"STOP ME IF YOU THINK YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE"

TUESDAY UPDATE: The virtual book tour continues! Read the nice little chat I had this week with Edgy Mama.

Un-news flash: Amy Guth is a nerd and a half. Prepare! I am about to confirm this yet again.

A while back, an ad was brought to my attention that advertised Michael Wright at the Adler Planetarium, lecturing on "The Greek Planetarium: A New Reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism, an elaborate Hellenistic astronomical instrument recovered in 1900 as part of a spectacular cargo from an ancient shipwreck. Dating to the 1st century B.C.E., the instrument is the earliest example of a geared mechanism. Michael Wright will describe his thirty-year personal quest to reconstruct this instrument. Through inspection and imagination, he offers a new and strikingly different analysis of the mechanism as the first planetarium."

Needless to say, I just returned and my head is about the explode in the best way possible. Wright's paper on the subject can be read here, but the short version goes something like this:

A fragment of what has now come to be known as the Antikythera Mechanism, was recovered from a 1st century BCE shipwreck near (quel suprise!) the Greek island of Antikythera...



...around 1900 and is generally regarded to speak to both the highly-developed level of early Hellenstic mechanics as well as (and there is plenty of overlap here) serving as some of the earliest evidence of gear usage in artifact (as oposed to documentary) form. And, ecause it's a dateable artifact, it is most totally worth nerding out over because it utilizes a differential gear, which, before all of this business, everyone thought didn't come around until the 13th century or so. Anyway...

So, these fragments were underwater for years, years, years and years, turned out to be bronze, and, when x-rayed, delivered a gorgeous display of a preserved gear system, marking and the like. Ka-blam! So, Prof. Derek Price does a good deal of work on the subject, a few follow after him, enter Michael Wright, who felt the device was underrepresented, inaccurately reconstucted and therefore poorly explained. Price's attempt was deemed somewhat inaccurate, but, at the time, nobody could do any better.

So, Wright, who tonight said he repairs clock for hobby, sifted through all of the early research and attempts to reconstruct and whipped out a version that is compliant with all detail found on the fragments. (And he made it out of scrap brass "from a public house door, the rubbish bin...") And, Wright does, indeed, knock one out of the park and builds a perfect mousetrap.

So, he described every gear and it's corresponding planet, we covered epicyclic platforms, solar and lunar movement in Hipparchosian theory, Apollonios, Ptolemaic theory! We spent time flipping between Price's original diagram...



...demonstrative of his guesswork in directing and adding differential gears, then switching over to Wright's improved-upon diagram. We covered the velocity ratio of the front dial! Synodic months! Metonic period! Callippic period! Then, we ventured into literary-nods this device was perhaps given by Cicero's "recently constructed by our friend Poseidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets."

Oh man. What a great night. If it weren't for the rain, I would probably find it impossible to sleep. Few things keep me awake quite in the same way a big vitamin B shot of academia does.