The Dial Of Destiny

Also known as the Antikthyera device, The Dial Of Destiny has always fascinated me, so I'm reposting my archived blog from 2017. (Especially since the latest movie Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny has brought it to light again.)

The story begins with a famous Greek mathematician named Archimedes - the Eureka man as many people know him. The word "Eureka" has to do with a famous legend when Archimedes yelled out "Eureka!" as he ran naked in a street after he watched his own tub water overflow. He calculated that the water that overflowed could be measured equating his mass in the tub. Therefor being able to solve the problem of mass. 

With an instructive script carved into it that places it around 200 B.C., The Antikythera mechanism is his just one of his inventions, and extremely unusual because it has the first known set of scientific dials or scales. The Antikthyera is actually an ancient clock, and something more like an analogue computer.  The device functioned by turning a single input knob, where you select a date, and the machine predicts with incredible accuracy the positions of the sun, the moon and five planets and the phases of the moon. Dials on the back predicted solar eclipses and the Calyppic cycle. 

Ever since its discovery, scholars have been engrossed — even obsessed by it, because the Antikthyera is a true enigma.  No other geared mechanism of such complexity is known from the ancient world, until medieval cathedral clocks were built nearly a thousand years later. Imagine.

Archimedes also invented a few other mind blowing things, of which one is known as the death ray, where he used gigantic mirrors to aim beams of sunlight at Roman ships to set them on fire. When Syracuse battled the Romans in 213 BC, they were so effective that they long delayed the capture of the city. The movie BTW includes an alluring scene of Archimedes and the Syracuse Siege which makes it one of my all time favorites along with the first film - Raiders Of The Lost Ark. 

The Antiktheya was actually lost at sea for about two thousand years but rediscovered by a Greek captain and crew in the year 1900. Simply going about their business as sponge divers, Captain Kondos sent down a diver to see about collecting a few more sponges while they waited for a the storm to pass, but a diver named Stadiatos resurfaced shouting frantically that he had seen hundreds of corpses and horses strewn below. Confounded, Kondo's thought maybe Stadiatos had lost his mind, and went down to take a look.

Kondos and his crew took action and retrieved what they could. Soon after, the Hellenic Navy explored the wreck and collected more of the valuable marble, coins, and other precious artifacts along with a few curious lumps of stone that that looked like intricate metallic gears. Although interesting, these pieces were largely ignored for almost fifty years until an English physicist named Derek Price took notice. 

I wonder if Price yelled out "Eureka"after he realized what the Antikthyera device really was about.

It's tragic to know, after all of his accomplishments that Archimedes was brutally murdered by a Roman soldier. According to Plutarch, Archimedes was researching a mathematical diagram, when a Roman soldier ordered him to meet General Marcus who was engaged in the siege of Syracuse. But Archimedes declined saying that he had to finish his diagram. Furious, the Roman soldier killed Archimedes.

Despite a his brutal murder, Archimedes benevolence influenced us from his mathematics, and his past inventions.  His life persevered over his death and sent us this serendipity, and perhaps this one of many reasons why its also known as The Dial Of Destiny.

Hublot's master watchmakers made a replica of the Antikythera mechanism a few years ago scaled down to wristwatch size. The piece was nearly impossible to create and the designers built nonlinear gearings to simulate elliptical patterns in the solar system. It sells online for $233,100.00. Just a little pocket change.

Quite a treasure but the harnessing of time and the original idea was created long ago by a brilliant mathematician, and a brave hero.

Archimedes burial site is in itself a well known mystery. His tomb was discovered in 75 B.C., cleaned and restored to its former glory by Cicero who wrote in detail about the location in Syracuse with a figure of a sphere and a cylinder. Unfortunately it did not last long and the tomb was again forgotten. No one knows where it is exactly today, but scholars know the alleged tomb of Archimedes is probably a Roman columbarium, or burial chamber from the Roman period, built a few centuries after the death of the mathematician.

I give the movie credit on that one too - as Jones narrowly escapes death trying to find the hidden burial site. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIF9-U9lE9o

https://www.jomashop.com/hublot-watch-908-ox-1010-gr.html