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ANTIKYTHERA Mechanism

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Bianca
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« on: May 23, 2007, 02:53:31 pm »




(page 7)

 
Wright was still a little upset about what he considered the sweeping claims that the research group had made when it published its findings, in the November 30, 2006, issue of Nature. He almost stayed home from the two-day conference on the Mechanism that the group put on, in early December. In the end, he decided to go, taking his wife, Anne, whom he married in 1998, “to stop me from lifting my knee in some chap’s groin.”

We went upstairs to Wright’s workshop. It was filled with tools and pieces of metal, and the air held the pleasantly acrid scent of machine oil. Scattered across the tables and the floor were clever devices that Wright had fashioned out of gears—clocks, astrolabes, engines of various kinds. I recalled Price’s description of the maker of the Mechanism—“some unknown ingenious mechanic”—and wondered if this mysterious maker might have been a bit like Wright, with a workshop similarly cluttered with machines.

Wright took his model apart and showed me how all the gears fitted together. I noticed some writing on a rectangular metal plate in the middle of the mechanism, and Wright told me that it was made of recycled bits of brass left over from some previous incarnation.

“So you think that the letters ‘ME’—”

“Precisely,” Wright interjected. “I think they must relate to whatever that bit of metal was used for before.”

Then Wright put the machine back together and turned the hand knob that drives the solar gear. It engaged with the smaller gears, through the various gear trains, and the pointers began to spin around the dials. The day-of-the-year pointer moved forward at a regular pace, but the lunar and planetary pointers traced eccentric orbits, sometimes reversing course and going backward, just as the planets occasionally appear to do in the night sky. Meanwhile, the pointers on the back dials crept through the months in the saros and Metonic cycles; eclipses came and went. I noticed that as long as he kept turning the knob Wright himself seemed, for once, perfectly unmuddled.

Until this moment, I had, like many others, continued to puzzle over why, if the Greeks were capable of building such a technically sophisticated device, they used that capacity to construct what is essentially a toy—an intellectual amusement. But as I beheld this whirring, whirling symphony of metal, a perfect simulation of a mechanistic and logical universe, I realized that my notions of practicality were foolish and shortsighted. This machine was much more than a toy; it embodied a whole world view, and it must have been, for the ancients, wonderfully reassuring to behold. ♦

« Last Edit: May 23, 2007, 03:31:39 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.


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