The Antikythera mechanism: A Geocentric masterpiece What is the basis of modern science and technology? According to science establishment historians heliocentrism is the cause. An online encyclopedia puts it this way: the Scientific Revolution can be roughly dated as having begun in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.... But it turns out that the scientific revolution that took place in Europe in the slipstream of the Renaissance not only was not caused by heliocentrism but in fact the opposite: the knowledge of humans of the universes geocentricity and the empirical application of that conclusion caused the scientific revolution! The origins of much modern technology can be traced back to the elaborate mechanical devices, or automata, thatburgeoned in post-medieval Europe. Those toys are an outgrowth of the medieval craft of clock making. And that craft, in turn, was an offshoot of the craft of applying complex mechanical technology for the purpose of astronomy related needs. This ancient tradition had survived and was transmitted via the Arab world into Western Europe just before and during the Renaissance. This was as these devices were unambiguously geocentric his is something that even the researchers of this particular mechanism (who mostly, at-least publicly, are believers of a heliocentric model of the universe) assert, albeit grudgingly. They obviously dont want everyone to know that devices like this ancient piece of clockwork expose the ancient roots of modern technology. Hmmm I wonder why? Greek sponge divers discovered the wreck of a Roman cargo ship off the island of Antikythera in 1901. Various items like statues and luxury goods, including jewelry, pottery, fine furniture, wine and bronzes dating back to the first century BC were lying on there. But the most important finds proved to be a few green corroded lumps, the last remnants of an elaborate mechanical device. which so-far is the oldest known complex scientific calculator/analog computer on earth. The Antikythera mechanism, as it is since become known, was an orrery setup in a wooden box, with dials on the outside and a complex assembly of bronze gear wheels within. X-ray photographs of the fragments (image on the left), in which around 30 separate gears can be distinguished, led the science historian Derek de Solla Price of Yale University, to conclude that the device was an astronomical computer capable of predicting the positions of the sun and moon in the zodiac on any given date. A recent investigation suggests that the mechanism was even more sophisticated than de Solla Price had thought. This new analysis was reportedly done on X-rays of the mechanism using a technique called linear tomography. This involves moving an X-ray source, the film and the object being investigated relative to one another, so that only features in a particular plane come into focus. Analysis of the resulting images was undertaken by Michael Wright, the curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, England, in conjunction with Allan Bromley, a computer scientist at Sydney University, Australia. They found the exact position of each gear, and suggested that Mr. Price was wrong in some accounts: he seems to have wrongly speculated on the number of teeth on particular gears (since a few of the pieces were missing) in order to arrive atparticular astronomical ratios. Mr. Price also postulated an elaborate reversal mechanism to get some gears to turn in the right direction.What happened then was that Mr. Wright noticed a boss fixed at the center of the mechanisms main wheel. To him this was suggestive of a fixed central gear around which other moving gears could rotate. This absolves the need for a reversal mechanism (as suggested by Mr. Price) and leads to the idea that the device was specifically designed to model a particular form of epicyclical motion. The Greeks wanted to position the objects in the sky in its right place within the celestial sphere. In other words, they recognized the universe as being geocentric and accounted for celestial bodies motions using elaborate gears around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth. Mr. Wright found evidence that the Antikythera mechanism would have been able to reproduce the motions of the sun and moon accurately, as well as the movements of the planets Mercury and Venus. Professor Michael Edmunds of Cardiff University who led a study of the mechanism is reported to have said: This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics aredesigned just makes your jaw drop. Whoever has done this has done it extremely carefully (...) in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa. The value of this mechanism lies in the fact that astronomy was essential for navigation. And it is improvements in navigation that resulted in something that directly and fundamentally caused the scientific revolution:the age of discovery or the age of exploration. That period from the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century, during which Europeans explored the world by ocean, searching for trading partners and various goods, is responsible for the rapid advancement of technological acumen of the wider society. Therefore it is not the theoretical heliocentric arguments of Copernicus or Galileo that caused this - they were the products of the age, not the cause of it. This demonstrates how the empirical application of geocentricity, that is, the advance of navigation during the Renaissance period, triggered the age of exploration, that in turn resulted in the advancement of the more wider field of science. Thank God that the explorers and discoverers did not indulge in heliocentric humbuggery, because had they did that, they would have not discovered continents and trading routes, but would have been lost and clueless for every single distance, on every single trip! abafte.blogspot/2011/03/antikythera-mechanism-geocentric.html
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 02:44:12 +0000
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