Saturday, December 6, 2014

"Euclid, Archimedes and the Antikythera Mechanism"

A correspondent writes in with more about the Antikythera mechanism,

"Euclid, the geometer, flourished around 300 B.C. The Antikythera shipwreck, from which the Antikythera Mechanism came, dates from around 206 B.C. So, mathematical development was ample at the time the Antikythera Mechanism was made and this can be documented.

The Mechanism was part of the navigational equipment of a ship engaged in international commerce, as the shipwreck happened at the very outer edge of the Greek world. And so the Mechanism probably was the highest state of the art in 206 B.C. Rome destroyed the best of Greece soon after.

'In 168 BC the Romans defeat[ed] the Macedonians in the battle of Pydna. In 146 BC and 86 BC the Romans seize[ed] rebellious Corinth, killing all the men, selling the women into slavery and destroying the city as an example. When Athens join[ed] King Mithridates in another rebellion against the Romans in Asia Minor they invade[d] the city, destroy[ed] the walls and [left] with the most valuable sculptures.'

A Roma solder killed Archimedes, the Greek inventor and polymath, at the end of the Roman siege of the Greek city of Syracuse, Sicily, 214-212 B.C, just 6 years before the Antikythera shipwreck took the Antikythera Mechanism down with it."

6 comments:

russ said...

I love these off-topic posts

Unknown said...

Your correspondent makes a good point about the Roman Empire. We-- Americans at least-- tend to think of Rome as a pre-modern analogue of the US, but it was nothing of the sort. The US's growth coincided with the Industrial Revolution, and the US contributed a lot to it. By contrast, the Roman Empire was a period of technological stagnation. Concrete was their only major invention over hundreds of years. And it wasn't just that they didn't invent anything, they actually retarded growth in the ancient Mediterranean. When the Hellenistic world coexisted with Rome, it produced a lot of innovations-- the astrolabe, water wheels, etc. After it was conquered, very little.

In its essence, Rome was what Robert Shiller would call a "naturally occurring ponzi process"-- it constantly needed to conquer new territories finance its military and bureaucracy, and once it ran out of conquests-- or the only potential conquests were too poor to justify, as with Germany-- it imploded. In addition to being inherently unstable, it was a system that drained resources from the productive sector.

John said...

@James

"Rome . . . constantly needed to conquer new territories to finance its military and bureaucracy, and once it ran out of conquests-- or the only potential conquests were too poor to justify, as with Germany-- it imploded."

Joseph Tainter in his classic masterpiece "The Collapse of Complex Societies" chronicles precisely what you describe above in considerable and persuasive detail.

Unknown said...

Joseph Tainter in his classic masterpiece "The Collapse of Complex Societies" chronicles precisely what you describe above in considerable and persuasive detail.

Thanks, I actually have a copy of his book but haven't had time to read it.

You might have seen it already, but this article by Ugo Bardi uses Tainter's theories to look at the collapse of Rome:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5528

CP said...

James, from the essay you linked:

"collapse of the Roman Empire was a complex phenomenon where different negative factors reinforced each other. It was a cascade of negative feedbacks, not a single one, that brought down the empire."

This reminds me of a book I've been meaning to review: Engineers of Victory, about WWII.

CP said...

"Civilizations and empires, in the end, are just ripples in the ocean of time. They come and go, leaving little except carved stones proclaiming their eternal greatness. But, from the human viewpoint, Empires are vast and long standing and, for some of us, worth fighting for or against. But those who fought in Teutoburg couldn't change the course of history, nor can we. All that we can say - today as at the time of the battle of Teutoburg - is that we are going towards a future world that we can only dimly perceive."