Translator: Romina Pol Reviewer: Gisela Giardino
There were people running, screaming, fire, spears.
The city was being invaded.
But it seemed like he didn'’t care.
He was still sitting, drawing mathematical shapes in the sand.
Until a Roman soldier threatened him with his sword
and wanted to capture him.
The old man, calmly, raised his eyes, looked at him,
and told him that firstly he would finish his demonstration.
Then he looked down and kept drawing in the sand.
When Romans invaded Sicily, Syracuse seemed an easy target.
However, it took them more than two years to conquer it.
It was the first battle in which technology made a difference.
Catapults and big cranes were used
to spin ships up in the air,
and many other innovations.
Plutarch says that Romans were so scared
that they saw a rope or a pulley and started running.
All those inventions were the work of only one man.
Who was that giant who, with his inventions,
made the Roman army tremble?
No less than Archimedes,
the most important mathematician of Antiquity.
Finally, the Romans conquered the city.
The soldier was obviously upset with Archimedes' attitude,
and killed him with his sword.
A terrible mistake for which he paid a very high price,
because his General, Marcus Claudius Marcellus,
deeply admired Archimedes.
In fact, Marcus Claudius, while he could have taken
all the treasures of the city, he chose one that fitted in any bag.
A device made by Archimedes.
Cicero says it was a kind of portable planetary,
that showed the position of the Sun, the Moon, the stars;
and when he made it work, it predicted eclipses.
How could this portable planetary be?
Cicero says he never thought that a human being
could be such a genius to do something like this.
The Roman general chose it before any other treasure.
How could it have been?
Can you imagine what was it like to have it in your hands?
Having the chance to study it, investigate it, touch it?
However, as many ancient marvels,
it was lost forever.
Or at least it seemed so, because in 1900 a sunk ship was found
at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, close to Antikythera’s island
full of treasures from the Greeks'’ time:
statues, jewelry, coins and something quite odd.
This: a bunch of spare parts of what looked like
an ancient clock full of gears.
This in itself was quite revolutionary because devices like this
appear in the late Middle Ages, 1500 years later.
Could they be the remains of Archimedes’' device?
To answer this question we would have to first rebuild
the original device from the parts and make it work again.
A Quixotic challenge that is taking more than a century.
In the 50'’s, an American named Solla Price worked on it;
And then two British men: Michael Wright in the 90's,
and Tony Freeth and his team in 2000.
Freeth’'s team made extremely high resolution CT scans
that let us see the interior of the fragments.
See for yourselves (Tomography video)
we start from the outside and little by little we enter the fragment.
This is really important because in the Museum
we are not allowed to break the device to see what is inside.
Look at those teeth,
look how they are conserved after 2000 years underwater.
Now we are advertising the first submersible tablets.
This is submersible! 2000 years underwater!
Look at it: it’'s crazy.
According to what we could rebuild so far,
the mechanism was protected by a wooden box
and had a cover at the front and a cover at the back.
At the front, it had two concentric scales:
one was divided by the twelve zodiac signs
and the other one by the 365 days of the year.
Over these scales, a needle spins and shows at the same time
the position of the Sun in the sky and the day of the year.
But over those scales there is also another needle
that shows the position of the Moon in the sky.
The mistake of that needle, according to current values,
Is 0.0002 days per turn.
But that’'s not all.
The Moon doesn'’t move at a constant speed.
Sometimes it goes faster and sometimes slower.
These guys could keep the Moon needle
from going at a constant speed, so that it speeds up
when the Moon goes faster and slows down when it goes slower.
And as if it wasn'’t enough, the Moon’'s needle
had a little ball painted half black and half white,
that spun showing the phases of the Moon.
(Video)
If you ask me, only Archimedes could have done something like this.
At the back we have two big spiral clocks.
The first one is an eclipse predictor.
Do you remember that Cicero said Archimedes'’ clock predicted eclipses?
Eclipses repeat themselves every 223 months.
For each one there is a cell, most of them are empty.
But when there'’s an eclipse, the cell informs if it is solar or lunar,
if it would be observable and even when it would happen.
The one above has two little clocks inside.
One of them makes a complete turn every four years
and showed the user when the Olympics would take place.
(Laughter)
The big spiral is a lunisolar calendar.
that divides 235 months in 19 years.
It'’s an extremely accurate calendar.
We have to add a day every four years to our calendar
on the leap years, so it doesn'’t disarrange.
To this calendar, we have to remove a day every 76 years.
Of course, we can say:
Who is going to remember to remove a year every 7 decades?”
To do that, the mechanism had another little clock
that took one turn every 76 years
to remind the user that he had to skip a day.
The calendar has the names of the months
and that was very important because every Greek city
had its own calendar with its own names.
And we could determine that the calendar of the mechanism
matches with the Corinth calendar or that of its colonies.
Do you know which city was a colony of Corinth for a long time?
Syracuse, Archimedes'’ city.
Is this then Archimedes’ device?
Truth is Archimedes’' and Antikythera’s' device
cast the same type of spell
on those who get in touch with them.
We know that the Roman General was haunted when he saw it
and he chose it over any treasure.
Something similar to what happens to Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings”
with Frodo'’s ring.
Cicero was also amazed when he saw it work
and became Archimedes'’ fan.
Archimedes'’ mechanism had that kind of charm.
But a very similar one has Antikythera’s'.
Solla Price, once he saw the fragments,
worked with them until he died.
Michael Wright was almost fired for investigating this device.
Tony Freeth mortgaged his economic future for the investigation.
I myself have to confess that I fell under its spell.
And I’'ve been working on it for 5 years nonstop.
I remember the first time I saw the fragments at the museum in Athens’
I was hypnotized, I couldn’'t stop looking at them.
I must have spent several hours watching the fragments
from every possible angle.
Until the museum'’s security got nervous
thinking I wanted to steal it.
And actually, I wanted to!
But it'’s not just its spell
what makes us suspect it’'s the same device.
There are several signs pointing at Archimedes:
it could be Syracuse'’s calendar,
Cicero’s description matches a lot with what we could rebuild,
the eclipses’ predictor also leads to Archimedes.
However, there’'s still a very important proof missing.
Without that, we have nothing.
It'’s the mechanism's construction date.
To give it a date, we tried to study the shape of letters,
of the script, but the margin of error is too big,
more than a hundred years.
Carbon-14 only works on organic material
and the gears are made of bronze.
But there’'s another chance.
In the eclipse predictor we have the hours
and the days in which eclipses will happen.
If we found the series of eclipses that better fit these data,
we would know when it was built.
This proposal is valid in theory but never worked in practice
because there is a lot of data of the eclipse predictor
that we don'’t come to understand well.
Something very annoying is that while it predicts every lunar eclipse,
it only predicts some of the solar eclipses.
For some reason, the person who made the device
decided to skip some solar eclipses.
Those forgotten eclipses don'’t seem to follow any logic,
they seem randomly skipped.
They are those red eclipses there.
One evening after working with the CT scans,
I simply thought about relocating the eclipses
from the spiral below to the spiral above
to see how they would fit.
I didn'’t have any reason to do it, I just did it.
And look what happened.
It seemed magical.
Suddenly all the eclipses organized in forming rays,
and what’'s most important, those skipped eclipses,
formed two very defined rays.
I have found the logic of this eclipse skipping.
I communicated this to my research partner, James Evans
and he immediately understood what it was about.
That gave us a lot of information about the eclipse predictor.
Maybe now we could find the date of construction.
We started working immediately.
It was years and years of burning our heads.
Of following dead-end strategies.
Of getting excited with a result to later realize
that we had made some silly mistake with calculations.
Until one Sunday of February, last year,
I was at my colleague’s house in the US
and we realized that there was no way to move forward.
That even using all the data we had,
we had too many possible dates.
I remember that day, we said goodbye with the bitter feeling
that the project that was taking more than three years had failed.
I couldn'’t believe it.
I kept myself together in front of him but when I went down the stairs --
I was sleeping in his basement, which was full of books
on the history of Astronomy, it'’s spectacular --
when I went downstairs and I sat on the bed, I couldn't believe it.
I couldn'’t mourn.
So many years working and we didn’'t find anything.
I started to revise, to make the calculations again,
I reviewed everything.
Until suddenly I thought about considering data
about the lunar anomaly we hadn'’t consider.
And that data was extremely powerful.
I did the calculation and it eliminated all but one candidate.
That night we found the result.
And we were about to quit!
And we were very close to the solution.
Today, after one year and a half of reviewing carefully
every calculation and checking all data,
I can officially announce that the first eclipse of the device
happened on June 25th, 205 B.C, at 15:35, Athens local time.
(Applause)
That means that the calendar could have started in September or August
of 216 B.C., when Archimedes was still --
our dearest Archimedes --
alive and kicking.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen,
this mechanism might have been made by Archimedes himself.
I imagine you will arrive home today
and you will start looking up information on the Internet,
if you aren'’t doing it already.
You can do it, there is a lot,
but if you suddenly realize that you'’ve spent the last 10 hours
in front of the computer,
that you forgot to have dinner or lunch,
or that you skipped work, be careful.
Be careful.
Maybe it'’s too late and you have fallen,
like many of us, under its spell.
(Applause)