The year is 72 B.C.E., and the Roman Republic has already punched a one-way ticket toward empire. The evergrowing Mediterranean power is embroiled in yet another conflict, and the Roman conqueror Lucius Lucinius Lucullus has chartered a series of ships to ferry home riches from newly plundered regions.
Although most ships eventually reach their destination at the port of Ostia, southwest of Rome, one Greek ship—loaded with jewelry, coins, statues, glassware, and bronze masterpieces—never arrives. As the vessel traverses the Aegean Sea, a violent tempest tosses it into the rocky shores of an island called Antikythera. The collision tears into the ship’s five-inch-thick hull, causing it to sink more than 100 feet beneath the waves until finally resting on a submerged slope off the island’s coast.
This is the story—or at least one of the stories—of how one of the world’s most confounding archaeological objects, the Antikythera mechanism, began its 2,000-year-long residency at the bottom of the Aegean. Pinpointing the mechanism’s origins, including the mystery of how and when the ship sank, is only the beginning.
Sponge divers first exhumed the mechanism—thought to be an ancient astronomical calendar and one of the earliest progenitors of the modern computer—off the coast of Antikythera at the turn of the 20th century. Since then, mathematicians, clockmakers, metallurgists, astrophysicists, and underwater archaeologists have tried to make sense of this fragmented, corroded, and maddening amalgamation of gears, pins, and dials.
In fact, the device is almost as famous for its incompleteness as it is for its complexity. Now housed at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, only one-third of the roughly shoebox-sized mechanism, spread across 82 fragments of varying sizes, has been found. The rest has been lost to the sea.
More than a century later, the discoveries—and controversies—surrounding one of the most incredible archaeological finds in human history are only growing.
The ancient Greeks had a knack for making the nearly impossible possible. Some of the Mediterranean’s greatest natural philosophers dabbled in electricity, steam power, even calculus, more than a millennium before the Scientific Revolution fixed these ideas at the foundation of modern science.
Even so, the complexity of the Antikythera mechanism has shocked researchers.
Milled with millimeter precision, likely using ancient tools like vertical lathes and bow drills, the device contained dozens of gear wheels that operated together in a dizzying display of astronomical information.
With insights gleaned from the fragments that remain, scientists know that a hand-cranked dial on its front side tracked the motion of the sun, the moon, and the other five planets known to antiquity: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The other side of the device housed two more circular dials. The upper dial reconciled the mismatch in periods between the lunar month and solar year, while the lower dial calculated both lunar and solar eclipses. It even contained a separate, smaller dial for marking athletic events like the Olympic Games.
The Antikythera mechanism was essentially a complicated celestial calendar—and is a remarkable testament to the sophistication of ancient Greek astronomy. The Greeks were late to the astronomy game compared to the Babylonians and Egyptians. The sixth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus began a centuries-long tradition of using geometry to understand the blanket of lights above. Over time, the Greeks began creating ever more complex geometric models of the cosmos. Eventually, they cast those models into a bronze clockwork miniature.
Achieving this level of mechanical sophistication wasn’t easy. For example, when viewed from Earth, the moon appears to speed up when it is closest to the planet, or at its perigee, versus when it’s farthest away, or at its apogee. To capture this nonuniform movement, the device’s makers used epicyclic gears (gears mounted on other gears) affixed on an eccentric axis containing a pin-and-slot mechanism to represent this subtle lunar anomaly.
And that’s just the moon.
Before the mechanism’s discovery, archaeologists studying antiquity had only unearthed gear wheels from watermills and windmills—crude mechanical gears, explains Tony Freeth, an honorary professor at University College London and cofounder of the (now defunct) Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. “This precision gearing…is just completely unknown from the ancient world.”
That “out of time” quality explains how the device (regrettably) fills an entire episode of the History channel TV series Ancient Aliens and became the central time travel MacGuffin in 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Even the famed 20th-century physicist Richard Feynman, someone very familiar with the seeming impossibilities of the quantum world, described the mechanism as “nearly impossible,” following a visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
This anachronism is partly what drew Freeth to study the mechanism. Freeth, 78, possesses a near encyclopedic knowledge of the Antikythera mechanism—its inner workings, its history, and the many people who’ve played a part in its story—and speaks about the device’s sheer genius with gusto and gravity.
Although Freeth earned degrees in mathematics from Cambridge and Bristol, he developed a passion for film and has spent a large part of his career working on documentary films and television specials about topics ranging from the experiences of youth in the U.K. to subsistence farming in sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2000, a colleague suggested that the Antikythera mechanism might make the perfect subject for a new documentary. Freeth was immediately intrigued and began developing a pitch. “I worked up a proposal and went around to TV commissioners, and they said, ‘What’s new?’” he recalls. “We couldn’t really give them a new story about it.”
So Freeth began poring over previous research and stumbled across Derek J. de Solla Price’s seminal 1974 work, Gears from the Greeks, which had reintroduced the wonder of the Antikythera mechanism to the world. Soon Freeth’s passing fascination blossomed into a full-blown scientific obsession.
Price, who died in 1983, was one of the early pioneers of modern Antikythera mechanism research. While he wasn’t the first to recognize its complexity, he was one of the first to truly grasp the profound implications embedded within its corroded gearing. After studying the device in Athens in 1958, Price delivered a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences conference in Washington, D.C., and compared the mechanism to a computer—a novel invention at the time. The presentation created a media sensation, and in one article he likened the mechanism’s discovery to “opening a pyramid and finding an atomic bomb.”
Price wasn’t just a champion of the device. He also made a number of crucial discoveries, including that it tracked time in relationship with the movement of the heavenly bodies, and amplified the theory that it was more computer or calculator than decorative object.
While Price primarily sought to understand how the mechanism functioned, he also mused about its creator and propped up previous assertions that Archimedes may have been the mind behind the machine.
Born in Syracuse, Sicily, around 287 B.C.E., Archimedes developed an obsession with mathematics from an early age. After studying in Egypt, he returned to Syracuse, where he made astounding discoveries, including the calculation of pi, the invention of the Archimedes screw (still used in crop irrigation today), and the foundational laws of hydrostatics. He may also have created a series of weapons—one report describes a giant claw that could lift ships from water while another account details a mirror-powered death-ray, which harnessed sunlight to burn invading ships—but this ingenuity wasn’t enough to save Syracuse from the Roman siege around 212 B.C.E.
Archimedes didn’t survive the battle, but some evidence suggests that his mechanical sphaeras, or spheres, did. The Roman statesman Cicero describes in his 52 B.C.E. treatise, On the Republic, that after the battle, Roman proconsul and newly minted conqueror of Syracuse, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, pilfered one of Archimedes’ astronomical creations. This globe-like object delineated the motions of the sun and moon and of those five planets which Greek astronomers called “wanderers.”
While Cicero’s description doesn’t perfectly match the Antikythera mechanism, this brief mention of Marcellus’s long-treasured Syracusan loot supports the theory that Archimedes had the mechanical know-how to replicate the movement of our solar system. “The famous Sicilian [Archimedes] had been endowed with greater genius than one would imagine it possible for a human being to possess,” Cicero writes, quoting the scholar Philus who reportedly witnessed the device in action after the siege.
For his part, Freeth agrees that it’s likely the famed Greek philosopher played a role in the mechanism’s creation. “The Antikythera mechanism is so clever, so ingenious, and so extraordinary,” he says,“that it’d need to be someone like Archimedes,” who had a strong mathematical and astronomical background.
Scholars haven’t been able to pinpoint when this particular mechanism was originally built, but most place its construction sometime between the third and first centuries B.C.E.—after Archimedes’ death but decades before it was eventually lost at sea.
It could be a copy of an Archimedean original, or it may contain iterations by other astronomers of the era, like Apollonius of Perga, Hipparchus of Nicaea, or Posidonius of Rhodes, an inventor whose work was described in another treatise by Cicero. “Once they built the Parthenon, everyone copied it,” Freeth says. “There are little copies of the Parthenon all over the Greek world.”
Regardless of who made it, Freeth says that the mechanism on display today was likely not the first draft and that an entire lineage of these devices could have existed throughout the Mediterranean. It would have been nearly impossible for a great scientist to sit down and design the mechanism from scratch without making simpler devices first, Freeth explains. “But we don’t have any of them.”
Scientists rarely like working with a sample size of one, but no other mechanism—or even some earlier iteration of a mechanism—has been found. A short walk through Athens’ National Archaeological Museum will reveal rooms filled with statues, vases, and other treasures of the ancient world. But you’ll only find one Antikythera mechanism—or a third of one, anyway.
Growing up on the coast of Massachusetts, some of Brendan Foley’s earliest memories were of the ocean. His fascination with the sea followed him through high school, where he first learned to snorkel, and to college, where he discovered the burgeoning field of underwater archaeology. He was hooked.
While studying at the University of New Hampshire, Foley explored his first shipwrecks in the Piscataqua River, a tidal river that forms the boundary between New Hampshire and Maine. He pursued master’s degrees in maritime history from Tufts University near Boston and maritime archaeology from the University of Southampton in the U.K., where his first class in underwater archaeology began with a section on the Antikythera shipwreck. “It was the site that alerted everyone …there’s really interesting stuff underwater,” Foley recalls. A PhD in the history and archaeology of technology from MIT and dives at Skerki Bank in the Mediterranean Sea, a famed archaeological site, with oceanographer Bob Ballard’s Institute for Exploration followed.
Eventually, he landed at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s (WHOI) Deep Submergence Laboratory. This work brought Foley to the Aegean Sea, where he used a suite of high-tech instruments to survey some 40 ancient shipwrecks—including the famed Antikythera dive site.
Foley, 56, who now teaches at Lund University in Sweden, spent six years of his almost two decades with WHOI exploring the Antikythera shipwreck with advanced survey equipment and automated underwater vehicles. He and his colleagues are part of a long line of divers—including the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau—who’ve visited the site.
It was in the spring of 1900 that a group of waylaid sponge divers first stumbled upon the ship after taking refuge on the island of Antikythera during a storm. When the storm subsided, the divers, who shared one brass diving helmet strapped to the ship with ropes, began plying the waters along the island’s eastern edge. One diver, Elias Stadiatis, pulled sharply on his rope. When he reached the surface, Stadiatis frantically described a scene of carnage—rotting corpses of women and horses strewn across the sea floor. The ship’s captain, Dimitrios Kontos, dove down to see for himself.
One of the divers—most reports say Kontos—later resurfaced with a bronze arm, part of a lost masterwork of antiquity. By complete chance, these divers had discovered the world’s richest shipwreck and inadvertently became history’s first underwater archaeologists.
When the divers, now employed by the Greek government, returned months later, excavating the site proved difficult. This part of the Aegean was frequently besieged by tumultuous waves. Furious storms were common, and the shipwreck had settled at a 45-degree angle, perilously close to the same rocky cliffs that likely ended its voyage two millennia prior. Some 300 years after the wreck, a rockslide had further entombed the vessel.
But even in these challenging conditions, the divers exhumed dozens of containers called amphorae—what Foley describes as the 55-gallon drums of the ancient world—along with perfume jars, glass bowls, jewels, coins, and many of those “corpses,” which turned out to be not-so-spooky bronze and marble statues. The divers could only stay submerged for about 10 minutes, Foley explains, and likely spent only a few minutes on the seafloor. The divers worked with rudimentary kit by today’s standards yet still somehow rigged up sculptures so they could be pulled from the water depths. “What they did was almost superhuman,” he says.
Foley’s own memories of diving at the island of Antikythera—he visited the site and its surrounding waters once or twice every year between 2011 and 2017 and estimates that he’s spent around 87 hours beneath the waves—contain two juxtaposing truths about the Aegean: It’s one of the most beautiful marine environments in the world—and it’s very challenging to study.
During an expedition in September 2014, Foley and his colleagues—experts from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports’s Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities (EUA) and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics—planned to spend a week mapping the wreck with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). They also had a crew of divers, armed with rebreathers and metal detectors, ready to scan the sea floor for ancient artifacts. Then they would debut a piece of heavy-duty diving equipment called the exosuit—picture a cross between Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit and the Michelin Man—into which divers could climb and explore depths too deep for scuba.
Foley and his team managed to get only four days of diving in and used the bulbous exosuit twice before the sky grew dark and strong winds rolled in.
Though rough weather scuttled their plans, they were still able to generate a three-millimeter-resolution map of the shipwreck and managed to recover an impressive collection of artifacts. On subsequent dive trips, he and his team uncovered more sculptures, a mysterious 100-kilogram lead weapon known as “the dolphin,” and a nearly complete human skeleton.
Foley recalls peering over the cliff face on a particularly stormy day during that 2014 expedition, watching with awe as waves pummeled the shore near the site of the wreck: “It gave me a really good indication of what the conditions may have been like the night or day when this ship sank.”
Over the decades, experts have tried to piece together what exactly happened to this ship all those centuries ago. While some details shift among varying narratives of the ship’s fateful journey, the end result remains the same: At some point in the middle of the first century B.C.E., the Antikythera mechanism came to rest in the salty sediments of the Aegean.
For two millennia, the mechanism lay untouched in its watery tomb more than 100 feet below the waves as time slowly trickled by, giving way to the birth of empires, the collapse into the Dark Ages, the rise of theocratic kingdoms, the foundation of nation states, and the arrival of modern science.
It’s a wonder the mechanism survived at all, given the conditions it faced in the ocean. “If you go into many of the archaeological museums in Europe, all of the fabulous bronze sculptures primarily come from shipwrecks or from sites underwater,” Foley explains. At the time of antiquity, bronze was valuable. And because it was malleable, it could be easily repurposed. “You might make a statue of a Greek god, but once that religion goes out of fashion…you can melt [the statue] down and make church bells or artillery gun barrels,” he says.
But 2,000 years underwater didn’t do the Antikythera mechanism many favors. Seawater rich with salts and other chemical compounds reacted with the high amount of copper in the bronze mechanism, slowly corroding it and replacing it with a green-hued rock known as atacamite. Over time, silt and sand accumulated between the gear wheels, which eventually solidified into hunks of lumpy rock. Bits of wood found among the fragments suggest the mechanism was housed in an ornate wooden frame.
After two millennia, the mechanism deformed into something unrecognizable from its intricate origins—and into something far more fragile.
Even after divers pulled up the unassuming clump of barnacle-encrusted gears, the mechanism’s one-of-a-kind nature wasn’t immediately apparent.
In May 1902, Spyridon Stais, a politician on the nearby Kythera Island, told his cousin Valerios, then director of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, about a series of strange gear wheels embedded in one of the recovered objects. For four years, experts theorized that perhaps the object was some sort of astrolabe, an impressive but relatively well-known astronomical device that helped sailors navigate by the position of the stars. It wasn’t until 1906 that a German classicist named Albert Rehm announced his theory that the object was something more.
A trained philologist who studied ancient languages, Rehm sought a well-rounded background in archaeology and began working as an epigrapher, detailing written inscriptions at excavations at Miletus. After hearing details about a mysterious Greek device recovered at Antikythera, Rehm’s interest in astronomy pulled him to Athens to analyze the object himself.
Relying only on his own observations and a few earlier photographs, Rehm figured out that the mechanism used epicyclic gearing (overlapping gears). He also surmised that the device must have tracked the movement of the sun through the zodiac constellations after finding the word “Pachon”—the ninth month of the ancient Egyptian calendar—on one of the fragments. “He was the very first person to suggest that it was an astronomical calculating machine,” Freeth says. Despite Rehm’s remarkable insights, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens still kept the mechanism filed away in storage.
That is, until the English physicist Derek de Solla Price stumbled upon it. Inspired by the work of Rehm and several Greek experts, Price began to study the artifact in the 1950s—at the time, fragments of the mechanism were stored in cigar boxes. Price, the Greek physicist Charalambos Karakalos, and Karakalos’s wife, Emilia, were also the first team to x-ray the Antikythera mechanism.
Finally able to see beneath the mechanism’s fragile outer layers, Price and his colleagues discovered that some of the rear gears in fragment A, the largest of the 82 fragments, could be used to calculate the mean position of the moon against the stars. Known as the Metonic Cycle, after the fifth century B.C.E. astronomer Meton of Athens, this formula explains the 19-year period in which lunar phases repeat on the same date of the solar year.
Price published many of his insights and discoveries in his now famous book, Gears from the Greeks. Finally, after decades of collective research, experts were starting to piece together one of the world’s greatest puzzles. “Rehm discovered these cycles in the inscriptions and then Price discovered them in the gearing,” Freeth says.
While Price successfully discerned that the front dial of the device tracked at least the movement of the sun and the moon, he incorrectly guessed how the gearing worked. And despite his attempts to decipher the back side of the dial, it remained mostly a mystery as several gears, particularly from the upper portion of the device, were completely missing.
By the mid-1970s, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens had placed the three main fragments of the mechanism on permanent display for people beyond academia to explore. After visiting the museum years later, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke noted that “if the insight of the Greeks had matched their ingenuity…we would not merely be puttering around on the moon, we would have reached the nearer stars.”
Further investigations by Michael T. Wright, then a curator at London’s Science Museum, and the late Allan Bromley, a historian of computing, involved new scans in the early ’90s using linear tomography, which provided depth information rather than just a mess of gears overlapping each other as in Price’s previous x-rays. Armed with these new images, Wright worked out how slightly eccentric gearing could have recreated the variable motion of the moon using a pin-and-slot device—an idea he later discarded because it contradicted existing research. Slowly, he began piecing together the mystery of the back side of the device by filling in the missing pieces of the upper gear train.
Around this time, Freeth had begun his own deep dive into the history of the Antikythera mechanism. He had read Price’s book, but was skeptical of many of the author’s conclusions and couldn’t glean any new insights because scans of the fragments were hard to come by.
So in the early 2000s, Freeth and his colleague Mike G. Edmunds, an astrophysicist and interstellar dust expert also at Cardiff University in Wales, decided to try to scan the mechanism again. Only this time, Freeth and Edmunds, along with a team of local experts and international scholars, opted for high resolution x-ray tomography. This method would create a series of image slices at a resolution of 40 microns that experts would be able to flip through, like pages in a book. Now they would have to convince the Greek government to give them access to the mechanism.
After years of negotiating, Freeth’s colleague, the Greek space physicist Xenophon Moussas, convinced Greece’s Deputy Minister of Culture to agree to a new set of scans, and in October 2005 the U.K.-based imaging firm X-Tek Systems shipped their custom-built, eight-ton x-ray machine dubbed “the Blade Runner” to the National Museum in Athens. The scanning process took about two and a half weeks, and it was “not an easy ride,” Freeth says. They were barely able to squeeze the machine through the doors of the museum, and then it broke down mid-scan. Technicians were called in to perform field repairs in situ.
The team also worked with Hewlett-Packard to perform another imaging technique known as reflectance transformation imaging, which uses varying light sources to provide exquisite detail of an object’s surface. The machine looked like a big dome covered in flashlights, Freeth says, and various exposures allowed researchers to manipulate different lighting conditions on a computer to reveal previously hidden inscriptions. With these two data sets ready for analysis, new discoveries were on the horizon.
Freeth and his colleagues began analyzing the results and homed in on what he described as scale markings where the back-side lower dial is located. He noticed that thin lines divided the spiral into sections, and many of those segments contained lettering, or glyphs. If he could somehow work out the number of these scales and how many spirals they formed, he might be able to devise the astronomical purpose of this lower dial. Eventually, he calculated that there must have been between 220 and 225 scale divisions, which struck him given the historic and astronomical significance of the number 223.
The Saros cycle, a Babylonian breakthrough which determines the relative time and position of a lunar or solar eclipse, contains 223 lunar months. Not only did the mechanism feature a calendar used to calculate lunar and solar eclipses, but it included a smaller dial within the Saros dial known as the Exeligmos, which told the user whether to add zero, eight, or 16 hours to their eclipse prediction time. They published results detailing the intricacies of these eclipse-tracking dials—along with the confirmation of Wright’s pin-and-slot device—in Nature in 2006.
Six years later, Freeth finally produced the long-awaited documentary The World’s First Computer and inspired a whole new generation of enthusiasts to explore the mechanical genius of ancient Greece.
Freeth and his colleagues have since described the nature of the Olympic dials and provided additional evidence that the Antikythera mechanism also tracked the motion of the planets via epicyclic gearing based on the descriptions of the periods of Venus and Saturn inscribed on the mechanism. And in a 2021 paper in Scientific Reports, the researchers proposed the most complete picture yet of the Antikythera mechanism.
But two years after Freeth’s latest revelations, the mechanism once again became the subject of a controversy.
Graham Woan remembers the exact moment he decided to study the Antikythera mechanism. He was traveling by train from Liverpool to Glasgow, where for the past 30 years he’s worked as an astrophysics professor at the University of Glasgow. Woan, 61, was teaching statistical astronomy that semester and needed to develop a series of test questions. “Writing statistical astronomy exam questions is torture,” Woan says. “I’m wracking my brain about how to think of an exam question—and then I thought, ‘Hang on a minute.’”
This moment of professorial inspiration came from an unlikely place. Earlier on the same train ride, Woan had emailed a colleague about his thoughts on an intriguing paper from 2020 involving the Antikythera mechanism. Experts long thought that one of its ancient cogs contained 365 holes, perhaps representing a solar calendar, but this new research asserted that the cog contained something closer to 354 holes, which more closely aligned with a lunar calendar.
He began to think about turning it into an exam question, Woan recalls, but “it was way too difficult.” Instead of dropping it all together, he had another idea. “I think I’d rather answer it myself.”
Because only one-third of the device has been found, and there is no second example for comparison, many breakthroughs have come from extrapolations of unknowns. But Woan isn’t afraid of a little uncertainty.
Originally trained as a radio astronomer, Woan regularly employs statistics to divine the known from the unknown—or at least a close approximation. It’s a technique Woan used frequently when working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) during its years-long hunt for gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime generated by the acceleration of objects in a gravitational field. “One of the problems in radio astronomy is you have incomplete information about the source of the radiation you’re detecting—you probably see where this is going,” Woan says, laughing. “You’re really just able to determine some of the spatial frequencies,” or the rate at which these spacetime ripples repeat across a specific distance.
Radio astronomy interferometry samples data from images to try to understand gravitational waves and pinpoint their origins. Astronomers use Bayesian statistics to help form imagery reconstruction with incomplete spatial frequency information.
Bayesian statistics, according to Woan, uses a problem’s parameters to create what he calls a “blob of probability” in which the truth most likely resides. That blob is defined by both observable data, like the number of holes on a gear fragment, and the assumptions made about that data. These assumptions—for example, the number of holes on the gear is not a negative number or zero because, obviously, the holes themselves exist—provide constraints that help experts draw nearer to the “blob” of truth. Keep adding assumptions, and that blob of probability narrows. Woan figured he could employ this same statistical method to the Antikythera mechanism.
Other evidence suggests that behind the Antikythera mechanism’s calendar ring lies a plate based on the Egyptian calendar with 365 days, which depicts a solar year. (This, of course, excludes the second-century B.C.E. innovation of adding in a leap day every four years, but it was a close approximation for Earth’s orbital reality.)
But because the plate is incomplete, it is impossible to tell with certainty how many holes were actually represented on it. So Woan and his colleague, Joseph Bayley, used Bayesian statistics to discern how many holes likely existed, extrapolating from the 80 or so holes that remained. “Our assumptions were simple,” Woan says. “Originally this ring was an exact circle and originally it had equally spaced holes around that circle in a ring.” He and Bayley then assumed it was fragmented in a random way and those fragments remained in a plane. They input the known data into a computer algorithm and let it rip.
Woan’s calculations suggested it was 299 times more likely that the ring contained 354 holes compared to 360 holes, which represents another widely used ancient calendar system. What’s more, there was a vastly higher probability that it contained 354 holes than 365 holes, as other scholars have previously asserted. Woan and Bayley published their results in The Horological Journal in July 2024. If true, this research could upend some of the very foundational thinking about the device itself.
The study has stirred controversy within the field of Antikythera scholars. Days after the article’s publication, Freeth told The New York Times that the results were “just wrong,” citing the existence of another, more accurate lunar calendar within the device. “Honestly, it’s impossible there was a crude lunar calendar stuck on the mechanism,” Freeth says.
Woan admits that he isn’t an Antikythera mechanism expert, but he stands by his calculations. Of course, he says, it’s possible that his starting assumptions were wrong: Maybe, for example, the holes were not evenly spaced, which would change the result. Otherwise, “if the observations are strong and constraining enough…the observations will drag you to the truth,” Woan says. “Even if it drags you there kicking and screaming.”
Although he never got his ancient Greek–inspired exam question, Woan marvels at how similar the scientific method is even when stretched across millennia. Scientists today are constantly developing new models of the universe, continually updated with the latest understanding of the cosmos. The same can be said of the ancient Greeks who originally cast the summation of Greek astronomy into a toaster-sized box. “They had to implement [their model] mechanically whereas…we have other useful tools like computers,” Woan says, “but it’s a model. It’s the same idea.”
Just as the Antikythera mechanism captured the ancient world’s understanding of the cosmos in miniature, so, too, does the century-long research into its function encapsulate the very best of science—that cyclical process of theory, testing, debate, and discovery that’s permeated the human experience since the very first astronomers glimpsed the night sky.
But the human exploration of the cosmos is a journey with no conclusion, and short of finding another corroded mechanism, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever grasp the extent of the Antikythera mechanism’s mechanical wonders, its ancient origins, or its many uses.
“It keeps throwing up interesting things, unexpected things,” Freeth says. “It’s a wonderful puzzle.”
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
