The Antikythera Mechanism… built with Lego

The device — which sounds like something that belongs in a Dan Brown novel — is an ancient celestial computer, driven by gears to carry out the calculations and dials to accurately predict heavenly events, such as solar eclipses. The technology used to construct the device wasn’t thought to be available for another 1,000 years.
 
According to Adam Rutherford, editor of Nature, the science journal has a long standing relationship with the Antikythera Mechanism. In a recent email, Rutherford pointed to a video he had commissioned in the spirit of continuing Nature coverage of this fascinating device. But he hadn’t commissioned a bland documentary about the history of the Antikythera Mechanism, he’d commissioned an engineer to build the thing out of LEGO!
 
The result is an engrossing stop animation production of a LEGO replica of this ancient celestial calculator. For me, this video really put the device in perspective. The Greeks, over 2,000 years ago, built a means of predicting the positions of the known planets, the sun, even the elliptical motions of planetary orbits. They’d drawn inspiration from the Babylonians (according to new research reported on by Nature) and re-written the history of what we understand of the ancient civilization’s technical prowess.
 

Sadly for the ancient Greeks, the Antikythera Mechanism was lost for 2,000 years at the bottom of the ocean and only now are we beginning to understand just how advanced this fascinating piece of technology truly is. Read Full Story

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