Wednesday, November 29, 2006

An ancient Greek computer?


I came across this fascinating article just now at the BBC site.

"
The Antikythera Mechanism, discovered more than 100 years ago in a Roman shipwreck, was used by ancient Greeks to display astronomical cycles.

Using advanced imaging techniques, an Anglo-Greek team probed the remaining fragments of the complex geared device.

The results, published in the journal Nature, show it could have been used to predict solar and lunar eclipses."

See here for the rest of the article.

2 comments:

Theodora Papapanagiotou said...

Does Mr Liakopoulos know about this?

teacher dude said...

Funny, that was my first thought as well. It's not as if he'd much encouragement.

Now if the BBC can find evidence to show the Earth is hollow and inhabited by centaurs, then he'll be proven right.