from the out-for-stars dept.
Doug Mounce
This article support Rank's view that the Greek interest in science and technology primarily was an immortality project to predict and control the future. Why mankind chose to project their soul onto the stars remains unclear. I think there's a natural sense of the eternal in the extreme sizes and distances which is where you'd like your soul to be.
(My son notes that the engineers who built such devices may have had more pedestrian interests -- such as just-seeing whether or not they could build these types of instruments.)
The Antikythera
The elegant complexity of the mechanism – and the use its makers designed it for – are emblematic of the values of the ancient world: For example, a dial that predicts the occurrence of eclipses to the precision of a day also purports to forecast what the color of the moon and weather in the region will be that day. To modern scientists, the three phenomena are entirely distinct from one another — eclipses depend on the predictable movements of the sun, moon and planets, the color of the moon on the scattering of light in Earth's atmosphere, and the weather on difficult-to-track local conditions. Astronomers may be able to forecast an eclipse years in advance, but there's no scientific way to know the weather that far out (just ask our friends at the Capital Weather Gang).
But to an ancient Greek, the three concerns were inextricably linked. It was believed that an eclipse could portend a famine, an uprising, a nation's fate in war.
"Things like eclipses were regarded as having ominous significance," Jones said. It would have made perfect sense to tie together "these things that are purely astronomical with things that are more cultural, like the Olympic games, and calendars, which is astronomy in service of religion and society, with astrology, which is pure religion."
That may go some way toward explaining the strange realization Price made more than 50 years ago: The ancient Greeks came dazzlingly close to inventing clockwork centuries sooner than really happened. That they chose to utilize the technology not to mark the minutes, but to plot out their place in the universe, shows just how deeply they regarded the significance of celestial events in their lives.
In a single instrument, Jones said, "they were trying to gather a whole range of things that were part of the Greek experience of the cosmos."