The major scientific journal Nature published an article on the famous Antikythera Mechanism in 2006. You can access the article as a PDF file here. For a bibliography on the mechanism, check out this page at the very cool website devoted to it.
Editor's note: replaced broken links and added excerpt.
Excerpt from the article:
The Antikythera Mechanism is a unique Greek geared device, constructed around the end of the 2nd Century BC.
From previous work1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 it is known that it calculated and displayed celestial information, particularly cycles such as the phases of the moon and a luni-solar calendar. Calendars were important to ancient societies10 for timing agricultural activity and fixing religious festivals. Eclipses and planetary motions were often interpreted as omens, while the calm regularity of the astronomical cycles must have been philosophically attractive in an uncertain and violent world.
Named after its place of discovery in 1901 in a Roman shipwreck, the Mechanism is technically more complex than any known device for at least a millennium afterwards. Its specific functions have remained controversial11,12,13,14 because its gears and the inscriptions upon its faces are only fragmentary. Here we report surface imaging and high-resolution X-ray tomography of the surviving fragments, enabling us to reconstruct the gear function and double the number of deciphered inscriptions.
The Mechanism predicted lunar and solar eclipses based on Babylonian arithmetic-progression cycles. The inscriptions support suggestions of mechanical display of planetary positions9,14,16, now lost. In the second century BC, Hipparchos developed a theory to explain the irregularities of the Moon's motion across the sky caused by its elliptic orbit.
We find a mechanical realization of this theory in the gearing of the Mechanism, revealing an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period.
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