An anti what?

Now this is pretty nifty item. We often hear about how insightful and with-in the ancients were and today's post is about an example of just that. What is it I'm talking about? An antikythera, that's what!

And what's an antikythera? It's a gear-driven "clock" that charts out the motions of the planets, executes a reliable calendar and predicts eclipses. You know, the things that had our Middle Ages ancestors running around screaming "The end of days is upon us!" Whereas the ancients said "Meh, just another eclipse. No biggie."

This is the same sort of thing you can see nowadays on fancy wristwatches. There's a guy named Martin Braun who produces beautiful mechanical watches that are functionally akin to the antikythera and which use a mess of gears and hands to chart different aspects of astronomy. This particular one charts the tiny differences, day by day of the difference between the apparent solar time and the mean solar time (the sun doesn't do the same thing in the sky every day, you know). His watches are a lot smaller, of course, but that's only because we've got far more advanced manufacturing capabilities. Give an ancient Grecian a lathe and some good steel and just watch what they'd do.

The thing that really blew the wraps off this Grecian marvel was the discovery, in the briny depths of the sea, of an actual antikythera that had gone down with the ship. As you might guess, it was a mess. A HUGE mess. Salt water does that to you. But some people have oodles of patience and after tediously cleaning, examining, thinking, probing, and so forth, worked out what was going on inside. This video shows a reproduction of the device, built as closely as possible to the original. Watch and try not to exclaim "Wow, that's so cool!"

- And that's today's word from the bird