NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Bill Morris
Date: 2011 Apr 6, 22:42 -0700
I first came across Derek de Solla Price's account of the Antikythera mechanism about twenty years ago and, if it taught me little else, it taught me not to fall into the trap of believing that fragments of the past that we have are all that ever were.
Frank writes 'In effect, they're imagining "what might have been" based on the remnants of the machine and there's not much incentive to scale back the extrapolations.' Since de Solla Price's reconstruction, modern technology, photographic, radiological and computer, has enabled a much more detailed analysis of the mechanism that I think is truly amazing. Tony Freeth gives us tantalising glimpses of what has been achieved since 1975 in a video at
http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/antikythera/
I'm no astronomer or physicist, still less a mathematician, so I take what is said on trust.
Enjoy!
Bill Morris
Pukenui
New Zealand
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