On 05 Dec 2014, at 12:16, Samiya Illias wrote:
As a person who takes the Quran literally, I'm not at all surprised
as it is stated that the ancients had been given much more, and we
haven't been given a tenth of what they had.
In theology, I agree. In the natural science and mathematics, the
evidence is that we have been much farer, notably thanks to
Aristotle's simplifying meta-physical assumptions.
Then Islam, Judaism and Christianity have been meta-physically correct
up to the eleventh century in the middle-east, but then, more or less
after Maimonides, they have taken the Aristotelian idea of "universe"
or "creation" too much seriously---making it into a dogma. Here the
beliefs of atheists, and the 3 religions departs too much from Plato,
and thus from the computationalist hypothesis. They might be true, but
the evidences are more that they are not, today.
Bruno
Samiya
On 05-Dec-2014, at 2:17 pm, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
Which go in the direction that may be Archimedes could have found,
or that greeks would have emit much earlier, a Church-Turing
thesis, and that without the stopping of science/theology by the
Roman Christians, the whole of computer science could have been
born much earlier. But in occident, science and theology stopped at
+500, and we entered the dark age, and we are still in there, now.
And if we continue to be blind on what happens in the Middle-East,
and elsewhere, we might well stay in the dark for one more
millenium.
Well, to be sure, we don't have evidence that the antikythera
mechanism is authentically Turing universal, but it is sure that it
is close. Very impressive discovery.
Bruno
On 05 Dec 2014, at 05:48, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
wrote:
For those who get into this kind of stuff.
http://www.gizmag.com/antikythera-mechanism-date/35016/
World's oldest computer may be older than previously thought
By David Szondy
December 4, 2014
3 Comments
The Antikythera Mechanism is the world's oldest computer (Photo:
Giovanni Dall Orto)
Since its discovery over a century ago, the Antikythera Mechanism
has had scholars scratching their heads over how the Greeks
managed to build a mechanical computer a hundred years before the
birth of Christ and thousands of years before anything similar.
But now things have become even stranger as researchers claim that
it's over a hundred years older than previously believed and may
have been built by a famous hand.
The Antikythera Mechanism was discovered in 1901 by sponge divers
off the Greek island of Antikythera. At first, not much was made
of it, but after the coral-encrusted, corroded mass of bronze
gears was later studied using x-rays, gamma rays, and neutrons,
and then reconstructed, it turned out to be something astonishing.
The device at first was thought to be some sort of surprisingly
early clock, but then it turned out to be the oldest computer
known. In fact it was an analog astronomical computer based on the
principle of the differential calculator that uses gear trains as
a way of performing complex calculations. On further study, the
device proved capable of calculating, among other things, the
position of the planets, sidereal time, and eclipses.
And all of this by using technology that was never realized to
exist in the ancient world and after it vanished, didn't reappear
until the 14th century. Even today the device sparks interest as
the design is adapted to not only museum exhibits, but also watches.
First reported in the New York Times, the new date for the
Antikythera Mechanism is the result of work by James Evans,
professor of physics at University of Puget Sound, and Christián
Carman, history of science professor at University of Quilmes,
Argentina.
The new date is based on a reconstruction of the device made by
John Steele of Brown University in 2008. This involved matching
the calculations against Babylonian eclipse records and applying
an analysis that took into account lunar and solar anomalies,
solar eclipses, and lunar and solar eclipses cycles that might
have been missing and other inaccuracies – not the least of which
might have been caused by the fact that much of the device was
never salvaged.
By a process of elimination, Evans and Carman eliminated hundreds
of eclipse patterns until a match was found that placed the
earliest eclipse on the device matching the year 205 BC. According
to the researchers, such a date not only places the manufacturing
date perhaps a hundred years earlier than the previous date of
about 100 BC, but also indicates that the mathematics used to
design the device were derived from Babylonian methods rather than
Greek trigonometry, which did not exist at that time.
The researchers also put forward another tantalizing possibility
opened by the new date. According to Cicero, there was a story
that a device much like the one found at Antikythera was made by
Archimedes and captured by the Roman general Marcellus after the
sack of Syracuse and the death of Archimedes in 212 BC. It is
remotely possible that it and the Antikythera Mechanism may be one
and the same. The researchers emphasize that the correlation is
conjectural, but it does suggest that the age of the device is not
only now known, but that a famous name can be given to its maker.
The results were published in the Archive for History of Exact
Science.
Source: University of Puget Sound
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