Professor Xenophon Moussos spoke at the Science 0+ festival about what the so-called "Antikythera mechanism" is, a kind of the first computer of mankind, revealed the secret figure of its creator and explained why the ancient Greeks needed it.
One of the most amazing discoveries in the history of archeology and ancient Greek history was made in the early 20th century, in 1901, when divers discovered the skeleton of an ancient Roman ship off the coast of Antikythera Island. In the hold of the ship, they found an unusual mechanical device, which consisted of several dozen gears and dials, which was called the "Antikythera mechanism".
The exact function of this device remains a matter of controversy among scientists, but most historians assume that this ancient Greek "gadget" was the first "computer" in history, a calculating machine that its owners used to determine the position of planets in the sky and other astronomical calculations.
Professor Xenophon Moussos, a physicist from the University of Athens who has been studying this machine for several decades, spoke about its secrets in a lecture he gave at the October Science 0+ festival at Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov.
Mechanical space
“For many years my students and I have been thinking about how ancient people, not possessing tools and knowledge, could create such“space”machines, a mechanical miniature copy of space. And now, it seems to me, we have finally found the answers to all these questions,”says the scientist.
According to Moussos, the idea of how and why such a machine could be created, simulating and calculating the movement of planets in the sky, came to him at the moment when he was reading one of the works of Aristotle, in which he described the fall of a meteorite. This passage, as the professor notes, prompted him to think that the Stagirite and other ancient Greeks well understood that the cosmos consists of ordinary matter, the same as the rocks of the Earth, and not some ephemeral substances that some philosophers wrote about.
“Meteorites, as Aristotle wrote, are 'hot stones', which, as he assumed, can compose stars, which also consist of hot gases. Moreover, they understood that heavy atoms tend to the center. Such a statement made me think - how could the ancient Greeks, who did not know physics and chemistry, know this?”- continues Moussos.
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According to the physicist, falling meteorites like the Chelyabinsk catastrophe made the ancient Greeks and representatives of other ancient peoples think about what is happening in the heavens, how they affect "earthly" life, and how cosmic processes can be studied. The Antikythera Mechanism is the end result of this process of space exploration.
“When people just started farming, it became clear to them that a calendar was needed for this - one of these calendars was found along with the Antikythera mechanism in the ship's wreck. And the main feature of all calendars is that they cannot be compiled without understanding that the behavior of nature can be described by mathematical methods, the laws of physics,”explains the Greek physicist.
These laws, which the ancient Greeks used to create the Antikythera mechanism, as scientists recently found out, were written right on the mechanism itself, on its back cover and on the very elements of the "supercomputer", as Musos calls this device. According to him, this "operating manual" allowed him and other Greek scientists to understand how this device was arranged, how it worked and why it was needed.
The geometry of the celestial spheres
As Mussos explains, the whole principle of operation of this device was based on the main astronomical discovery of the ancient Greeks - that all cosmic phenomena associated with the movement of objects in the solar system are periodic and symmetric.
“The inscriptions that we uncovered in June of this year clearly indicate that the ancient Greeks understood the periodic nature of lunar and solar eclipses, understood how the phases of the moon change, the periodic nature of the movement of Venus, Saturn and other planets,” explains Mousos.
These same records, he said, gave us the first concrete hints about who was the owner and developer of this "computer." As the Greek physicist suggests, based on the descriptions of similar devices in various chronicles and notes of that time, he was a very specific person who lived in Syracuse.
“We know that Archimedes created two similar mechanisms, which his contemporaries called 'spheres'. These were automatic machines, the principles of which were well described in the chronicles, and they were arranged in much the same way as the Antikythera mechanism. In fact, both these spheres and our 'supercomputer' are a continuation of those primitive astronomical structures, such as Stonehenge, which were built by people in antiquity,”the scientist noted.
Before studying the Antikythera mechanism, as Mussos explained in an interview with RIA Novosti, no one believed that such devices actually existed, plus in reality this "calculator" turned out to be much more complicated than those Archimedes' spheres described by Heron Alexandria, another great engineer of antiquity.
Proof that Archimedes was involved in the manufacture or at least in the design of the Antikythera mechanism, according to the physicist, are two things:
The first proof is that the Antikythera Mechanism included tools for calculating the distance from the Sun to the planets, based on the same principles that Archimedes came up with, measuring the time that planets spend traveling from one extreme point to another.
Second, the predictions of eclipses written on the device helped Moussos and his colleagues understand exactly when and where this "supercomputer" was made. Their calculations show that the creator of the Antikythera Mechanism lived in Syracuse between 212 and 180 BC, several years before the death of Archimedes and 30 years after his death.
Accordingly, the "Stephen Jobs" of antiquity was either Archimedes himself or his students. The version of the device that was found off the coast of Antikythera, according to Mussos, was assembled much later in the east of Hellas according to Archimedes' schemes. This place, in his opinion, is the island of Rhodes, whose metallurgists were considered the best in the world in ancient times.
Recently, archaeologists have announced that they managed to find the body of one of the alleged members of its crew near the wreck of the ship. Even if scientists can extract DNA from these bones, Musso believes, we are unlikely to know exactly where the mechanism was made and who made it.
“It is not at all necessary that we find the creator of this device by DNA, but in any case, we will be able to reveal the secret of who were either the passengers or the crew members of the sunken ship. If we are lucky, we will find out by the isotopic composition of his teeth, where their owner was born and raised,”the scientist explained.
Astrophysics of antiquity
According to Moussos, the Antikythera Mechanism was unusually accurate for its time. For example, he took into account the presence of leap years in the calendar, made it possible to calculate the movement of the moon, taking into account the fact that the speed of its movement is unstable and that it changes as it moves away and approaches the Earth, despite the fact that the ancient Greeks did not know Kepler's laws.
The physicist says that the gears of this mechanism, which determined the speed of movement of the planets, were built in such a way that they, in fact, calculated the so-called Fourier series and calculated spherical functions that are used today for serious astronomical calculations.
On the other hand, do not think that this "supercomputer" was perfect - it was built on the basis of the geocentric model of the cosmos developed by Claudius Ptolemy, and therefore the Antikythera Mechanism had to cope with the typical problems associated with such an interpretation of the Oycumene device.
The main problem with the Ptolemaic model of the solar system is that it poorly describes why the planets, if they move around the Earth, periodically change their speed sharply and begin to move backward. Ptolemy and his followers suggested that this is due to the fact that the planets move not in one, but in two circles.
The first, the largest of them, is called the deferent and the Earth is in its center. According to this deferent, not a planet revolves around the Earth, but an epicycle - a small circle along which a celestial body actually revolves. Such a "matryoshka" from orbits well explained the motion of planets in antiquity, but by the late Middle Ages its predictions began to strongly diverge from reality, which made Copernicus and many other astronomers look for alternatives to it.
“The Antikythera mechanism took into account and made it possible to calculate epicycles, at least for the Moon. Its accuracy was such that the speeds of the moon, obtained by this device, were close to those that can be obtained using Kepler's laws today - as I believe, the mechanism calculated both sinusoids and the ellipsoid of the orbit, but this still needs to be proved,”explains Mousos …
Why did the ancient Greeks need such a mechanism? According to Moussos, in addition to the possible use of such devices for navigation and travel to distant lands, "supercomputers" could help the Hellenes build temples, observatories and other structures in such a way that their walls were always clearly facing east-west and north-south. The streets of Athens, Piraeus, Thessaloniki and many other cities of Hellas, according to Moussos, were built according to such "astronomical" principles.
In addition, the Antikythera mechanism was also used for its intended purpose - on its back wall, in addition to predicting eclipses, as Mussos notes, a calendar of the Olympic Games and other events that played an important role in the life of the Greeks was found, including for determining the terms of rule of elective rulers … Unfortunately, all this progress in astronomy was lost after the spread of Christianity, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and the banning of ancient philosophy in the "dark ages" of the Middle Ages.
