[HN Gopher] A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythe...
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A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 221 points
Date : 2021-03-12 13:07 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| nograpes wrote:
| Can anyone help me understand why gears with prime numbers of
| teeth would not be mechanizable?
|
| _For Venus the original designer faced a dilemma: the known
| period relation (5, 8) was very inaccurate, whereas the accurate
| (720, 1151) was not mechanizable because 1151 is a prime number,
| requiring a gear with 1151 teeth._
|
| I thought that gears with prime numbers of teeth would be
| advantageous because it would spread the wear evenly across the
| gear that it contacted.
| blt wrote:
| 1151 is too many teeth for a gear. The teeth would not be deep
| enough to transmit power effectively. You can't make this exact
| ratio using gears with fewer teeth because 1151 is prime (more
| generally, whenever the numerator and denominator are coprime).
| vgel wrote:
| In addition to the other comments, gears with a prime number of
| teeth were undesirable because they couldn't be laid out by
| iterative division of a circle. A gear with 64 teeth can be
| easily laid out by dividing the circle into fourths, dividing
| those fourths into fourths, and again to get 64 even divisions.
| For a gear with a prime number of teeth, the only option is to
| guess-and-check walk a pair of calipers around the circle,
| adjusting them iteratively until you make the exact number of
| steps and wind up at the exact same place. Without vision
| magnification, this was extremely difficult to do accurately.
| Clickspring (see top comment) did some experiments with a large
| dividing plate that makes the process somewhat easier, but it
| would still be far more difficult than making a non-prime
| number of teeth.
| biggieshellz wrote:
| You can't split them up into several smaller gear pairs, so you
| actually need two gears with 720 and 1151 teeth. A gear with
| 1151 teeth is impractical to make, both in terms of size and in
| terms of the manufacturing capability at the time.
| wolfd wrote:
| It's tough to make gears with that many teeth, especially if
| you want them to mesh with smaller gears.
|
| Also, meshing against a 1-tooth gear is problematic, so you
| would need to probably increase that to >4 teeth to have it
| work. Then your bigger gear needs to have >4x the teeth to get
| the desired ratio.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The design, so slim, so dense, so well engineered. There has to
| have been ones that came before. Too clever to not be an
| iteration.
|
| I wonder if we'll ever discover another.
| jandrese wrote:
| The flipside of being so small and dense is that was fragile,
| which is a problem when you're trying to preserve something for
| a millennia. It was also undoubtedly expensive, meaning few
| were produced in the first place and they would be a prime
| target for thieves and artifact hunters. The one in the article
| could easily be the last one remaining.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Would the maker have really been thinking that the thing
| being made would still be usefull 50, 100 or 1000 years
| later? Sure, it could be used to look that far ahead, but
| would they have been concerned about longevity of the device
| itself?
| mseepgood wrote:
| > The design, so slim, so dense, so well engineered.
|
| It's the Apple M1 of its time.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Wonder if there are common origins of Antikhytera and Sanskrit
| word for cosmos, Antariksha.
| rexreed wrote:
| There is no connection. Antikyhtera is the name of the Greek
| island near where the device was found.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera
| maxerickson wrote:
| The mechanism is named after an island near to where it was
| found. It was found in a wrecked roman ship, the island name is
| contemporary Greek.
|
| So it would be a coincidence, likely without much meaning.
| exDM69 wrote:
| Antikythera is the name of the location where the archeological
| discovery of the mechanism was made. Its origins are unknown.
|
| Thus the mechanism has no relation to the sanskrit word.
| johnnujler wrote:
| Not sure if it would be wise to dismiss the possibility so
| easily.
|
| We clearly do not know all the causal elements involved, plus
| I wouldn't be surprised if the name of the island itself had
| something to do with "antariksha".
| chatzi wrote:
| Antikithira is a composite word: Anti (a prefix meaning
| opposite) + Kithira (a nearby island). So maybe it is the
| other way round, "antariksha" is named after the island ?
| johnnujler wrote:
| Never said it was named after antariksha. Merely pointed
| out the possibility of a connection. Are we considering
| word formation and origin retracing a settled matter?
|
| Also just realised that I am replying to a sock puppet
| account. Thanks anyway.
| chatzi wrote:
| huh? what makes you think I am a sock puppet ?
| [deleted]
| exDM69 wrote:
| If there is a connection, it is coincidental and unrelated
| to the mechanism which was made elsewhere, and sank in a
| storm en route to somewhere else. Antikythera is a small
| barren island in the mediterranean.
| jcrubino wrote:
| Great tip.
|
| Archimedes in the Sand Reckoner cites to be solving on a
| problem from the "Eastern Philosophers". The problem is also in
| the Vajra Sutra where the numbers of sands in the cosmos is
| contemplated.
|
| Archimedes Father was an astronomer.
|
| Great parallel lives material that never maid it into the
| original.
|
| The Antikytheron is written in a Corinthian dialect, from where
| Archimdes father is said to have come from.
|
| My musing consiracy theory for the Roman sacking of Syracuse
| was for the Antikythera from which harvest and thus taxes could
| be better calculated - i.e. Thales.
|
| But the Romans killed the only guy who understood how the
| Antikythera worked.... so it became a generals paper weight.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| The wikipedia article suggests doubt on the Archimedes
| connection -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
|
| In particular when it says "it was demonstrated in 2017 that
| the calendar on the Metonic Spiral is indeed of the
| Corinthian type but cannot be that of Syracuse," although as
| evidence goes that doesn't sound definitive.
|
| Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Archimedes was
| part of an active intellectual community and is reported to
| have written a (now lost) manuscript on the construction of
| planetarium-style models ("On Sphere-Making"), so whether or
| not the artifact is directly from Archimedes there might be
| an intellectual link.
| jcrubino wrote:
| Thus my "musing conspiracy"....
|
| Thanks for posting the link. Much of my commentary comes
| from past research on Archimedes... so I am biased and
| amused.
|
| If I recall the founding of Syracuse is by Spartans and
| Corinthians... Archimedes society cared enough about
| knowledge that he was sent to Alexandria to study. Syracuse
| was a melting pot of cultures from the start and the
| Phonecians and the roman conflicts reinforced that to the
| end.
| cproctor wrote:
| Is that King's Landing?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Sometimes I think the Antikythera Mechanism is more of an ancient
| Greek Rorschach blot: what people are _certain_ it was supposed
| to do may reveal more about what is important to them than it
| does about the mechanism and its maker 's intent.
| sho_hn wrote:
| If you want to go deeper, I can recommend Jo Marchant's book on
| the device as a lovely summary of what it does, the research
| history and how it all relates to the rest of world history.
| jdefelice wrote:
| Clickspring has been recreating the Antikythera[1] and
| findings[2] went into a research paper.[3]
|
| [1] Playlist:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkKgdq57uOo
|
| [3] https://bhi.co.uk/antikytheramechanism/
| rfrey wrote:
| For added incentive for those who make the poor call to not
| check out the videos, he doesn't just recreate the mechanism...
| He invents or re-invents the tools and techniques required to
| make it, using only materials and technology known to be
| available at the time.
| ddingus wrote:
| And that is super cool. I think we'd very significantly
| underestimate what our earlier brothers and sisters could
| actually do.
|
| And I also believe, since communication was spotty, and took
| a long time, that there were pockets of real Mastery in the
| world. But everyone didn't benefit, just because of the
| communication and knowledge-sharing difficulties from that
| time.
|
| I think Travelers had an amazing experience. They could go to
| some parts of the world and literally see the future, and
| other parts of the world and perhaps feel very connected to
| the very basics.
|
| Meta: I sure wish this Google Voice thing would not randomly
| capitalized words. Sorry for the typos I just dictated this
| and hit send
| willhslade wrote:
| You can do this today: hang out with a reindeer herder in
| Siberia and then pop over to Shanghai. Nothing's changed.
| posterboy wrote:
| you can go to, say, India today and see the past. Same
| difference.
|
| Since the Median empire at least, the post was also fairly
| standard. Vice versa, I am affraid I severely underestimate
| what pockets of real mastery exist in the world, hidden
| behind NDAs, paywalls and below the threshold in libraries.
| I'm normally pretty much satisfied with holding a
| telecommunication device in my hand.
|
| This includes, hypothetically, the modern knowledge of
| ancient knowledge. So I don't disagree with you.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Having the ability to send letters is one thing, but
| that's not the same as having the kind of widespread
| societal/academic support system which circulates
| knowledge, elevates budding experts, and brings together
| groups interested in a common area of study.
| posterboy wrote:
| Part of it may be that superior knowledge was highly
| secretive and well guarded.
|
| That's why I'm saying it's the same as today. There is no
| good reason a peasant would be unable to read, except
| that nobody taught them, which should not take too much
| time for alphabetics, or that it was written in a
| foreign, holy language.
|
| Heck, Runes were considered to have magical power and
| ritual incantations were highly formularized--as they are
| today: a) e.g. in fashion brands, b) e.g. in law code to
| the extent that it requires professional translators
|
| Or closer to the topic, take maths, which has a highly
| formularized, international, often ambiguous and domain
| specific writing system. Indeed, it's also a good example
| of a science where instruction is crucial, and most
| information is left out in writing because the reader is
| expected to have it all in working memory.
|
| Even better analogy, computing machines: Not only do
| write with them, but in a sense we encode information in
| the, well, object, just like a sine and cosine wave
| diagram (or animation) encodes the motion of a radius in
| the circle. Only the keenest reverse engineers are able
| to read out the fundamental principles of its working.
| But, for analogy, CISC was found unwieldy so the trend is
| going back to RISC and doing hyperscalarity via
| networking, to solve heat problems.
|
| Anyhow,domain knowledge implies today as it did then
| _where to get stuff_ , not just how to use it.
| Specifically for the Iron age this means knowledge of
| iron mines, geography and geology. Maths and other
| structural sciences are only peripheral.
|
| Given that early Iron was meteoric, one can kind of see
| how a connection to the skies and gods could be drawn.
|
| And we have to wonder about fate, too. Some resources
| simply deplete. It's not that the knowledge is lost, but
| its application. Calenders have been further developed,
| certainly. Currently we predict the future on the end of
| global climate. Yeah that's sad, but it puts the little
| bit of heat that I put out as background noise into
| perspective.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think I see where you're coming from, but I would argue
| this was be much more true a few decades ago than it is
| today-- the internet is not without its faults, but it
| _has_ democratized access to a lot of what is needed to
| ramp up on the arcane languages of things like
| mathematics and law.
|
| Obviously in-person mentorship and instruction is still
| ideal, but the modern internet is much more than just a
| virtual text book or a bunch of videos of recorded
| lectures-- for any given topic there are a hundred
| communities which happily welcome novices and are willing
| to examine your reasoning about a particular problem and
| help plug the holes.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Part of it may be that superior knowledge was highly
| secretive and well guarded.
|
| Especially when that superior knowledge went against the
| controling religion of the day in that mass acceptance of
| the knowledge would severely weaken the control that the
| religion had on the populace. Some of these religious
| governing periods set back human learning for centuries.
| dylan604 wrote:
| My day's schedule just got put on pause.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I always wonder what future archaeologists in will read into
| artifacts from our time when they find them in 2000 years...
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| We really like trash made of plastic.
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm not so sure. A lot of trash plastic degrades over long
| periods of time. They might find the plumbing (which is a
| type of plastic that lasts longer), but that isn't trash in
| general.
| lallysingh wrote:
| They'll read digital archives. They'll be fine.
| curtainsforus wrote:
| Assuming the computers and the archives and the OS'es and the
| standards documentation and so on and so on survive.
|
| 200 years of javascript-style churn does not a reliable
| storage method make.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Mostly they'll be interpreting plumbing. Toilets, sinks will
| last for 1000 years or longer.
| progre wrote:
| I read someware that in 2000 years the books we managed to save
| from the middle ages and up to about 1850 will still be around
| but anything printed after that will be gone because the paper
| of the modern age is to fragile to last.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The cultures that dominated North and South America prior to
| the arrival of European explorers and the mass plague that
| accompanied them were absolutely vast, and we are only now
| starting to piece together the size and scale of some of
| those empires.
|
| There are several reasons for the gap in understanding of
| their scale, but one is that the well-settled communities
| (with some exceptions primarily centered in South America)
| often used primarily wooden construction, as wood was
| extremely plentiful in the New World. When the European
| plagues led to 90%-plus die-offs in these cultures, the
| survivors couldn't maintain the scale of cities they'd built,
| and since wood rots relatively quickly, their permanent
| settlements were all but eradicated by the time any
| subsequent waves of European exploration arrived to write
| down what they saw in languages Europeans could read.
|
| Modern archaeology techniques, by analyzing land cultivation
| and the few remnants a wooden building leaves of foundation,
| are starting to comprehend the scale of the cities built by
| the original settlers of North and South America.
|
| https://www.history.com/news/native-american-cahokia-
| chaco-c...
| shakezula wrote:
| They were also about as complex and technologically
| advanced as their Old World counterparts. I'm consistently
| impressed by how well South American cultures understood
| the cosmos, plumbing, irrigation, materials, etc... South
| American civilizations would have been a source of new
| information, and no doubt a bunch of knowledge was lost.
|
| We only have a few books left from thousands of years of
| civilizations. It makes me incredibly sad to think about
| the history we lost. It would be like if we only had one or
| two books to understand all of Roman history. Absolutely
| blows my mind how fragile everything we've built is.
| SeeManDo wrote:
| Where are the ancient Nazi conspiracies and how this machine is
| related to JFK and the Illuminati pawn stars?
| gatlin wrote:
| Eh, even we think it's a reach to connect antikythera to George
| H W Bush like that.
| [deleted]
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Sadly or maybe only interestingly, the Clickspring folks' recent
| article[1] arguing that the mechanism used a lunar calendar
| doesn't seem to be cited in this new article.
|
| [1] https://bhi.co.uk/antikytheramechanism/
| bluGill wrote:
| Given how recent his publication is, it is quite likely that
| the authors of this were already in the final edit stages when
| they became aware of it, and so it didn't affect anything in
| their paper and so wasn't cited.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Forgive the naive question, but does this mean these ancient
| Greeks knew the world was round thousands of years ago?
| ljf wrote:
| Yes; https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/ancient-
| gre...
| tsoukase wrote:
| Eratosthenes even measured earth's circumference with
| astonishing accuracy. They knew more than we think they knew...
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The Greeks deduced that lunar eclipses were caused by the
| earth's shadow and, from the consistent roundness of the
| shadow, that it was a globe.
| belval wrote:
| What happened to these advanced civilization of the antiquity? We
| have drawings of highly advanced siege engines yet it seem that
| after the fall of Rome we all went back to fighting with sticks
| for a few centuries. Why is that?
| [deleted]
| rozab wrote:
| Jonathan Blow has an excellent talk on this topic in relation
| to software.
|
| https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| oops
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This isn't really historically correct. There was no single
| burning of the Great Library of Alexandria that completely
| destroyed it. Like many libraries of antiquity it suffered
| several fires and recovered, but eventually fell into decline
| and disfavor as other academia centers sprang up.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Literally the dark ages...go read up on it.
| McRask wrote:
| Define irony
| LegitShady wrote:
| meh the dark ages are well studied and any minor effort to
| find some information on it will get someone more and more
| accurate information on it than asking on HN. It's the kind
| of question that has a short but useless answer that fits
| on hackernews 'fall of rome bad for progress' but the
| answer you should get is to go put in some basic effort and
| look it up - its easy to find information on using the
| terms 'dark ages'.
| belval wrote:
| You assessment is fair, but there is a lot of data out
| there that you simply won't find by using Google search.
| One exemple is the "A collection of unmitigated pedantry"
| blog which I found after someone used it in a comment
| when replying to me.
|
| If you google "Iron processing in the middle ages" you
| won't find Bret Devereaux' excellent series[1], yet it is
| a much better read than the Wikipedia page.
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-
| did-they-...
| progre wrote:
| Rome was the fiber internet of those days. When west rome
| collapsed europe went back to dial-up.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That's basically correct. Rome organized things on a very
| large scale with high productivity. Its replacement by less-
| organized tiny local systems cratered productivity, and the
| resulting systems couldn't afford to do the things Rome had
| done.
| progre wrote:
| I came by this analogy by Dan Carlin. He was talking about
| "Germania" but the same applies to Sweden. When Sweden was
| christianized around 1000 AD this was basically equivalent
| to "being connected to the internet". Suddenly the vast
| resources (intellectual and communicational) of the
| catholic church where available to the (now christian)
| elite, giving them a huge advantage.
| tokai wrote:
| As I understand it this idea of the dark ages isn't supported
| by modern historians.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The "dark ages" is a good description of what happened
| throughout most of Western Europe after the fall of the
| Western Roman Empire. The nuance is that the Eastern Roman
| (Byzantine) Empire survived much longer, and that somewhat
| well organized kingdoms remained in parts of the West for a
| time.
|
| But there was a remarkable economic and cultural collapse in
| most of the former Western Roman Empire. Large cities mostly
| disappeared. Literacy nearly disappeared, and was only really
| preserved by the Church. The extensive Roman system of
| taxation and the public goods it paid for (roads, aqueducts,
| baths, theaters, security) nearly disappeared. Without large
| cities, roads and security, long-distance trade collapsed and
| the economy became much simpler. Skilled trades that existed
| in the highly complex Roman economy were forgotten. Classical
| literature and philosophy were largely lost in the West.
| Essentially, urbanized classical civilization disappeared.
|
| There's a tendency to talk nowadays about the "transformation
| of the Roman Empire," rather than its fall, but I find that a
| bit too euphemistic.
| stryan wrote:
| > Large cities mostly disappeared. Literacy nearly
| disappeared, and was only really preserved by the Church.
|
| Neither of those were wide-spread in Western Europe during
| the Roman empire either. If you take a look at the major
| cities of the Roman Empire they're generally in either
| Italy, Byzantium, or North Africa[0]. All of which
| continued past the fall of Rome. Literacy rates were also
| questionable [1].
|
| > Without large cities, roads and security, long-distance
| trade collapsed and the economy became much simpler.
|
| Long-distance trade certainly did not collapse after the
| fall. While it did decrease to certain extent in the near
| time period, it rebound within a century or two [2].
|
| [0] https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=4
| db977...!
|
| [1] https://www.quora.com/Was-literacy-common-in-the-Roman-
| Empir...
|
| [2] https://oxfordre.com/economics/view/10.1093/acrefore/97
| 80190...
| sho_hn wrote:
| In the case of the Antikythera mechanism, it turns out the
| knowledge and technology weren't entirely lost. There's a
| fairly well-established throughline now from Babylonian
| observation-based astronomical tables to Greek philosophical
| views and mathematics (and craftmanship) to Arabic astrolabes
| (retaining some of the gear-train tech) and then back to
| Europe, to the monastic astronomical clocks. Then the
| escapement was invented and added in, and boom you got modern
| industrial technology.
|
| There are a lot of loss and bottlenecks along that journey,
| though. And many notable locations, installations and
| individuals. The history of instrument-making and how it is
| intertwined with philosophical and religious views on the skies
| and the topology of the universe is quite fascinating (e.g. the
| motivations for observing the sky, being able to produce
| predictions at all, crafting models, etc).
| posterboy wrote:
| > The history of instrument-making and how it is intertwined
| with philosophical and religious views on the skies and the
| topology of the universe is quite fascinating (e.g. the
| motivations for observing the sky ...
|
| While this is in part to be attributed to superstition and
| religion, this in turn was of material importance to
| navigation, aggriculture, and perhaps philosophy. Indeed, it
| is curious how those interrelated.
|
| For one, nomads would need to know when it was time to move
| on, and where to.
| jcrubino wrote:
| The Roman were truly a successful agrarian civilization, but
| became lackluster in progress from there.
|
| They never made an overwhelming shift to mathematical /
| science based civilization. They took over Syracuse with a
| mandate to keep Archimedes alive, but that failed. Some
| scholars say the only roman contribution to math was
| numerals.
|
| Basically they reaped the profits of empire, and fell into
| the cargo cults of opulent success, abandoning the prior
| agricultural based common sense by never integrating new
| ideas in the Aristotelian domains except for to pay homage to
| the originating culture enough to collect taxes.
| dragonelite wrote:
| You mean slave labor society right, if you can't expand the
| empire fast enough, you "human capital" stream dries up,
| its like taking on too much debt and not being able to keep
| up with paying.
| jcrubino wrote:
| I meant The Romans, started out as an agrarian culture
| where Ceasars were more interested in tending the farm
| than politics that evolved into the spectacle that Rome
| is now known for.
|
| Not ready to drop a book on HN regarding the nuance of
| Roman evolution just yet.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| Everybody slaved. The Romans were just better at it (and
| most other things).
| deek wrote:
| They dabbled in engineering as well
| jcrubino wrote:
| But killed Calculus with Archimedes.
| kipchak wrote:
| Very broadly speaking we tend to now think of history or time
| as being fairly linear with progress being made while ancients
| tended to think of history as cyclical and those before them as
| random.
|
| The Antikythera mechanism or the somewhat inexplicable late
| bronze age collapse and the unidentifiable "sea people" that
| caused it are good examples to indicate there's some degree of
| cyclicality, wherein people stumble across ruins more advanced
| than their own civilization and wonder where they could have
| gone.[1]
|
| Getting to the "why" part, Peter Turchin's work expanding on
| Ibn Khaldun's concept of Asabiyyah seems the most compelling to
| me.
|
| [1]https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
| smogcutter wrote:
| Regarding the "Bronze Age collapse", there's some thinking
| that it might be much less of an inexplicable cataclysm than
| it usually appears. Here's a really interesting
| r/askhistorians thread about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ask
| Historians/comments/fm3vs1/how_d...
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Peter Turchin is not a professional historian. He's a hack
| whose theories have been debunked.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| You're right, he's not a professional historian. And that's
| a good thing, because History the academic field is
| hopelessly sick and outdated.
|
| Turchin may not be right about everything (or most things),
| but the kind of thing he's trying to do is the path
| forward. The really interesting action in history (broadly
| construed) is all being done by people doing history within
| analytic paradigms, like Turchin. Look for work by people
| who call themselves economic historians.
| generalizations wrote:
| People throw around "debunked" like it's final. In reality,
| it's just a lazy dismissal without substance.
|
| You want to say he's wrong about something, say what it is
| and give a reason. Otherwise you're just avoiding actual
| critical thought.
|
| (Also, I have no idea who Peter Turchin is. I just don't
| like it when people inflict their defective thinking on
| others.)
| waserwill wrote:
| The short of it: Turchin advocates for a field of
| 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully
| describe and predict social trends, especially large ones
| such as collapse.
|
| His own description from a decade ago:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project
| he directs and uses to study this:
| http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ And has
| produced some interesting descriptive work such as:
| https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full
|
| Some of his group's work [0] has been criticized on
| methodological grounds [1]. While some of his work may
| produce overdetermined models (trying to model history,
| considering all of the possible variables, can be
| tricky), the sorts of things he is interested in have
| been developed a fair bit, of late [2].
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 [1]
| https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis
| [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full
| generalizations wrote:
| That is cool stuff. Thanks for the links, I'll be reading
| those later.
| kipchak wrote:
| Assuming you're referring to [1] or [2] or [3], it doesn't
| look like a debunking to me so much as healthy scientific
| debate, specifically between the Seshat and DRH projects
| who are both competing for limited resources-The John
| Templeton Foundation funds both for example.
|
| In such a case the criticism of not being a professional
| historian seem odd, as the credentials of Edward
| Slingerland and Bret Beheim, the lead authors of the
| critical papers, seem to be fairly comparable to Turchin's.
|
| [1]https://psyarxiv.com/jwa2n/
|
| [2]https://eslingerland.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2019/09/Hist
| oria...
|
| [3]http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/what-came-first-
| big-god...
| ontekhunhsentuh wrote:
| Knowledge is passed on from master to apprentice. Nearly-
| universal literacy helped to alleviate this issue somewhat, but
| even today most practical knowledge is passed on by people
| working together.
|
| The result is that even a gap of a single generation is enough
| for some knowledge to be lost. That's why Roman concrete was
| forgotten, why we can't build a Saturn V anymore, why you can't
| just start a chip-fab with enough money, and why it's so hard
| to maintain code without access to someone that designed the
| code-base.
|
| Most things, even if they're written down, are more accurately
| modelled in someone's brain.
| leafmeal wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the Saturn V a bit more?
| ontekhunhsentuh wrote:
| This came up when people started looking sideways at the
| ballooning costs of the Space Launch System. Even though we
| have extensive blueprints and even parts left over from
| Saturn V rockets, the institutional knowledge to use any of
| those things simply doesn't exist anymore, and would have
| to be re-created at exceptional cost of you wanted to build
| another one.
|
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-
| build...
| phkahler wrote:
| That's why odd gaps appear. Like an article about how China
| can't manufacture the balls for ball-point pens, or critical
| parts for jet engines.
|
| Maybe a few missing pieces are why Intel cant seem to figure
| out EUV lithography.
|
| None of these things are trivial and probably not documented
| in a way where a noob could pick them up.
| shakezula wrote:
| Even just the specific knowledge of building a house is
| probably a generation removed from most people these days.
| It scares me to think of just how fragile we really are.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Sure, but what is forgotten makes room for novel ideas
| which are hopefully sometimes improvements. Plus, now we
| have computers to write and share this knowledge so it
| doesn't always have to be memorized.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| > which are hopefully sometimes improvements
|
| The death of Latin is very upsetting.
| rajansaini wrote:
| Why is that out of curiosity?
| pmlnr wrote:
| It was the common language of the time.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Reading the English for Catullus 16 (pretty dirty) and
| feeling jealous that they could put it so succinctly in
| their own language. Also this TED talk https://www.ted.co
| m/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shape....
| qiqing wrote:
| Technically, there are more Latin speakers alive today
| than cumulatively during the Roman Empire. However, I
| think negligibly few are _native_ speakers.
|
| Exponential population growth is weird.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1513/
| krapp wrote:
| The fall of the Roman empire was essentially a post-apocalyptic
| event for the West. The economic and political collapse of
| Rome's satellite states halted the progress of technological
| and cultural development across subsequent generations. Many
| ancient Greek classics, such as the works of Aristotle might
| have been lost forever had they not been saved by Islamic
| scholars.
|
| And don't think it couldn't happen again. We've stored the
| entirety of our cultural knowledge on an ephemeral digital
| network that depends upon an intricate and vastly complex
| technological infrastructure. If that collapses, so does modern
| civilization, and we're back to horses and buggies.
| stryan wrote:
| > The fall of the Roman empire was essentially a post-
| apocalyptic event for the West. The economic and political
| collapse of Rome's satellite states halted the progress of
| technological and cultural development across subsequent
| generations.
|
| "Halted" and "post-apocalyptic" are strong words. The Fall of
| Rome was a very long and drawn out event, and plenty of
| technological and cultural development continued after the
| Fall. r/AskHistorians has many good posts[1] describing why
| the "Dark Ages" weren't Dark and the various advances made
| during the post-Rome pre-Rennasiance period.
|
| A lot of people think that technological and philosophical
| progress stopped after Rome, when really it just isn't talked
| about. In my opinion, this is probably because it's a lot
| more exciting to talk about Roman architecture since many
| buildings still exist today, rather then the three-field
| system and mould-board plows that kept the population alive.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/235w3l/wh
| y_a...
| ivanhoe wrote:
| Well, almost all of the work of Greek philosophers and
| their science and philosophy achievements were in Catholic
| Europe completely forgotten and actively censored for
| centuries. Fantastic Roman infrastructure, aqueducts,
| running water inside the multi-storey buildings and huge
| sewage systems were completely neglected - people
| completely lost the Antic ideas of hygiene - resulting in
| horrible sanitary conditions as newly built cities lacked
| any sanitary infrastructure. Even rich people lived like
| that, almost no castle even after the middle age had a
| sewage system, nor running water. They used wells for water
| and dropped sewage in front of houses, on the streets
| directly.
|
| Now, they didn't return to stone age of course, practical
| tools and technologies that were a part of common knowledge
| remained in use, but many advanced engineering skills were
| lost. Also the society drastically changed, it fell into
| religious fanaticism and extreme conservatism - which is
| the main reason why it was called the dark age actually.
| stryan wrote:
| > Well, almost all of the work of Greek philosophers and
| their science and philosophy achievements were in
| Catholic Europe completely forgotten and actively
| censored for centuries.
|
| While less available they were still known and studied
| and certainly not censored. Neo-Platonist and
| Aristotelian thought was very influential in the Post-
| Antiquity and Early-Medieval time periods: see the Desert
| Fathers and the Scholastics. And that's not even talking
| about the fact that the Byzantines were there the entire
| time; most "Renaissance" ideas had the origins in
| Medieval Byzantine thought.
|
| As for hygiene, feel free to look at the Wikipedia
| article for it[1]: the sewers weren't that effective,
| people still threw rubbish in the streets, and the
| bathhouses were cesspools of disease. And that's not
| talking about that fact that Roman sewage and hygiene was
| just that: Roman. It's not like the Roman Empire was some
| golden age where every city in Europe lived like that.
| Most places it was just as dirty and filthy.
|
| > Also the society drastically changed, it fell into
| religious fanaticism and extreme conservatism - which is
| the main reason why it was called the dark age actually.
| It went from being under the control of an autocratic
| emperor to...being under the control of an autocratic
| feudal lord. Saying it "fell into [..] conservatism"
| seems a bit off when it really just traded one man for
| many. Religious fanaticism I won't bother talking about
| (why does everyone think people suddenly became more
| religious after Rome?). As for the term dark ages, that's
| just a term Petrarch alluded to the time period with,
| which was then later used in reference to the fewer
| historical records we have for the time period. It made
| no reference to religious fanaticism or conservatism.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Ro
| me
| lurquer wrote:
| You're not arguing against a competing view of history.
|
| You are arguing against an ideology.
|
| Save your breath.
|
| This is their view of history:
|
| Ancient Rome was enlightened. Then Christianity destroyed
| all the worlds great accomplishments. Then, Galileo
| showed everyone who was boss.
|
| Oh yeah... a corollary to this version: Islam was as
| nearly enlightened as Rome and would have ushered in an
| age of elegant sophistication but for the no-good
| Crusaders.
|
| So sad...
|
| In reality, Ancient Rome was a brutal slave-based society
| where life was cheap, religious fanaticism was rampant,
| children were disposable, and death was glorified.
|
| Given a choice of being an average inhabitant of the
| Roman Empire or an average inhabitant of medieval Europe,
| only the truly ignorant would choose the former.
| [deleted]
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Modern digital recordings can last for a very long time. And
| old USB stick dug up in hundreds of years, can be
| reinterpreted by a future modern civilization. They're kind
| of all 'saved by Islamic scholars' in that sense?
| tylermw wrote:
| The data on that USB drive will deteriorate over a couple
| decades. NAND memory generally isn't an adequate format for
| archival purposes.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Yeah I see online empirical data that shows anywhere from
| years to centuries, depending on temperature. So not
| thousands of years.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Indeed. The BBC's Domesday book was put on a pre-CD glass
| based optical medium which should last forever, but they
| managed to lose reading equipment for it, and a huge
| digitization effort from the 80s would have been lost
| (they published a call for help, and eventually someone
| found a reader in their garage.... but it was a close
| call)
| krapp wrote:
| A future civilization would need to reconstruct a
| compatible operating system, software and hardware first,
| then build something with a USB port to put the stick into.
|
| It's not impossible but consider how many ancient human
| languages we still can't translate, or can only translate
| due to coincidence (as in the case of the Rosetta Stone
| with Egyptian hieroglyphics.) Translating digital
| information in a similar cultural vacuum would be
| exponentially more difficult. If that stick is encrypted,
| how does one even know there is information to begin with?
| salemh wrote:
| You mean West Romes fall. The Eastern Roman empire lasted
| until the 15th century. Eastern Rome was sacked in 1204 which
| was the actual blow that jump stated the Western
| Enlightenment after plundering Eastern Rome for 50 years.
| https://www.ancient.eu/article/1188/1204-the-sack-of-
| constan... https://www.britannica.com/place/Byzantine-
| Empire/Byzantine-... https://historyofislam.com/contents/the-
| classical-period/con...
|
| The Ottomans did not take over East Rome until the 15th
| century, where much of the plunder was already gone to the
| West. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/ancient-
| history/fallconstan...
|
| While the West would term the East Romans as "Byzantines" in
| the 15th Century, this isn't correct to say they were not in
| Roman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantium
| dragonelite wrote:
| A imperial decline mostly means a lot of chaos for a couple of
| decades, I think the most recent example would be the soviet
| union. It took Putin like almost 2 decades to recover/stabilize
| from the western plunder of Russia in the 90s via Russian
| oligarchs. Russia lost a lot of brain power in that period and
| lost a lot of institutional knowledge which might takes
| generations to rebuild again.
|
| Also the engineers and high ranking members of society have to
| resources to flee to more stable regions and carry their
| knowledge with them. Its also the engineers that are usually
| given grace or offers by a opposing forces/rivals.
| jtolmar wrote:
| When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the various successor
| states didn't have enough organizational capacity / surplus /
| numbers to do things like arm permanent standing armies with
| advanced siege engines, or build aqueducts and long paved roads
| everywhere. But there was still technological advancement in
| plows, water mills, and crop rotation even shortly after the
| collapse.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| This cites Price's "Gears from the Greeks" (1974), one of the
| major papers on the Antikythera Mechanism. I read through it once
| for a university assignment. It's fascinating and well worth
| checking out if you're interested in the device.
| m-app wrote:
| Related video presentation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQnE0BLEi8k
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