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A Portable Cosmos - Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World (Paperback)
Loot Price: R448
Discovery Miles 4 480
You Save: R75
(14%)
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A Portable Cosmos - Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World (Paperback)
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List price R523
Loot Price R448
Discovery Miles 4 480
You Save R75 (14%)
Supplier out of stock. If you add this item to your wish list we will let you know when it becomes available.
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From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Terracotta Army, ancient artifacts
have long fascinated the modern world. However, the importance of
some discoveries is not always immediately understood. This was the
case in 1901 when sponge divers retrieved a lump of corroded bronze
from a shipwreck at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea near the
Greek island of Antikythera. Little did the divers know they had
found the oldest known analog computer in the world, an astonishing
device that once simulated the motions of the stars and planets as
they were understood by ancient Greek astronomers. Its remains now
consist of 82 fragments, many of them containing gears and plates
engraved with Greek words, that scientists and scholars have pieced
back together through painstaking inspection and deduction, aided
by radiographic tools and surface imaging. More than a century
after its discovery, many of the secrets locked in this mysterious
device can now be revealed. In addition to chronicling the unlikely
discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, author Alexander Jones
takes readers through a discussion of how the device worked, how
and for what purpose it was created, and why it was on a ship that
wrecked off the Greek coast around 60 BC. What the Mechanism has
uncovered about Greco-Roman astronomy and scientific technology,
and their place in Greek society, is truly amazing. The mechanical
know-how that it embodied was more advanced than anything the
Greeks were previously thought capable of, but the most recent
research has revealed that its displays were designed so that an
educated layman could understand the behavior of astronomical
phenomena, and how intertwined they were with one's natural and
social environment. It was at once a masterpiece of machinery as
well as one of the first portable teaching devices. Written by a
world-renowned expert on the Mechanism, A Portable Cosmos will
fascinate all readers interested in ancient history, archaeology,
and the history of science.
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