The Ancient Greek "Computer"

Guest: Alexander Jones, PhD, Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity and Director of the New York University Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and Author of “A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World” The most sophisticated piece of machinery ever discovered from ancient Greece is a two-thousand-year-old box of bronze gears. It was made centuries before the first geared clocks would be built in Europe. But this ancient Greek device doesn’t keep time in the hourly-sense of the word. It’s more about Time, with a capital T. The Associated Press has called it a “philosopher’s guide to the galaxy” with its spinning gears that show the movement of planets, the moon and the sun. While this device was pulled from a shipwreck more than 100 years ago, it’s only been in the last few years that scientists and historians have begun to crack its secrets, thanks to high-end scanning and imaging technology. What they’ve learned sheds new light on both ancient Greece and the modern world.