THE ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM:THE WORLD'S FIRST COMPUTER

In 1900, Greek sponge divers discovered a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The artifacts they came back up with included money, statues, pottery, and various other works of art and craft, as well as a curious lump of bronze and wood that turned out to be by far the most important item onboard. When an archaeologist named Valerios Stais took a look at it two years later, he noticed that the lump had a gear in it. Almost a half-century later, the science historian Derek J. de Solla Price thought this apparently mechanical object might merit further examination, and almost a quarter-century after that, he and the nuclear physicist Charalambos Karakalos published their discovery–made by using X-ray and gamma-ray images of the interior–that those divers had found a kind of ancient computer....

The video depicts a virtual model of the Antikythera Mechanism by Mogi Vicentini based on the theoretical and mechanical model by Michael T. Wright produced for the Galileo Museum in Florence, Italy.

Learn more at:
http://naturedocumentaries.org/9444/v...

http://naturedocumentaries.org/6294/a...



The Antikythera Mechanism: http://bit.ly/fm4oFK is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision. 

In 2010, we built a fully-functional replica out of Lego. 

Sponsored by Digital Science: http://www.digital-science.com/ a new division of Macmillan Publishers that provides technology solutions for researchers. Available under a CC-BY-3.0-Unported license.

Antikythera Mechanism Research Project http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr

VIA http://www.openculture.com/page/2