Here's a story about learning stuff. Normally I just learn something, full stop, and this is only a story because it took a few years.
As
discussed previously, my high school calculus teacher was the quirky and charming Don Joffray, who among other things was a big fan of the famously earthy Nobel physicist Richard Feynman. If you can look past Feynman being a womanizing chauvinist pig even for a guy born in 1918, he wrote a superbly entertaining book called
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, and the somewhat darker but still worthwhile
What Do You Care What Other People Think?. In the latter, he writes
the kind of passage that sets young people off on their scientific careers:
Yesterday morning I went to the archeological museum....I saw so much stuff my feet began to hurt. I got all mixed up--things are not labeled well. Also, it was slightly boring because we have seen so much of that stuff before. Except for one thing: among all those art objects there was one thing so entirely different and strange that it is nearly impossible. It was recovered from the sea in 1900 and is some kind of machine with gear trains, very much like the inside of a modern wind-up alarm clock. The teeth are very regular and many wheels are fitted closely together. There are graduated circles and Greek inscriptions. I wonder if it is some kind of fake. There was an article on it in the Scientific American in 1959.
...
[The Greeks] were very upset when I said that the development of greatest importance to mathematics in Europe was the discovery by Tartaglia that you can solve a cubic equation: although it is of very little use in itself, the discovery must have been psychologically wonderful because it showed that a modern man could do something no ancient Greek could do. It therefore helped in the Renaissance, which was the freeing of man from the intimidation of the ancients. What the Greeks are learning in school is to be intimidated into thinking they have fallen so far below their super ancestors.
I asked the archeologist lady about the machine in the museum--whether other similar machines, or simpler machines leading up to it or down from it, were ever found--but she hadn't heard of it. So I met her and her son of Carl's age (who looks at me as if I were a heroic ancient Greek, for he is studying physics) at the museum to show it to her. She required some explanation from me why I thought such a machine was interesting and surprising because, "Didn't Eratosthenes measure the distance to the sun, and didn't that require elaborate scientific instruments?" Oh, how ignorant are classically educated people. No wonder they don't appreciate their own time. They are not of it and do not understand it. But after a bit she believed maybe it was striking, and she took me to the back rooms of the museum--surely there were other examples, and she would get a complete bibliography. Well, there were no other examples, and the complete bibliography was a list of three articles (including the one in the Scientific American)--all by one man, an American from Yale!
I guess the Greeks think all Americans must be dull, being only interested in machinery when there are all those beautiful statues and portrayals of lovely myths and stories of gods and goddesses to look at. (In fact, a lady from the museum staff remarked, when told that the professor from America wanted to know more about item 15087, "Of all the beautiful things in this museum, why does he pick out that particular item? What is so special about it?")
Joff mentioned this passage in a class digression, but he didn't know any more than we or Feynman did. I never followed up on this, because I was in college when I read it, and the Internet was not yet in a state where you could just type "
what's that mechanism in a Greek museum that Richard Feynman was writing about?" and get an answer. If you've ever used the old-school data archives like
Lexis-Nexis, you know that life is too short to use them in your spare time.
Years later I saw it covered (lightly, as research was still sparse) in some books on engineering in antiquity, and then over the past 15 years we've had numerous breakthroughs as we develop better non-destructive imaging techniques, and uncover some more pieces of the thing from its surrounding collection. (Feynman may have been a little too hard on the Greeks, because the technology to investigate the thing didn't really exist yet.)
It turns out this device is called the
Antikythera (an-ti-KY-the-ra) mechanism, and it's a brain-bender because it's more sophisticated than anything we've found from the following 1500 years, and we've found no precedents, nothing simpler or similar that would have led to it. It's like opening a time capsule from 1850 and finding a digital camera. There's no question of its age, but what the hell?
The thing is fiendishly complicated, at least if you lack a background in watch-making and astronomy, but you can read about that yourself--it calculates a variety of astronomical phenomena, including lunar and solar eclipses, locations of planets, and (WTF?) the dates for the ancient Olympics. The most recent news is that they figure the start date for the calendar is 205 BC, and if we assume they wanted to maximize the calendar's utility going forward, that pushes the date of manufacture back more than a hundred years.
There's the pure archeological puzzle, but how can we look at this in the broader scope of what we think we know about antiquity? An economist
has a thought:
The key point, in my view, is that we have discovered no other comparable machine from antiquity or any other era other than modern times. It took us until 2006 to even understand what the device was supposed to do, using advanced tomography, and we had been holding it since 1901.
So what to infer? The first option is that this device was a true outlier, standing sui generis above its time. Cardiff University professor Michael Edmunds "described the device as 'just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind'".
As an artifact that is true, but is that so likely in terms of broader history? It is pure luck that we fished this thing out of the Mediterranean in 1901. (By the way, further dives are planned to search for more parts of it.) The alternative possibility is that antiquity had many more such exotic devices, which have remained unreported, at least in the manuscripts which have come down to us. That would imply, essentially, that we don't have a very good idea of what antiquity was like. In my view that is the more rational Bayesian conclusion. It is more likely than thinking that we just lucked out to find this one unique, incredible device. To put it another way, if you found some organic life on a traveling comet, you ought to conclude there is more of that life, or something related, somewhere else.
And to me, the Antikythera Mechanism does not sound like a "lone genius" kind of device: "The gear teeth were in the form of equilateral triangles with an average circular pitch of 1.6 mm, an average wheel thickness of 1.4 mm and an average air gap between gears of 1.2 mm." (Wikipedia) That suggests it was made by some kind of regular industrial process. It also had some sophistications which modern Swiss watches do not.
Given this Bayesian conclusions, which other strange claims stand a decent chance of being true of antiquity? Which other surprises await us? [emphasis added]
Short version: humans are awesome, and we know nothing.
So
what to infer? The first option is that this device was a true
outlier, standing sui generis above its time. Cardiff University
professor Michael Edmunds "described the device as "just extraordinary,
the only thing of its kind"".
As
an artifact that is true, but is that so likely in terms of broader
history? It is pure luck that we fished this thing out of the
Mediterranean in 1901. (By the way, further dives are planned to search
for more parts of it.) The alternative possibility is that antiquity
had many more such exotic devices, which have remained unreported, at
least in the manuscripts which have come down to us. That would imply,
essentially, that we don't have a very good idea of what antiquity was
like. In my view that is the more rational Bayesian conclusion. It is
more likely than thinking that we just lucked out to find this one
unique, incredible device. To put it another way, if you found some
organic life on a traveling comet, you ought to conclude there is more
of that life, or something related, somewhere else.
And to me, the Antikythera Mechanism does not sound like a "lone genius" kind of device: "The gear teeth were in the form of
equilateral triangles
with an average circular pitch of 1.6 mm, an average wheel thickness of
1.4 mm and an average air gap between gears of 1.2 mm." (Wikipedia)
That suggests it was made by some kind of regular industrial process.
It also had some sophistications which modern Swiss watches do not.
Given
this Bayesian conclusions, which other strange claims stand a decent
chance of being true of antquity? Which other surprises await us?
-
See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/what-should-a-bayesian-infer-from-the-antikythera-mechanism.html#sthash.5d9RhwoX.dpuf
The
key point, in my view, is that we have discovered no other comparable
machine from antiquity or any other era other than modern times. It
took us until 2006 to even understand what the device was supposed to
do, using advanced tomography, and we had been holding it since 1901.
So
what to infer? The first option is that this device was a true
outlier, standing sui generis above its time. Cardiff University
professor Michael Edmunds "described the device as "just extraordinary,
the only thing of its kind"".
As
an artifact that is true, but is that so likely in terms of broader
history? It is pure luck that we fished this thing out of the
Mediterranean in 1901. (By the way, further dives are planned to search
for more parts of it.) The alternative possibility is that antiquity
had many more such exotic devices, which have remained unreported, at
least in the manuscripts which have come down to us. That would imply,
essentially, that we don't have a very good idea of what antiquity was
like. In my view that is the more rational Bayesian conclusion. It is
more likely than thinking that we just lucked out to find this one
unique, incredible device. To put it another way, if you found some
organic life on a traveling comet, you ought to conclude there is more
of that life, or something related, somewhere else.
And to me, the Antikythera Mechanism does not sound like a "lone genius" kind of device: "The gear teeth were in the form of
equilateral triangles
with an average circular pitch of 1.6 mm, an average wheel thickness of
1.4 mm and an average air gap between gears of 1.2 mm." (Wikipedia)
That suggests it was made by some kind of regular industrial process.
It also had some sophistications which modern Swiss watches do not.
Given
this Bayesian conclusions, which other strange claims stand a decent
chance of being true of antquity? Which other surprises await us?
-
See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/what-should-a-bayesian-infer-from-the-antikythera-mechanism.html#sthash.5d9RhwoX.dpuf
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