky than we did.
23:57
Speaker 1: So you can't look at this device and say, hey,
23:59
Speaker 1: this just represent our understanding of the cosmos, how we
24:03
Speaker 1: think the Moon moves and how we think Jupiter moves,
24:06
Speaker 1: because that's not what they could have been calculating. They
24:09
Speaker 1: didn't know our idea of the cosmos. They had their own.
24:12
Speaker 1: Weird Obviously, now we understand to be wrong ideas for
24:16
Speaker 1: how the universe worked. So we have to unravel what
24:18
Speaker 1: they thought was happening and then figure out if this
24:21
Speaker 1: thing is reflecting their sort of earthly understanding or misunderstanding
24:25
Speaker 1: of the universe. Yeah, because they thought that guy like
24:28
Speaker 1: Apollo pulled the sun in his chariot, right, So what
24:32
Speaker 1: exactly other than the Greek mythology, what was their view
24:36
Speaker 1: of the universe. So the Greeks believed that the Earth
24:39
Speaker 1: was at the center of the Solar system, and basically
24:42
Speaker 1: they were looking up at the sky and they were
24:44
Speaker 1: trying to track like how the stars moved, and how
24:47
Speaker 1: the planets moved, and how the moon moved. But it
24:49
Speaker 1: was a geocentric theory of the way that the world worked.
24:52
Speaker 1: So what we call the Ptolemaic system, it's really ancient,
24:56
Speaker 1: the idea that the Earth is at the center of
24:58
Speaker 1: everything and everything else moves around it. And to us
25:01
Speaker 1: that seems sort of like obviously wrong now, but it's
25:04
Speaker 1: easy to discard that in the light of history, right,
25:07
Speaker 1: But if you go back to like who they were
25:08
Speaker 1: and what they were seeing, it's not a totally bonker's
25:11
Speaker 1: way to think about the universe. To think that the
25:14
Speaker 1: Earth might have been at the center of everything, right,
25:17
Speaker 1: because when you are tracking the night sky and you're
25:21
Speaker 1: standing there from Earth, everything's rotating around you. So it
25:25
Speaker 1: feels very much like you are at the center of
25:28
Speaker 1: this rotation, right, It really does. Like that is our
25:31
Speaker 1: perspective in the same sense that like, before you measure
25:34
Speaker 1: the Earth's curvature, you might think, oh, yeah, sure, it
25:36
Speaker 1: makes sense for the Earth to be flat. It's consistent
25:39
Speaker 1: with what you see. So let's not like just dismiss
25:41
Speaker 1: the ancient geniuses. Let's try to understand what they were thinking.
25:44
Speaker 1: And you know, they considered the idea that maybe the
25:47
Speaker 1: Earth was moving and maybe it was rotating around the Sun,
25:50
Speaker 1: and so they considered that theory, but they thought they
25:52
Speaker 1: had disproved it. They thought that if the Earth was
25:55
Speaker 1: moving around the Sun, they would be able to tell.
25:58
Speaker 1: They thought if you looked up at the night sky,
26:00
Speaker 1: you would be able to tell that the Earth was
26:02
Speaker 1: moving because the stars would be wiggling. Why would they
26:06
Speaker 1: think the stars were wiggling in the same way that
26:09
Speaker 1: like if you paint a bunch of stars on the
26:10
Speaker 1: walls of your room and then walk around, your view
26:13
Speaker 1: of the stars changes, right, Because as your perspective changes,
26:17
Speaker 1: what you see changes, and they thought that the stars
26:20
Speaker 1: were much much closer than they actually were. Right, they
26:23
Speaker 1: didn't realize the stars were suns that were super bright
26:26
Speaker 1: and super distant. They thought they were sort of in
26:29
Speaker 1: their neighborhood, and so if the Earth was moving around
26:32
Speaker 1: the Sun, then we would get a different view of
26:34
Speaker 1: those stars. This is what we now know as like parallax.
26:37
Speaker 1: And because they didn't have the technology to detect that
26:40
Speaker 1: the stars actually did wiggle a little bit as the
26:43
Speaker 1: Earth moved, and they thought the stars were much much closer.
26:46
Speaker 1: They dismissed this idea. I mean, it makes sense, like
26:49
Speaker 1: when you look at the stars they're so bright, the
26:51
Speaker 1: idea that something is so many light years away from
26:55
Speaker 1: you that could produce that light, that would be so
26:59
Speaker 1: hard to speculate about them being so far away. Yeah,
27:03
Speaker 1: And it's a really powerful lesson in sort of the
27:05
Speaker 1: history of physics that you can hold onto one assumption.
27:08
Speaker 1: In this case, they were assuming that the stars were
27:10
Speaker 1: not super far away, and that led them to make
27:13
Speaker 1: a second wrong conclusion, right, that the Earth was stable
27:16
Speaker 1: and was at the center of everything, So you should
27:19
Speaker 1: always be like on the lookout for these assumptions that
27:22
Speaker 1: might have closed doors that have truth behind them, but
27:25
Speaker 1: we can't blame them too much. It's a difficult thing
27:27
Speaker 1: to observe. The stars are super duper far away, and
27:31
Speaker 1: so their position in the sky does wiggle a little
27:34
Speaker 1: bit as we go around the Sun, and we can
27:36
Speaker 1: use that to measure the distance to the stars. It's
27:39
Speaker 1: sort of like if you hold your finger in front
27:41
Speaker 1: of you and you look at it with your left
27:42
Speaker 1: eye and your right eye, you see a different picture.
27:45
Speaker 1: And as your finger gets closer and closer, your left
27:47
Speaker 1: eye and your right eye see more differences than if
27:50
Speaker 1: your finger is further and further away. So the closer
27:53
Speaker 1: something is, the more differences you'd see it from different
27:56
Speaker 1: points of view. So as the Earth goes around the Sun,
27:59
Speaker 1: we get different views of the stars, but mostly for
28:01
Speaker 1: the closer stars. I used to do that a lot
28:03
Speaker 1: as a kid, hold my finger right out in front
28:05
Speaker 1: of my nose, close one eye, opened the other one
28:08
Speaker 1: vice versa, because it felt like magic, like my finger
28:11
Speaker 1: was jumping around. But yeah, that's I mean, it's so
28:13
Speaker 1: interesting that they really got close right, had these correct ideas,
28:19
Speaker 1: but they just because they had this assumption about the
28:22
Speaker 1: stars being closer. They just missed it. But they were
28:26
Speaker 1: right about other things too, like things being spears and
28:29
Speaker 1: not flat, right, yeah, exactly. The Greeks understood that the
28:33
Speaker 1: Earth was a sphere and the planets were spears and
28:35
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff. And it wasn't until Kepler
28:38
Speaker 1: and Copernicus, you know, more than a thousand years later,
28:42
Speaker 1: that we understood that things didn't move in circles around
28:45
Speaker 1: the Earth, but instead that they moved in ellipses with
28:48
Speaker 1: the Sun at the center. And then it wasn't until
28:50
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century we were actually able to measure this
28:54
Speaker 1: parallax effect to see that the stars really were wiggling
28:58
Speaker 1: as we went around the Sun. And so, you know,
29:01
Speaker 1: no shade on the Greeks for not having figured that out,
29:03
Speaker 1: especially because you know, still there's a lot of folks
29:06
Speaker 1: out there that don't seem to have absorbed this knowledge.
29:10
Speaker 1: I was shocked to read that there was a survey
29:13
Speaker 1: by the NSF in twenty fourteen that asked Americans whether
29:16
Speaker 1: the Sun went around the Earth or the Earth went
29:19
Speaker 1: around the Sun, and twenty six percent of Americans believed
29:24
Speaker 1: that the Sun went around the Earth. Oh boy, well,
29:26
Speaker 1: maybe they're time travelers from ancient Greece and they're just
29:30
Speaker 1: trying to blend in. Maybe they are. So the key
29:33
Speaker 1: concepts that the Greeks had that were wrong that we
29:36
Speaker 1: need to have in our minds as we think about
29:38
Speaker 1: the Antikothera mechanism is that things moved in circles and
29:42
Speaker 1: that everything went around the Earth instead of around the Sun.
29:46
Speaker 1: And these two concepts made their calculations actually much much
29:49
Speaker 1: more complicated than they had to be. That's interesting. So
29:53
Speaker 1: they were just making the work harder for themselves. So
29:56
Speaker 1: do we see evidence of that on the Antikothera mechanism
30:00
Speaker 1: of these weird views of the Earth being the center
30:03
Speaker 1: and orbits being circles. We absolutely do, because gears are
30:07
Speaker 1: actually a nice way to describe circles, because the gears
30:10
Speaker 1: are themselves circles. But the problem is if you look
30:14
Speaker 1: up it in the sky and try to describe the
30:15
Speaker 1: motion of planets just using circles, it doesn't really work right.
30:19
Speaker 1: Like Jupiter doesn't move around the Earth in a simple circle,
30:23
Speaker 1: because what's actually happening is both of them are moving
30:25
Speaker 1: around the Sun. Sometimes Jupiter appears to be going around
30:28
Speaker 1: the Earth, and sometimes it sort of changes direction and
30:31
Speaker 1: seems to go the other way. And you can see
30:34
Speaker 1: this pretty clearly if you look at the heliocentric model
30:37
Speaker 1: for the Solar System, where the Earth and Jupiter are
30:40
Speaker 1: both moving around the Sun, and you think about what
30:42
Speaker 1: happens from the Earth's point of view. Sometimes it looks
30:45
Speaker 1: like Jupiter's going one way around the Earth, and sometimes
30:47
Speaker 1: it looks like it's going the other way, because they're
30:50
Speaker 1: both really moving in circles around the Sun. And so
30:53
Speaker 1: the Greeks puzzled about this for a long time, and
30:55
Speaker 1: what they decided was happening was that the planets were
30:59
Speaker 1: embedded in these crystal spheres of ether. But there wasn't
31:02
Speaker 1: just one crystal sphere. There was like several crystal spheres.
31:06
Speaker 1: So like Jupiter was moving in this crystal sphere, but
31:09
Speaker 1: then there was a second sphere that also moved it.
31:12
Speaker 1: So instead of having one circle, they had two circles,
31:15
Speaker 1: a big one and a little one, and those two
31:18
Speaker 1: working together would explain the retrograde motion. So these are
31:21
Speaker 1: called epicycles. That's really interesting also about like the fact
31:25
Speaker 1: that they used these circular gears for the whole thing.
31:28
Speaker 1: I guess it does make sense that you'd want to
31:31
Speaker 1: be looking for something like a cam or some oblong shape,
31:34
Speaker 1: because I know that for automatons that were made in
31:38
Speaker 1: like the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, they would actually use
31:41
Speaker 1: like these cams that had these like complex oblong shapes,
31:45
Speaker 1: so they can make these movements that are not perfect circles.
31:48
Speaker 1: So if you didn't see any of that, that's such
31:51
Speaker 1: an interesting hint to like what their conception of the
31:55
Speaker 1: universe was. Yeah, And one of the biggest clues that
31:58
Speaker 1: confirmed that this thing might be an astronom o'clock, which
32:01
Speaker 1: is counting the number of teeth on these gears. So
32:03
Speaker 1: they found pairs of gears, big ones and small ones
32:07
Speaker 1: that had gear reissues that lined up perfectly with the
32:10
Speaker 1: Greeks concept of these cycles. So the Greeks, for example,
32:14
Speaker 1: thought that Venus moved on two cycles, two different circles,
32:18
Speaker 1: and these circles had a ratio of one one five
32:21
Speaker 1: one to seven twenty. But it's like almost impossible to
32:25
Speaker 1: make a gear with like a thousand and fifty one
32:27
Speaker 1: teeth in it. But they found instead were other smaller
32:30
Speaker 1: gears with almost exactly the same ratio, like an approximation.
32:34
Speaker 1: So they found gears for example, with two hundred and
32:37
Speaker 1: eighty nine and four hundred and sixty two teeth in it,
32:40
Speaker 1: which has like almost the same ratio as what the
32:43
Speaker 1: Greek thought was the exact ratio of seven twenty to
32:46
Speaker 1: eleven fifty one. And so they found all of these
32:50
Speaker 1: pairs of gears that reflect what the Greeks thought was
32:53
Speaker 1: happening in the sky, these ratios of the size of
32:56
Speaker 1: these crystalline spheres, and that was a very strong clue
33:00
Speaker 1: that this thing was a computer for predicting astronomical locations.
33:04
Speaker 1: That's really interesting. So instead of trying to make it
33:08
Speaker 1: tinier and more precise, they just use that same ratio
33:12
Speaker 1: with their still impressively delicate, but larger, more crude gears. Yeah,
33:18
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. And this thing shows a really impressive
33:21
Speaker 1: sort of engineering ethos because sometimes they would make these approximations,
33:25
Speaker 1: and the approximations would let them use the same gear
33:28
Speaker 1: for multiple things. Like if you could have a gear
33:31
Speaker 1: with seventeen teeth in it, and seventeen appeared in two
33:34
Speaker 1: of these ratios, then you only needed one of those
33:36
Speaker 1: gears and it could drive two other gears, so you
33:39
Speaker 1: could like do two calculations at the same time. So
33:42
Speaker 1: as they take this thing apart and understand what the
33:45
Speaker 1: gears are and try to understand what the gears can do,
33:48
Speaker 1: they faced a big challenge and like actually reproducing Greek calculations,
33:52
Speaker 1: like it's one thing to say, okay, it's got some
33:54
Speaker 1: symbols of the moon on it and the sun on it,
33:57
Speaker 1: and it's got some gears, but actually putting it together
34:00
Speaker 1: to see how it works turned out to be a
34:01
Speaker 1: huge challenge, and there are still puzzles today about what
34:05
Speaker 1: this thing exactly did and how it worked. This is
34:08
Speaker 1: why I never undo the Rubis cube when I get it.
34:11
Speaker 1: I just leave it as it is, so people think
34:13
Speaker 1: I know how to do it, but you know, it's
34:15
Speaker 1: just like, oh yeah, I did that this morning. But
34:17
Speaker 1: you leave it as it comes out of the box
34:19
Speaker 1: and then you never have to redo it. Or what
34:22
Speaker 1: if this whole thing was just like one of their
34:24
Speaker 1: email drafts, it wasn't actually finished. We'll talk more about
34:30
Speaker 1: whether we can reproduce the antikotheram mechanism after a quick
34:34
Speaker 1: break where I'm totally going to do a Rubis cube.
34:50
Speaker 1: All right, So just did a Rubis cube blindfolded behind
34:54
Speaker 1: my back. No need to check my work. So let's
34:57
Speaker 1: talk a little more about this antikothera mechani and why
35:01
Speaker 1: it's so difficult to reproduce it. So some of the
35:04
Speaker 1: puzzles were worked out by price in the middle of
35:07
Speaker 1: the last century, some of the sort of easier ones,
35:10
Speaker 1: you know, for example, there were gears that we notice
35:13
Speaker 1: that had like two hundred and thirty five teeth or
35:16
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty seventeeth, and some of these things
35:19
Speaker 1: you can understand based on the Greek understanding of how
35:23
Speaker 1: things worked. So, for example, there's a bit of an
35:25
Speaker 1: awkward disconnect between how the moon cycles and how the
35:29
Speaker 1: sun cycles. Right, So for example, it takes like twenty
35:32
Speaker 1: nine and a half days to go from new moon
35:35
Speaker 1: to new Moon, which is like almost one twelfth of
35:38
Speaker 1: a solar year, but not exactly right. Twelve times twenty
35:42
Speaker 1: nine and a half gives you three hundred and fifty
35:45
Speaker 1: four days, eleven days short of the solar year. So
35:48
Speaker 1: if you have these two calendars, they sort of naturally
35:50
Speaker 1: go out of SINC. But every nineteen years things sort
35:53
Speaker 1: of come back into SINC. And every nineteen years there
35:56
Speaker 1: are two hundred and fifty four orbits of the moon
36:00
Speaker 1: around the Earth. Now, two hundred and fifty four, again
36:02
Speaker 1: is a large number of years. Half of that is
36:04
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty seven. So these are the sort
36:07
Speaker 1: of like mathematical puzzles that Price went through to figure out,
36:10
Speaker 1: like what could this gear potentially mean? Where's the number
36:13
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty seven mean to the Greeks? So
36:16
Speaker 1: in this case, we think maybe it was a way
36:19
Speaker 1: to connect the solar year with the lunar year. Yeah,
36:22
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm in a Dan Brown book right now.
36:24
Speaker 1: All we need is some cult members to chase us
36:28
Speaker 1: and try to kill us, so that, yeah, I mean,
36:32
Speaker 1: that's they had such complex problems. They had to figure
36:35
Speaker 1: out what this thing made out of all these gears.
36:39
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not an engineer. I like to think
36:41
Speaker 1: I'm somewhat crafty, but it is so hard for me
36:44
Speaker 1: to imagine being able to figure out how to manage
36:48
Speaker 1: these gears in a way that they're doing all these
36:50
Speaker 1: calculations and things like making up for that difference between
36:55
Speaker 1: the lunar and solar calendars. It's so hard for me
36:58
Speaker 1: to understand how they would have done that. It's really tricky,
37:02
Speaker 1: and for a long time it was sort of like
37:03
Speaker 1: vaguely understood. But around twenty years ago people wanted to
37:07
Speaker 1: dig in deeper. They wanted to like actually develop models
37:10
Speaker 1: of this thing that lined up number one with like
37:14
Speaker 1: what we had found archaeologically, that had pieces that represented
37:17
Speaker 1: things we had actually found and predicted what we understood
37:21
Speaker 1: the Greek cosmology to do. And it wasn't really successful.
37:25
Speaker 1: You know, there's a lot of missing pieces. You know,
37:26
Speaker 1: we think we've maybe discovered like a third of this thing,
37:29
Speaker 1: So it's like trying to figure out how a game
37:31
Speaker 1: boy worked if you only had a third of the pieces, right.
37:34
Speaker 1: And also, the thing is like stuck inside of a
37:37
Speaker 1: blob and you only really have fuzzy pictures of it,
37:39
Speaker 1: and there's like an inscription that's saying blow in the
37:42
Speaker 1: cartridge and you have no idea what that means. That's
37:45
Speaker 1: right up up down down a b ab special goods.
37:50
Speaker 1: And so around twenty years ago they decided to take
37:52
Speaker 1: more data because now we had more advanced technology and
37:54
Speaker 1: we had fancy computers, so you could do things like
37:57
Speaker 1: basically put this thing in x CT scan. A CT
38:00
Speaker 1: scan is like three D X rays. You put this
38:03
Speaker 1: thing inside a powerful beam of X rays so you
38:06
Speaker 1: can image the inside of it, and then you rotate.
38:08
Speaker 1: It's like you put it on a turntable and you
38:10
Speaker 1: spin it around, and you get all these three D
38:13
Speaker 1: X ray images, and then the computer sifts them together
38:16
Speaker 1: and makes like a three D model of what's inside
38:19
Speaker 1: this thing. So instead of just having these like radiographic
38:22
Speaker 1: images about twenty years ago, we got these like three
38:25
Speaker 1: D tomography. It's like idea of what's really going on
38:29
Speaker 1: inside of it. And that was a huge step forward.
38:31
Speaker 1: I just had that done to my teeth. Takee a
38:33
Speaker 1: mouth guard in Not so fancy, are you now? And
38:37
Speaker 1: they're a mechanism. That's right. The mystery of what's going
38:42
Speaker 1: on in Katie's teeth is just as deep a question science.
38:47
Speaker 1: What happened here arguably more spooky. You've been chewing rocks
38:51
Speaker 1: to get Katie, but this particular rock is very delicate. Right.
38:56
Speaker 1: You don't just like take this thing out of the
38:57
Speaker 1: museum in Athens and ship it over to the X
39:01
Speaker 1: ray machine, right, Instead, what they had to do was
39:03
Speaker 1: build a special, extra powerful machine and bring it to
39:07
Speaker 1: Athens because they didn't want to move this thing at all,
39:10
Speaker 1: So they built like an eight ton version of this
39:13
Speaker 1: three D X ray machine and had to drive it
39:15
Speaker 1: through the streets of Athens and like lower it down
39:18
Speaker 1: into the basement and the museum with special cranes. The
39:21
Speaker 1: whole thing was a big project, but it gives us
39:23
Speaker 1: like a real glimpse of the interior of this thing.
39:26
Speaker 1: And based on that, a bunch of different groups are
39:29
Speaker 1: trying still to piece together what they think happened. And
39:33
Speaker 1: there's like papers on this from like you know, a
39:35
Speaker 1: couple of years ago. People are still speculating, oh, maybe
39:38
Speaker 1: this gear went with that gear, or maybe there was
39:40
Speaker 1: a missing piece here. Right, There's a lot of guessing involved,
39:44
Speaker 1: a lot of people trying to develop theories that describe
39:47
Speaker 1: what they thought this thing did and also that was
39:49
Speaker 1: consistent with what they thought the Greeks could do, right,
39:53
Speaker 1: Because I was thinking, like, is this just one genius
39:57
Speaker 1: prodigy person making this thing or was this reflective of
40:02
Speaker 1: the society at the time being able to make things
40:05
Speaker 1: like this, Because it's odd to me how this mechanism
40:09
Speaker 1: is such as standout among archaeological finds, Like it's not
40:12
Speaker 1: like we're finding gears all over the place in ancient Greece,
40:17
Speaker 1: So like, was this the work of the Einstein of Greece,
40:22
Speaker 1: like the Manhattan Project of Greece, but less destructive. Or
40:26
Speaker 1: was this something like is there a whole aspect of
40:29
Speaker 1: ancient Greece we are completely missing. It's a great question.
40:33
Speaker 1: We have some hints from ancient writings. There were some
40:35
Speaker 1: descriptions of these kinds of machines, people describing the existence
40:40
Speaker 1: of them, these boxes that could be used to predict
40:43
Speaker 1: the motion of the moon and the sun. So there
40:45
Speaker 1: are contemporarious writings that suggest they exist, but not lots
40:49
Speaker 1: of them, write very few mentions, and so we don't
40:52
Speaker 1: know how many other ways this kind of technology might
40:56
Speaker 1: have been used in Greek society. We sort of should
40:58
Speaker 1: have known about it from these but didn't even accept
41:01
Speaker 1: it when we saw one because of our preconceived notions
41:04
Speaker 1: of like primitive Greek technology. It does really require us
41:07
Speaker 1: to reimagine what the Greeks might have done. The kind
41:11
Speaker 1: of technology we're talking about here is really kind of impressive.
41:13
Speaker 1: They've estimated that building this thing, according to one of
41:17
Speaker 1: the models of how it works, requires complex and precise
41:20
Speaker 1: machining to within millimeters. It's nothing compared to what we
41:23
Speaker 1: can do today. But two thousand years ago. I mean,
41:26
Speaker 1: we didn't see that kind of thing in Europe until
41:28
Speaker 1: like the fourteen fifteen hundreds with very complex medieval clocks,
41:33
Speaker 1: and so it is sort of shocking, and it does
41:35
Speaker 1: make you wonder what else they might have used that
41:37
Speaker 1: technology for. What else is out there waiting in shipwrecks
41:41
Speaker 1: that we haven't yet uncovered. Yeah, I mean this is
41:43
Speaker 1: a society that hadn't even invented but days yet, so
41:48
Speaker 1: very very ancient, and it's a really fun archeological puzzle,
41:51
Speaker 1: right not just to figure out what this thing might
41:53
Speaker 1: have done, but to figure out how they might have
41:56
Speaker 1: made it, Like what technology did they use to create
41:59
Speaker 1: these things? The same way people like to ask questions
42:01
Speaker 1: about how did the Egyptians build those pyramids? Like it
42:05
Speaker 1: forces you to try to uncover their technology and their
42:08
Speaker 1: strategies for solving these problems without our tools, and so
42:12
Speaker 1: of course people speculate, you know, maybe this is the
42:15
Speaker 1: signature of some advanced civilization that's been lost. I even
42:19
Speaker 1: read this quote from a mechanical engineer that said, to quote,
42:22
Speaker 1: unless it's from outer space, we have to figure out
42:24
Speaker 1: a way in which the Greeks could have made it,
42:27
Speaker 1: which is not to suggest that it's from outer space,
42:30
Speaker 1: or that the Greeks were aliens or anything like that.
42:33
Speaker 1: It's just a sign that we should keep our minds
42:35
Speaker 1: open when we think about these ancient societies and what
42:38
Speaker 1: they were capable of. We have a very very narrow
42:41
Speaker 1: view of what happened there and what they were doing
42:43
Speaker 1: and what they were capable of, and we shouldn't let
42:45
Speaker 1: that narrow view close our minds to what else they
42:49
Speaker 1: might have done. My theory is a secret race of giants,
42:52
Speaker 1: and this is just some gears from their huge risk watches.
42:57
Speaker 1: Maybe these were risk watches they used to cheat on
42:59
Speaker 1: their chemistry. I think. To bring it all together, there's
43:03
Speaker 1: a nice link between how this thing was originally lost
43:06
Speaker 1: for us to discover and how this thing was then
43:09
Speaker 1: later discovered. As you said, it's a story of sorts.
43:12
Speaker 1: Two storms, one that sank this ship that had the
43:15
Speaker 1: mechanism on it, and then one that diverted the ship
43:18
Speaker 1: that later founded. And I don't know if storms are
43:21
Speaker 1: likely or unlikely in that part of the world, but
43:23
Speaker 1: if it hadn't been for those two storms, this thing
43:26
Speaker 1: might still be on the bottom of the ocean. So
43:29
Speaker 1: what you're saying is probably aliens caused the storms to
43:34
Speaker 1: gently guide humanity in a journey of self discovery. You know,
43:39
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it, but it's possible that alien contrails
43:43
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere due to the advanced mechanisms of their
43:46
Speaker 1: propulsion devices, might be causing storms that lead to great
43:50
Speaker 1: archaeological fines. I'm definitely not saying that you've just started
43:55
Speaker 1: a new doomsday could I hope you're happy? No, But
43:58
Speaker 1: I do like digging into the history of technology and
44:01
Speaker 1: the history of science and getting an understanding for how
44:04
Speaker 1: people thought the universe worked. And remember that our concept
44:08
Speaker 1: of the universe might also contain, like blindingly silly assumptions,
44:12
Speaker 1: things we think are obvious that we don't even question,
44:15
Speaker 1: and then lead us to make all sorts of other
44:17
Speaker 1: mistaken assumptions and mistaken conclusions. Their history of physics is
44:21
Speaker 1: filled with these moments when we peeled back the blinders
44:24
Speaker 1: and saw the universe was very different from the way
44:27
Speaker 1: we imagined it had been. So cast your mind back
44:29
Speaker 1: to the ancient Greeks and think about how they saw
44:31
Speaker 1: the universe and how things might have gone differently for
44:35
Speaker 1: our science if so much of their knowledge hadn't been lost. Yeah,
44:39
Speaker 1: I mean, if they just hadn't dumped their stuff overboard
44:42
Speaker 1: in favor of the booze, you know, that's what happened.
44:46
Speaker 1: We got to lose some ballast. It's got to be
44:48
Speaker 1: this cool mechanism and not all of our wine. And
44:52
Speaker 1: think about how close we came to not having any
44:55
Speaker 1: of their knowledge, you know, so much of what the
44:57
Speaker 1: Greeks did was only preserved because of the Islamic world
45:01
Speaker 1: and Islamic scholars which recorded and captured and propagated and
45:04
Speaker 1: build on all of this work, specifically these mechanical ideas.
45:09
Speaker 1: There are writings that suggests that in the Arabic world
45:12
Speaker 1: there were similar mechanical devices, sort of like in the
45:14
Speaker 1: year five hundred or so, and that maybe this technology,
45:17
Speaker 1: in this know how came back to Europe in the
45:20
Speaker 1: thirteenth century when the Arab Morris came through Spain, and
45:23
Speaker 1: that's what led to this flowering of these medieval clocks.
45:27
Speaker 1: And so it's really only because of the Islamic world
45:29
Speaker 1: that we even have any of this knowledge. Imagine if
45:32
Speaker 1: it hadn't been right, Imagine how different the history of
45:35
Speaker 1: at least Europe would be without preserving this ancient knowledge.
45:39
Speaker 1: I mean, we'd probably still be using Roman numerals, which sucks.
45:42
Speaker 1: So I am happy about the Arabic numerals for sure.
45:47
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean it is interesting because our history
45:51
Speaker 1: of knowledge and technology is not a straight line. It's
45:54
Speaker 1: kind of more like silly string strewn all over the place.
45:58
Speaker 1: Absolutely it is. We are wering almost blind through a
46:02
Speaker 1: room full of treasures, hoping to discover stuff, and it's
46:05
Speaker 1: frustrating to think about how much work has been done
46:08
Speaker 1: that has been lost, and to wonder how much of
46:11
Speaker 1: what we've discovered will be lost, like our understanding of
46:15
Speaker 1: particles and black holes and stuff. How long will that
46:17
Speaker 1: preserve if society crumbles and our civilization falls apart the
46:21
Speaker 1: way the Greeks and the Romans did. Will that be
46:23
Speaker 1: preserved somehow in some caches of knowledge for later humans
46:27
Speaker 1: to unpack from the wreckage, or will it be gone forever?
46:31
Speaker 1: Or will later humans be surprised to discover what we
46:33
Speaker 1: were capable of because they thought we were even more
46:35
Speaker 1: primitive than we are. I mean, I think the main
46:38
Speaker 1: takeaway is you've got to waterproof your devices, and will
46:44
Speaker 1: future humans figure out a way to do chemistry and
46:46
Speaker 1: biology without so much memorization. All right, thanks very much
46:50
Speaker 1: for joining us on this journey into the history of
46:53
Speaker 1: science and discovery and remembering that ancient peoples knew a
46:57
Speaker 1: lot more about the universe than we often give credit
47:00
Speaker 1: to and let's hope future humanity gives us some credit.
47:11
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained
47:14
Speaker 1: the universe. Is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcast
47:18
Speaker 1: from I heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
47:22
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.