Prof Edmunds said: "It makes you wonder what they would have achieved if they’d have carried on, and the Romans hadn’t taken over and put a stop to things. Would they have had a man on the Moon by AD 300?
“It sounds ridiculous, but if they were able to construct something as technically brilliant as this, it’s not complete fantasy,” said Prof Edmunds.
“The Romans were great at the stuff like building sewers and getting things done, but it was the Greeks who were the thinkers, and came up with real innovative technology.”
I was just reading about that on CNN.com. Don’t you imagine it was a device that was actually left here by aliens? …what was that book in the 70s that set out to prove aliens had been here many times before (e.g., an island somewhere that’s been known as Elephant Island for eons but the only way you can tell it’s shaped like an elephant is from the air)??
There was a piece on this on tv last night on Discovery Channel. Incredible stuff!
I remember watching a show about a Scotsman (can’t think of the name) who developed an incredibly accurate time piece for ships during the days when sailors were still struggling with how to figure out longitude. The reason this second story comes to mind is mention of how incredibly accurate the tiny gears are in the Antikythera Mechanism.
The show about the Scotsman demonstrated how he had first invented his own tools so that he could build by hand an accurate gear at a scale he could easily control, but that his tools would duplicate every movement he made in the machining of a duplicate gear at a fraction of the same size. As I started to understand how the Scotsman’s tools worked I was struck by the genius of his work. The same feeling occurred when I started to understand what the Antikythera Mechanism was for and how incredible it was for them to have similarly hand-machined the tiny gears for their mechanism.
Gee, it must be neat to be so darn smart, instead of just being a pretty face.
Yes, you can’t help but be impressed by the ingenuity of the ancient Greeks. But the above query makes me wonder what we could have achieved in this country (USA) if we had taken a different direction in 2000. Could we have been energy independent by the year 2020?
It’s information like this that gives the lie to the Western idea of “progress”. There are cities in ruins from 6,500 B.C. with more advanced draining systems and water supplies than we have today.
Every new idea that gets absorbed into popular culture means that another one somewhere has got lost.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that the ancient Greeks managed to get their head around the notion of differential gears. But in a culture of city-states, this information doesn’t easily get spread around.
To look at some “history” books humans were living in caves until about 2000 B.C when suddenly they evolved into the Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerians and Chinese. And ditto in a pre-colombian location. And it’s all been uphill since then. Allegedly. I disagree. Man is the same old fidgety tinkering primate as ever. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that we’ve reached this pitch of “civilization” at least once in the past before.
Once they got their equivalent of the Internet up and running, I wonder how Victorian spam would be worded…I mean you have to handle some things with the longest of tongs, right?
Property and investment scam spam was invented (through snail mail) in Victorian England. They also used adverts in cheap popular books. My collection of Victorian fishing books is full of them.
I think they’d have to word it in terms of manly vigor and such. Even literature, as you know, could convey these things with far greater subtlety than we seem to require today.
