The paper [here](https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/07-HJJuly24-AOT...) makes it clear that these researchers (whose main topic is gravitational waves) have used Bayesian analyses to estimate how likely different counts for holes present in the full calendar ring are. This is cool, but the bit about "techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime" is, well, making reference to Bayesian analysis.
Why is science reporting such irredeemable clickbaity trash? Not just from the mainstream media with commercial motive, from whom I naturally expect trash, but also from nonprofit universities of all places.
Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline? People who only read the headline and think "Woweee science is amazing!" before scrolling down? Anybody who reads the article will roll their eyes at the headline, and the publisher isn't even getting ad revenue from this shit. Why are they pandering to the most base idiots like this?
> Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline? People who only read the headline and think "Woweee science is amazing!" before scrolling down?
That's a bigger fraction of the population than we might like to think...and probably the majority of the eventual readers of that headline (as it trickles through to other publications). I'd bet your sarcasm is actually correct there.
So, I have some competing thoughts on this. On the one hand, science is tedious and boring but people often pursue it as a career because it is in some way inspirational or aspirational. Students in science programs aren't just yearning for the mines. Also, science is highly repetitive and yet all grant money is scoped as pursuing something new and innovative.
When I worked at a research lab, the communications folks would often ask me, can we call it AI? They were almost begging to put that label on it, I suppose they new that would be high quality bait. But no, sorry it's just statistics and computational methods.
This is a way to show off someone's mathematical work to a non-mathematical audience and to promote the college. Would you prefer "Our scientists wrote a paper about some math they did called 'An Improved Calendar Ring Hole-Count for the Antikythera Mechanism'", you should read it." ?
That doesn't seem as likely to grab the attention of people who watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
The antikythera mechanism is a (bad) predictor of planetary locations. People have recreated it in its entirety using legos. There isn't much mystery about what it does.
However, a new high resolution X-ray of the device inspired some scientists to do some neat math on it. I read the paper, it's good work. I'd love to a chance to get an article published about one of my papers, even more if regular people had even the slightest chance to understand it.
Making a technically true statement that you know will be misinterpreted by its intended audience is not meaningfully distinct from lying to that audience.
I don't understand what you mean, I think the headline must have changed?
It is currently (4:50 PM EST) "GRAVITATIONAL WAVE RESEARCHERS CAST NEW LIGHT ON ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM MYSTERY" both in the article, and on the HN item.
If it didn't change, I guess my confusions stems from this is an extremely straightforward way to state it.
Two gravitational wave researchers wrote the paper, and the paper gave us more certainty about whether the Antikythera mechanism represents 354 or 365 days.
I can't envision how to make it less sensationalist.
That's clickbait. I suppose you think it isn't clickbait because it isn't lying but I classify it as such because it seems intended to give wild impressions which are contrary to truth, namely that the mechanism had anything to do with gravitational waves. Clickbaiting without lying is a common technique among science reporters, almost as common as clickbaiting with lies.
I'm sorry if I'm coming off as combative, I'm legitimately, genuinely, confused: what part is clickbait? They are gravitational wave researchers.
Poking around this:
I have a test for myself before I rant about science journalism: "would it be confusing without the thing my rant is angry about?"
Answer here is yes, I'm very familiar with this sort of thing from the astrophysics people in my physics department 18 years ago (monte carlo, bayesian), but it would be bizarre from archaeologists.
Poking around this, again:
If that isn't convincing: the unwashed masses who we are worried being betrayed by clickbait don't know what "gravitational waves" are, there's no reason for them to be unduly attracted to it.
The "Gravitational Wave" part is clickbait. It could have said "Researchers cast new light...". Also the first paragraph is clickbait
"Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century’s most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer."
it elaborates further down: "Professor Woan used a technique called Bayesian analysis, which uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, to calculate the likely number of holes in the mechanism using the positions of the surviving holes and the placement of the ring’s surviving six fragments."
Bayesian analysis has nothing to do with gravitational waves, it's a statistics paradigm. It was not "developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime". The whole gravitational angle is totally superfluous and is only there to get more clicks.
It's not just Bayesian analysis. I'm beginning to get a distinct impression people saw "Bayesian" and did a quick scan of the paper. To this graduate school physics dropout, this is an astrophysics-style paper on an archaeological artifact.
"it seems intended to give wild impressions which are contrary to truth, namely that the mechanism had anything to do with gravitational waves"
It's not technically lying but it will nonetheless induce people to think something which isn't true. If this confuses you, consider this article/example:
> "A classic example might be if your mum asks if you've finished your homework and you respond: "I've written an essay on Tennessee Williams for my English class." This may be true, but it doesn't actually answer the question about whether your homework was done. That essay could have been written long ago and you have misled your poor mother with a truthful statement. You might not have even started your homework yet."
When you say something which is true but say it in a way or context which you know will cause somebody else to believe something which isn't true, that's a form of lying.
Running through this in my head again and again, and editing 500 times along the way, apologies. I'm done now:
You believe that it is narrowly true gravitational wave researchers did this, like a kid saying they "wrote their essay" in response to whether they "did [completed] their homework"
I believe it is wholly true.
I believe we agree on the narrow truth that they are gravitational wave researchers.
I believe we disagree on the wider truth.
I believe you believe its a wider lie, in that it indicates they used gravitational wave-style techniques in this endeavor.
I believe it is widely true, because they're using the specific techniques that I saw astrophysicists use in grad school.
Is it possible you saw "Bayesian", assumed that was the extent of their expertise applied, then noted that it has no relation to their expertise, since that's entry-level stats, not physics?
Someone I once considered a friend, handed out invitations to a christmas party he was holding. While nothing he told us about the plans were strictly false, it turned out it was a direct marketing campaign. And there were no sales conducted at the event, instead he called everyone who showed up a week later to see if we were interested in anything we saw. He deliberately crafted a hook to be misleading to his target audience, even though nothing he said was false. I now consider him deeply untrustworthy and have severely limited my contact with him.
I believe the author of the title deliberately crafted a title that would be misconstrued by his target audience into believing something false, even though it was technically true.
I believe this isn't lying, but I also believe it's not meaningfully distinct from lying.
The goal of the authors of the PR is to promote a narrative. In this case, the PR intends to increase funding for gravity wave research by imputing its utility in another field.
From The ELements of Style, Strunk and White, omit needless words. Dropping "Gravitational waves" from the title conveys the same information.
The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
The authors used the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's (open source) Bilby package to do the nested sampling analysis. So this was a drop-in use of this GW software to analyse the antikythera data. There is quite a close analogy between the 22-dimensional antikythera analysis, with its intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, and the ~15 dimensional spinning binary black hole analyses done in the GW world, again with intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. That's the GW connection, and it may not be so clear from the reports.
Yeah, so after collecting enough opinions from enough people, I'm 100% confident saying there isn't truly anything specific to GW here. When I use the ROOT library from CERN to analyze my molecular dynamics data, I'm not doing particle physics, I'm using ROOT as a general purpose library.
It doesn't really matter. The work is not exceptional, it doesn't shed new light on anything, and really only got the coverage it did due to clever use of key words and hype by the press release authors. In other words, like 90% of popular science.
> what part is clickbait? They are gravitational wave researchers.
They are physicists who are in practice data scientists. They are both male, presumably have experienced no amputations, and look like they were born in the 20th century. Their “day job” is in gravitation. They both likely speak English.
The only part of which which has even the slightest bearing on their work is that they are of late de facto data scientists, among their (presumable) other skills.
This is a NPC reply. Yeah, in our profession, people using those tools have "data scientist" on the paycheck. Doesn't mean they wanna be called that or that their actual job is that.
I have to echo what others have said - this is absolutely clickbait. The fact that they also happen to do gravitational field research has nothing to do with the discoveries involving the Antikythera mechanism. It was included to make the reader of the headline wonder if the designers of the Antikythera mechanism knew something of gravitational waves. The only way to get the answer is to then click into the article to find out.
Unfortunately, this is the state of media today. It would be very helpful if the admins of HN could implement a way that users with enough karma could identify and vote to delete articles that have disingenuous headlines. Yes, we can flag articles, but maybe if we could choose WHY we're flagging to make others aware of what the problem is. If we don't protect the integrity of this site as an elevated place to have intellectual discourse, we will eventually lose it to the tidal wave of garbage content that seems to be getting worse by the day.
You shouldn’t be so surprised, university PR depts are notorious for clickbait like this. These types of articles are all over HN. They are just incentivized to get their name in the press by whatever means necessary.
The intended recipients of these press releases are mainly the people who make decisions for funding agencies. Due to the highly competitive nature of funding, people working in fairly esoteric (if interesting) fields like gravity waves need to demonstrate some sort of applicability to adjacent areas of science.
In USA biology, there is a similar problem- it's known as the "Make Senators Believe Your Funding Will Cure Their Disease Problem" whereby even the simplest basic discoveries get pumped up to sound like they've cured cancer to induce future funding.
I’ve heard recently that a lot of the research funding for looking for the Loch Ness Monster is to marine biologists, who study the life in the lake (and also look for a monster a little bit, as a treat).
Why is science reporting such irredeemable clickbaity trash? Not just from the mainstream media with commercial motive, from whom I naturally expect trash, but also from nonprofit universities of all places.
Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline?
University science-by-press-release drives me crazy, too. My guess has been that the intended audience is alums that might be enticed to donate more.
Because reporters are not trained to respect science or to believe that they could understand it, and University press offices employ a lot of reporters who can’t make it at a real newspaper.
The new paper does a more detailed statistical analysis and comes up with tighter bounds for the hole count, reinforcing the case for a lunar calendar.
Oh and quick timesaver for all the dubious people like me: they applied general statistical techniques from their gravity work to parsing the fragments of the computer we have. There’s no direct connection between the two subjects, otherwise.
EDIT: some kinda humorous scientific meta-commentary at the very bottom of the paper: they were able to get the anthropology paper based on these findings peer reviewed and published in print well before this technical paper finished peer review. If I were an Academia pen tester, this is the kind of race condition that I’d look for!
Haven spoken to the authors, the really nice layout was done by the journal itself - the source paper is available on arxiv, and whilst a nice paper still, does not have the fancy photos of the authors embedded in sidebars and the like.
This is a cool statistical paper, one of many depressing papers that makes me wish I knew more math. The "gravitational wave" angle is apparently that it uses some statistical methods that originated in gravity wave research. There are no ultra-sensitive new measurements or anything like that. They use the same X-ray measurements as the Clickspring article from a few years ago (https://bhi.co.uk/antikytheramechanism/) and basically support Clickspring's conclusion (that the Antikythera was a lunar calendar) with increased statistical confidence.
It is insane how complicated this is, and this is a simplified version of the actual thing. This schematic of the proposed full mechanism (I think it's hypothesizing some of the missing parts) blows my mind: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Antikyth...
If you have a 3d printer, I really am enjoying the project and recommend it.
This is one situation where metalwork probably beats 3d printing, in terms of ease of implementation.
My guess is that the antikythera was probably state of the art, built by a highly advanced workshop by extremely skilled artisans, and cost an obscene amount of money. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison#H4
> Professor Woan used a technique called Bayesian analysis, which uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, to calculate the likely number of holes in the mechanism using the positions of the surviving holes and the placement of the ring’s surviving six fragments. His results showed strong evidence that the mechanism’s calendar ring contained either 354 or 355 holes.
> At the same time, one of Professor Woan’s colleagues at the University’s Institute for Gravitational Research, Dr Joseph Bayley, had also heard about the problem. He adapted techniques used by their research group to analyse the signals picked up by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors, which measure the tiny ripples in spacetime, caused by massive astronomical events like the collision of black holes, as they pass through the Earth, to scrutinise the calendar ring.
Greeks were cooking with gas (from the paper):
“However, we note that the degree of manufacturing precision is remarkable, with standard errors in hole positions of only 0.028mm radially, and 0.129mm azimuthally.
Budiselic et al. quote a standard deviation for their individual position measurements of 0.037 mm, so a good deal of the radial error may come from the measurements of the X-ray images themselves.”
As someone who spent a decade doing precision metrology with optical devices... there isn't a way to correctly measure that part with the precision they indicate in the measured values.
If you're in optical measurement and it should be around 200nm (rayleigh criterion, wavelength dependent), am I missing something? Obviously, that's just angular resolution, not measurement precision, so I'm guessing I'm missing some detail.
If I recall the precision is limited to by the wavelength of the light being used. If they are using X-Rays in the 0.01 nm to 10 nm range wouldn't that give them more precision then optical light in the 380 nm to 700 nm range?
It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing. Just a few missing pieces, probably a more rigorous scientific method and mathematics. Maybe some economic inventions too like the stock corporation to enable venture investing.
I also wonder about the abolition of slavery. It was normal through pretty much all of human history up to the last 200 years or so. Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor?
> It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing.
Bret Devereaux proposed that Industrial Revolution was due to a highly improbable coincidence of circumstances.[1] It all started with a steam engine, and very inefficient one at first[2]. But it had found it place, and then James Watt made the better engine and it also found its uses. It gave time for material science and thermodynamics to catch up, and then steam engines became light enough to power ships and then locomotives.
Industrial Revolution, if we look closer took a lot of relatively small steps, and some of these steps made sense only because the stars lined up. Now people consciously "line up stars" to move progress forward, but then it was really a coincidence.
Yet another thing to put in the bag of Fermi paradox answers: would industrialization and high technology be likely without fossil fuels?
Of course we have solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear, but all of those are hard to access at any kind of scale without at the very least modern metallurgy and advanced materials made possible by fossil fuel energy. Modern renewable energy isn't possible without things like silicon PV, advanced materials for huge wind turbines, and batteries that are the product of extremely advanced materials science and manufacturing technology.
Fossil fuels were basically the thermodynamic seed capital.
It technically could have been done more slowly with wood and other biomass as a fuel and feedstock, but it seems like it would have been less likely to occur.
Industry consumes enormous amounts of energy/power. Access to energy/power is a form of wealth. A civilization without access to large amounts of energy and power beyond the needs of a primitive agrarian or hunter-gatherer society cannot industrialize. To industrialize, industrial amounts of energy and power are required.
As well access to iron is required. And then eventually steel. All of this requires knowledge and writing and printing so that knowledge can be accumulated and propagated.
Late 18th century England and its colonies had access to all of these things. Coal, iron, printing presses, and universities. As well it had an political and economic structure that made risk-taking easy -- all the other prerequisites without risk-taking would still amount to the industrial revolution not happening.
>Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor?
It's crazy that to some extent this is still true today. Automation could go a lot further with existing technologies and make many workers' lives easier or safer. But it is often cheaper to hire humans and burn through them instead of spending the money to implement new kinds of robotics. Especially when companies only think until the next quarter.
People who will depend on UBI won't innovate. People who innovate don't need UBI. Slavery was expensive (guards, low productivity). In USSR Soviets realised that in Gulags it's more effective to pay Zeks regular salary and treat them as contractors than keep them as slave work force.
UBI and better healthcare would allow me the freedom to innovate. Right now it’s a much more significant barrier to strike out on my own and build something. So it makes more sense to me to just have a 9-5 job, but if there was a bit more wiggle room I’d certainly try it.
Some people would just play Minecraft, but a few would innovate, and the economic value of those innovations would be far greater than the economic value lost to the Minecraft players who quit their McJobs.
Early science in the Renaissance and later, until the 20th century, was almost entirely driven by people who could afford to pursue their efforts while sustained by income that required little or zero direct effort.
Give humanity a chance. It might just surprise you.
They were extraordinary minds and very rare. For 40 years I live among people who receive some amounts of unconditional money. All they invented is how to drink bottle of vodka at once (I can't do that, impressive). Most of humans are lazy, greedy and envy, that's why we need to raise children and show them what is "proper". I do believe in some people. Loans or stipends are better - they create mutual contract, you feel you need to give something in return.
Earlier in life I created something that has generated a minimal stipend every month. That small security has enabled me to take risks, produce art, create technical processes, construct the water, power, data, and physical infrastructure for a private sustainable community, take a couple of years off to educate my children in technology, and, in short, prosper. It is life changing to know that the worst that can happen if you fail is that you will be mildly uncomfortable for a period of your choosing.
OTOH I see a lot of wasted potential, talented people working banal 9 to 5 jobs because they can’t risk failure, forgoing learning opportunities because they can’t take the time, and in general stuck in employment traps that prevent them from ever refining their natural talents.
Sure, some people will do nothing with their lives despite the opportunities presented to them… but many, many people would do much, much more if they weren’t trapped in a system designed to harvest, under duress of homelessness, the vast majority of their useful time in exchange for the lowest possible compensation.
why do you say folks who depend on UBI won’t innovate? Logically speaking it almost seems more probable they would since they wouldn’t need to devote time and energy to a job.
After many years of working on the the problem of biological automation, I came to conclude that it's really hard to beat an extremely skilled/smart lab tech for general purpose experiments. And my company thinks on the decade+ timescale.
True. But what percentage of the workforce is extremely skilled and smart lab techs? And who knows, if we automate mundane normal jobs, we might get more people who find the time to pursue such high level skills instead of being worried about paying for food.
>Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor?
Slaves weren't free. At least in the early United States, slaves were considered a significant investment; only rich plantation (land) owners could afford them. If they were cheap, then everyone would have had one. Here's an interesting article about the topic:
A typical slave in the US in the early 1800s cost several hundred dollars, which in today's dollars is between $60k and $184k. Obviously, this isn't something typical people can afford.
I'm not sure if slaves were this expensive back in ancient Greek or Roman times, but I suspect it probably wasn't that different.
Industrialization would have completely changed the economics of these places.
>I'm not sure if slaves were this expensive back in ancient Greek or Roman times, but I suspect it probably wasn't that different.
The price fluctuated heavily. After a successful conquest slaves were way more affordable. Generally, a lot of people were able to afford slaves, so it was cheaper on average too. It was also place-dependent, compare for example Athens where roughly half of the population was free, and Sparta, where most of the population was enslaved.
And of course even when slaves were expensive, most economically important labor was done by them anyway.
If the slaves in Sparta far outnumbered the native population of Spartans, what exactly kept them from revolting and taking over? Was it just because the Spartans were all trained as warriors?
My point though was about the early days. There were no machines like that available, just slaves and animals. As long as there were slaves was there an incentive to develop this level of mechanization?
> It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing.
There are many factors at play. Serious industrialization requires several components to build on. There is a reason for example that "All roads lead to Rome". That's because no roads lead to Athens.
The machines to do the work, were the animals. Horses to carry merchandise around, bulls to plow land were used all over the place, by Romans, Greeks, Sumerians, Persians, everyone.
Metal constructions used for heavy work like iron, were too brittle, and bronze was too weak to withstand significant forces. It is only the last two hundred years that strong alloys were developed for industrial applications.
These statements are 100% pseudo-scientific woo. If you look at the mechanism, you can't measure anything on it even with 1mm precision, let alone 0.037mm.
The paper notes a (to me) amazing thing. The object of the researchers' Bayesian analysis is the number of holes likely to have been made in a metal ring, of which only a fragment remains. They think either 354 or 355 holes, on a 77.1mm radius.
The amazing thing is that the holes were placed with an average radial variation of only 28µm. This is about 0.001 inches. 2000 years ago. Our ancestors had some serious skills.
> Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on…
Seems like they are a bit out of their lane, as light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, a completely different force from gravitation.
More seriously: the fact that the two scientists happen to have been doing data analysis on gravitational data isn’t really relevant to the work, rather it was pulled out to make us click on the article title.
Super interesting work though, and not what I would have expected!
I would love a website with a 3D breakdown of the Antikythera mechanism that let one peruse it in space, (dis)assemble it, and see how it functions (at least, to be best of our understanding.) Are we far enough along in what we know of it to have such a resource?
For anyone who's not familiar, "this guy" is Chris Budiselic of Clickspring, who's mentioned as an inspiration for this research:
> In 2020, new X-ray images of one of the mechanism’s rings, known as the calendar ring, revealed fresh details of regularly spaced holes that sit beneath the ring. Since the ring was broken and incomplete, however, it wasn’t clear how just how many holes were there originally. Initial analysis by Antikythera researcher Chris Budiselic and colleagues suggested it was likely somewhere between 347 and 367.
Not merely inspiration, but https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BHI-Antikythera... is Budiselic et. al.'s paper on the hole count. (It's kind of a big deal to fans because he stopped putting out youtube videos to get the paper ready for publication - where we learned that this was far more than a machining-technique obsession, and that the "British Horological Institute" was a real thing :-)
Not sure about "most skilled", as there are some very good machinist with skills in different areas. I'd say he's definatley the most patient, learning and explaining ancient methods and every step along the way. And the videos are certainly of the most visually appealing.
You mean besides being found in Greece, made at a time range where Greeks were both powerful in the context of the hellenistic empire and had important mathematicians and astronomers like Archimedes and Hipparhos, the labels being in Greek, and the whole on-device manual being in Greek?
It was found in the ocean from what I understand, not actually in Greece. And I would consider that weal evidence anyways, e.g. coins from land found in another.
I wasn't aware it had Greek symbols on it. That's all I meant.
Very different, except if any example of "something of one culture found someplace else" applies to anything else ("The Pyramids might have been built by Celts!", "The Rosetta Stone? Possibly a work of the Chinese!", "Mayan artifacts? Aliens!"), regardless of context and circumstances.
First you commented without knowing about the mechanism, or bothering to read to learn the very basic fact that it had Greek inscriptions.
Then you came back to comment that you believe it was found "in the ocean", again not bothering to read up, which would have told you it was found next to a Greek island in the eastern Aegean sea, as far away from the ocean as possible. Clearly didn't care to know the archeaologists' consensus either.
It seems like you have some bias to make it non-Greek for some reason?
The paper [here](https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/07-HJJuly24-AOT...) makes it clear that these researchers (whose main topic is gravitational waves) have used Bayesian analyses to estimate how likely different counts for holes present in the full calendar ring are. This is cool, but the bit about "techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime" is, well, making reference to Bayesian analysis.
So it's sort of like saying "techniques developed for nuclear weapons design" when all you mean is Monte Carlo methods?
I'm definitely referring to Monte Carlo this way from now on.
Why is science reporting such irredeemable clickbaity trash? Not just from the mainstream media with commercial motive, from whom I naturally expect trash, but also from nonprofit universities of all places.
Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline? People who only read the headline and think "Woweee science is amazing!" before scrolling down? Anybody who reads the article will roll their eyes at the headline, and the publisher isn't even getting ad revenue from this shit. Why are they pandering to the most base idiots like this?
> Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline? People who only read the headline and think "Woweee science is amazing!" before scrolling down?
That's a bigger fraction of the population than we might like to think...and probably the majority of the eventual readers of that headline (as it trickles through to other publications). I'd bet your sarcasm is actually correct there.
So, I have some competing thoughts on this. On the one hand, science is tedious and boring but people often pursue it as a career because it is in some way inspirational or aspirational. Students in science programs aren't just yearning for the mines. Also, science is highly repetitive and yet all grant money is scoped as pursuing something new and innovative.
When I worked at a research lab, the communications folks would often ask me, can we call it AI? They were almost begging to put that label on it, I suppose they new that would be high quality bait. But no, sorry it's just statistics and computational methods.
This is a way to show off someone's mathematical work to a non-mathematical audience and to promote the college. Would you prefer "Our scientists wrote a paper about some math they did called 'An Improved Calendar Ring Hole-Count for the Antikythera Mechanism'", you should read it." ?
That doesn't seem as likely to grab the attention of people who watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
The antikythera mechanism is a (bad) predictor of planetary locations. People have recreated it in its entirety using legos. There isn't much mystery about what it does.
However, a new high resolution X-ray of the device inspired some scientists to do some neat math on it. I read the paper, it's good work. I'd love to a chance to get an article published about one of my papers, even more if regular people had even the slightest chance to understand it.
Precision matters, and legos only have a certain amount of precision.
Besides that, things like the number of holes in the calendar ring matter.
Check out Clickspring on youtube, he's one of the people who narrowed the hole count down to 2 numbers, and this paper argues hard for one of those.
He's building a replica of the mechanism using period tools, and it's amazingly precise so far.
Making a technically true statement that you know will be misinterpreted by its intended audience is not meaningfully distinct from lying to that audience.
I don't understand what you mean, I think the headline must have changed?
It is currently (4:50 PM EST) "GRAVITATIONAL WAVE RESEARCHERS CAST NEW LIGHT ON ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM MYSTERY" both in the article, and on the HN item.
If it didn't change, I guess my confusions stems from this is an extremely straightforward way to state it.
Two gravitational wave researchers wrote the paper, and the paper gave us more certainty about whether the Antikythera mechanism represents 354 or 365 days.
I can't envision how to make it less sensationalist.
That's clickbait. I suppose you think it isn't clickbait because it isn't lying but I classify it as such because it seems intended to give wild impressions which are contrary to truth, namely that the mechanism had anything to do with gravitational waves. Clickbaiting without lying is a common technique among science reporters, almost as common as clickbaiting with lies.
I'm sorry if I'm coming off as combative, I'm legitimately, genuinely, confused: what part is clickbait? They are gravitational wave researchers.
Poking around this:
I have a test for myself before I rant about science journalism: "would it be confusing without the thing my rant is angry about?"
Answer here is yes, I'm very familiar with this sort of thing from the astrophysics people in my physics department 18 years ago (monte carlo, bayesian), but it would be bizarre from archaeologists.
Poking around this, again:
If that isn't convincing: the unwashed masses who we are worried being betrayed by clickbait don't know what "gravitational waves" are, there's no reason for them to be unduly attracted to it.
The "Gravitational Wave" part is clickbait. It could have said "Researchers cast new light...". Also the first paragraph is clickbait
"Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century’s most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer."
it elaborates further down: "Professor Woan used a technique called Bayesian analysis, which uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, to calculate the likely number of holes in the mechanism using the positions of the surviving holes and the placement of the ring’s surviving six fragments."
Bayesian analysis has nothing to do with gravitational waves, it's a statistics paradigm. It was not "developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime". The whole gravitational angle is totally superfluous and is only there to get more clicks.
It's not just Bayesian analysis. I'm beginning to get a distinct impression people saw "Bayesian" and did a quick scan of the paper. To this graduate school physics dropout, this is an astrophysics-style paper on an archaeological artifact.
"it seems intended to give wild impressions which are contrary to truth, namely that the mechanism had anything to do with gravitational waves"
It's not technically lying but it will nonetheless induce people to think something which isn't true. If this confuses you, consider this article/example:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171114-the-disturbing-a...
> "A classic example might be if your mum asks if you've finished your homework and you respond: "I've written an essay on Tennessee Williams for my English class." This may be true, but it doesn't actually answer the question about whether your homework was done. That essay could have been written long ago and you have misled your poor mother with a truthful statement. You might not have even started your homework yet."
When you say something which is true but say it in a way or context which you know will cause somebody else to believe something which isn't true, that's a form of lying.
Running through this in my head again and again, and editing 500 times along the way, apologies. I'm done now:
You believe that it is narrowly true gravitational wave researchers did this, like a kid saying they "wrote their essay" in response to whether they "did [completed] their homework"
I believe it is wholly true.
I believe we agree on the narrow truth that they are gravitational wave researchers.
I believe we disagree on the wider truth.
I believe you believe its a wider lie, in that it indicates they used gravitational wave-style techniques in this endeavor.
I believe it is widely true, because they're using the specific techniques that I saw astrophysicists use in grad school.
Is it possible you saw "Bayesian", assumed that was the extent of their expertise applied, then noted that it has no relation to their expertise, since that's entry-level stats, not physics?
Someone I once considered a friend, handed out invitations to a christmas party he was holding. While nothing he told us about the plans were strictly false, it turned out it was a direct marketing campaign. And there were no sales conducted at the event, instead he called everyone who showed up a week later to see if we were interested in anything we saw. He deliberately crafted a hook to be misleading to his target audience, even though nothing he said was false. I now consider him deeply untrustworthy and have severely limited my contact with him.
I believe the author of the title deliberately crafted a title that would be misconstrued by his target audience into believing something false, even though it was technically true.
I believe this isn't lying, but I also believe it's not meaningfully distinct from lying.
The goal of the authors of the PR is to promote a narrative. In this case, the PR intends to increase funding for gravity wave research by imputing its utility in another field.
From The ELements of Style, Strunk and White, omit needless words. Dropping "Gravitational waves" from the title conveys the same information.
The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
The authors used the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's (open source) Bilby package to do the nested sampling analysis. So this was a drop-in use of this GW software to analyse the antikythera data. There is quite a close analogy between the 22-dimensional antikythera analysis, with its intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, and the ~15 dimensional spinning binary black hole analyses done in the GW world, again with intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. That's the GW connection, and it may not be so clear from the reports.
Yeah, so after collecting enough opinions from enough people, I'm 100% confident saying there isn't truly anything specific to GW here. When I use the ROOT library from CERN to analyze my molecular dynamics data, I'm not doing particle physics, I'm using ROOT as a general purpose library.
It doesn't really matter. The work is not exceptional, it doesn't shed new light on anything, and really only got the coverage it did due to clever use of key words and hype by the press release authors. In other words, like 90% of popular science.
> what part is clickbait? They are gravitational wave researchers.
They are physicists who are in practice data scientists. They are both male, presumably have experienced no amputations, and look like they were born in the 20th century. Their “day job” is in gravitation. They both likely speak English.
The only part of which which has even the slightest bearing on their work is that they are of late de facto data scientists, among their (presumable) other skills.
This is a NPC reply. Yeah, in our profession, people using those tools have "data scientist" on the paycheck. Doesn't mean they wanna be called that or that their actual job is that.
I have to echo what others have said - this is absolutely clickbait. The fact that they also happen to do gravitational field research has nothing to do with the discoveries involving the Antikythera mechanism. It was included to make the reader of the headline wonder if the designers of the Antikythera mechanism knew something of gravitational waves. The only way to get the answer is to then click into the article to find out.
Unfortunately, this is the state of media today. It would be very helpful if the admins of HN could implement a way that users with enough karma could identify and vote to delete articles that have disingenuous headlines. Yes, we can flag articles, but maybe if we could choose WHY we're flagging to make others aware of what the problem is. If we don't protect the integrity of this site as an elevated place to have intellectual discourse, we will eventually lose it to the tidal wave of garbage content that seems to be getting worse by the day.
You shouldn’t be so surprised, university PR depts are notorious for clickbait like this. These types of articles are all over HN. They are just incentivized to get their name in the press by whatever means necessary.
Science is not magically immune to the same pressures that corrupt every other news and information source.
The intended recipients of these press releases are mainly the people who make decisions for funding agencies. Due to the highly competitive nature of funding, people working in fairly esoteric (if interesting) fields like gravity waves need to demonstrate some sort of applicability to adjacent areas of science.
In USA biology, there is a similar problem- it's known as the "Make Senators Believe Your Funding Will Cure Their Disease Problem" whereby even the simplest basic discoveries get pumped up to sound like they've cured cancer to induce future funding.
I’ve heard recently that a lot of the research funding for looking for the Loch Ness Monster is to marine biologists, who study the life in the lake (and also look for a monster a little bit, as a treat).
Why is science reporting such irredeemable clickbaity trash? Not just from the mainstream media with commercial motive, from whom I naturally expect trash, but also from nonprofit universities of all places.
Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline?
University science-by-press-release drives me crazy, too. My guess has been that the intended audience is alums that might be enticed to donate more.
Because reporters are not trained to respect science or to believe that they could understand it, and University press offices employ a lot of reporters who can’t make it at a real newspaper.
Propaganda is popular because it works...and the best kind of propaganda is genuine (truly and sincerely believed).
> Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline?
The headline seems fine to me. You might mean the synopsis after it?
I haven't read through the paper but it seems that it comes to the same conclusion as this prior paper: https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BHI-Antikythera...
The new paper does a more detailed statistical analysis and comes up with tighter bounds for the hole count, reinforcing the case for a lunar calendar.
This is cool (lots of necessary context) but the paper itself is downright gorgeous
https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/07-HJJuly24-AOT...
Oh and quick timesaver for all the dubious people like me: they applied general statistical techniques from their gravity work to parsing the fragments of the computer we have. There’s no direct connection between the two subjects, otherwise.
EDIT: some kinda humorous scientific meta-commentary at the very bottom of the paper: they were able to get the anthropology paper based on these findings peer reviewed and published in print well before this technical paper finished peer review. If I were an Academia pen tester, this is the kind of race condition that I’d look for!
I'd like to see the LaTeX that generated that paper, it does look really nice.
Haven spoken to the authors, the really nice layout was done by the journal itself - the source paper is available on arxiv, and whilst a nice paper still, does not have the fancy photos of the authors embedded in sidebars and the like.
This is a cool statistical paper, one of many depressing papers that makes me wish I knew more math. The "gravitational wave" angle is apparently that it uses some statistical methods that originated in gravity wave research. There are no ultra-sensitive new measurements or anything like that. They use the same X-ray measurements as the Clickspring article from a few years ago (https://bhi.co.uk/antikytheramechanism/) and basically support Clickspring's conclusion (that the Antikythera was a lunar calendar) with increased statistical confidence.
I'm currently building this 3d printed version of the Antikythera mechanism. It's not easy:
https://www.printables.com/model/284372-antikythera-mechanis...
It is insane how complicated this is, and this is a simplified version of the actual thing. This schematic of the proposed full mechanism (I think it's hypothesizing some of the missing parts) blows my mind: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Antikyth...
If you have a 3d printer, I really am enjoying the project and recommend it.
This is one situation where metalwork probably beats 3d printing, in terms of ease of implementation.
My guess is that the antikythera was probably state of the art, built by a highly advanced workshop by extremely skilled artisans, and cost an obscene amount of money. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison#H4
>steadfastly pursuing various methods during thirty years of experimentation,
And the best was yet to come . . .
> Professor Woan used a technique called Bayesian analysis, which uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, to calculate the likely number of holes in the mechanism using the positions of the surviving holes and the placement of the ring’s surviving six fragments. His results showed strong evidence that the mechanism’s calendar ring contained either 354 or 355 holes.
> At the same time, one of Professor Woan’s colleagues at the University’s Institute for Gravitational Research, Dr Joseph Bayley, had also heard about the problem. He adapted techniques used by their research group to analyse the signals picked up by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors, which measure the tiny ripples in spacetime, caused by massive astronomical events like the collision of black holes, as they pass through the Earth, to scrutinise the calendar ring.
The title was very clickbait
Greeks were cooking with gas (from the paper): “However, we note that the degree of manufacturing precision is remarkable, with standard errors in hole positions of only 0.028mm radially, and 0.129mm azimuthally. Budiselic et al. quote a standard deviation for their individual position measurements of 0.037 mm, so a good deal of the radial error may come from the measurements of the X-ray images themselves.”
As someone who spent a decade doing precision metrology with optical devices... there isn't a way to correctly measure that part with the precision they indicate in the measured values.
If you're in optical measurement and it should be around 200nm (rayleigh criterion, wavelength dependent), am I missing something? Obviously, that's just angular resolution, not measurement precision, so I'm guessing I'm missing some detail.
It's not that precise.
As for the method:
https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BHI-Antikythera...
The measurements were done on X-ray images, not optical.
If I recall the precision is limited to by the wavelength of the light being used. If they are using X-Rays in the 0.01 nm to 10 nm range wouldn't that give them more precision then optical light in the 380 nm to 700 nm range?
It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing. Just a few missing pieces, probably a more rigorous scientific method and mathematics. Maybe some economic inventions too like the stock corporation to enable venture investing.
I also wonder about the abolition of slavery. It was normal through pretty much all of human history up to the last 200 years or so. Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor?
> It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing.
Bret Devereaux proposed that Industrial Revolution was due to a highly improbable coincidence of circumstances.[1] It all started with a steam engine, and very inefficient one at first[2]. But it had found it place, and then James Watt made the better engine and it also found its uses. It gave time for material science and thermodynamics to catch up, and then steam engines became light enough to power ships and then locomotives.
Industrial Revolution, if we look closer took a lot of relatively small steps, and some of these steps made sense only because the stars lined up. Now people consciously "line up stars" to move progress forward, but then it was really a coincidence.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine
There's also the availability of coal. Coal was absolutely critical.
Yet another thing to put in the bag of Fermi paradox answers: would industrialization and high technology be likely without fossil fuels?
Of course we have solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear, but all of those are hard to access at any kind of scale without at the very least modern metallurgy and advanced materials made possible by fossil fuel energy. Modern renewable energy isn't possible without things like silicon PV, advanced materials for huge wind turbines, and batteries that are the product of extremely advanced materials science and manufacturing technology.
Fossil fuels were basically the thermodynamic seed capital.
It technically could have been done more slowly with wood and other biomass as a fuel and feedstock, but it seems like it would have been less likely to occur.
Industry consumes enormous amounts of energy/power. Access to energy/power is a form of wealth. A civilization without access to large amounts of energy and power beyond the needs of a primitive agrarian or hunter-gatherer society cannot industrialize. To industrialize, industrial amounts of energy and power are required.
As well access to iron is required. And then eventually steel. All of this requires knowledge and writing and printing so that knowledge can be accumulated and propagated.
Late 18th century England and its colonies had access to all of these things. Coal, iron, printing presses, and universities. As well it had an political and economic structure that made risk-taking easy -- all the other prerequisites without risk-taking would still amount to the industrial revolution not happening.
>Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor?
It's crazy that to some extent this is still true today. Automation could go a lot further with existing technologies and make many workers' lives easier or safer. But it is often cheaper to hire humans and burn through them instead of spending the money to implement new kinds of robotics. Especially when companies only think until the next quarter.
This is probably the best argument in favor of universal basic income (UBI). Any nation that leans into that can then focus on innovation.
People who will depend on UBI won't innovate. People who innovate don't need UBI. Slavery was expensive (guards, low productivity). In USSR Soviets realised that in Gulags it's more effective to pay Zeks regular salary and treat them as contractors than keep them as slave work force.
UBI and better healthcare would allow me the freedom to innovate. Right now it’s a much more significant barrier to strike out on my own and build something. So it makes more sense to me to just have a 9-5 job, but if there was a bit more wiggle room I’d certainly try it.
Would you innovate or just play minecraft/guitar or read books about innovation but never innovate.
Some people would just play Minecraft, but a few would innovate, and the economic value of those innovations would be far greater than the economic value lost to the Minecraft players who quit their McJobs.
> would be far greater how you calculated that?
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Nah, probably something related to computers or bikes and woodworking. Maybe I could combine all 3
Early science in the Renaissance and later, until the 20th century, was almost entirely driven by people who could afford to pursue their efforts while sustained by income that required little or zero direct effort.
Give humanity a chance. It might just surprise you.
They were extraordinary minds and very rare. For 40 years I live among people who receive some amounts of unconditional money. All they invented is how to drink bottle of vodka at once (I can't do that, impressive). Most of humans are lazy, greedy and envy, that's why we need to raise children and show them what is "proper". I do believe in some people. Loans or stipends are better - they create mutual contract, you feel you need to give something in return.
Umm… I think you are deeply misguided on this.
Earlier in life I created something that has generated a minimal stipend every month. That small security has enabled me to take risks, produce art, create technical processes, construct the water, power, data, and physical infrastructure for a private sustainable community, take a couple of years off to educate my children in technology, and, in short, prosper. It is life changing to know that the worst that can happen if you fail is that you will be mildly uncomfortable for a period of your choosing.
OTOH I see a lot of wasted potential, talented people working banal 9 to 5 jobs because they can’t risk failure, forgoing learning opportunities because they can’t take the time, and in general stuck in employment traps that prevent them from ever refining their natural talents.
Sure, some people will do nothing with their lives despite the opportunities presented to them… but many, many people would do much, much more if they weren’t trapped in a system designed to harvest, under duress of homelessness, the vast majority of their useful time in exchange for the lowest possible compensation.
that's strange excuse, if you don't work from 9 to 5 pretending to innovate but don't everyone loses.
why do you say folks who depend on UBI won’t innovate? Logically speaking it almost seems more probable they would since they wouldn’t need to devote time and energy to a job.
no need to improve life if you have enough already
The American way of thinking. Meanwhile half the workforce essentially still works as a slave.
As someone who works in a robotics company, our biggest competition is minimum wage Latinos working in warehouses.
It's only occasionally said out loud, but yeah, pretty much everyone selling warehouse robotics supports raising the minimum wage :-)
After many years of working on the the problem of biological automation, I came to conclude that it's really hard to beat an extremely skilled/smart lab tech for general purpose experiments. And my company thinks on the decade+ timescale.
True. But what percentage of the workforce is extremely skilled and smart lab techs? And who knows, if we automate mundane normal jobs, we might get more people who find the time to pursue such high level skills instead of being worried about paying for food.
>Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor?
Slaves weren't free. At least in the early United States, slaves were considered a significant investment; only rich plantation (land) owners could afford them. If they were cheap, then everyone would have had one. Here's an interesting article about the topic:
https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php
A typical slave in the US in the early 1800s cost several hundred dollars, which in today's dollars is between $60k and $184k. Obviously, this isn't something typical people can afford.
I'm not sure if slaves were this expensive back in ancient Greek or Roman times, but I suspect it probably wasn't that different.
Industrialization would have completely changed the economics of these places.
>I'm not sure if slaves were this expensive back in ancient Greek or Roman times, but I suspect it probably wasn't that different.
The price fluctuated heavily. After a successful conquest slaves were way more affordable. Generally, a lot of people were able to afford slaves, so it was cheaper on average too. It was also place-dependent, compare for example Athens where roughly half of the population was free, and Sparta, where most of the population was enslaved.
And of course even when slaves were expensive, most economically important labor was done by them anyway.
Your point still stands, but as a note in Sparta slaves were state property, not individually owned.
If the slaves in Sparta far outnumbered the native population of Spartans, what exactly kept them from revolting and taking over? Was it just because the Spartans were all trained as warriors?
That's... wild. I had no idea it was that expensive. So ten slaves roughly equaled the price of one used medium to large scale combine:
https://www.machinerypete.com/harvesting/combines
My point though was about the early days. There were no machines like that available, just slaves and animals. As long as there were slaves was there an incentive to develop this level of mechanization?
> It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing.
There are many factors at play. Serious industrialization requires several components to build on. There is a reason for example that "All roads lead to Rome". That's because no roads lead to Athens.
The machines to do the work, were the animals. Horses to carry merchandise around, bulls to plow land were used all over the place, by Romans, Greeks, Sumerians, Persians, everyone.
Metal constructions used for heavy work like iron, were too brittle, and bronze was too weak to withstand significant forces. It is only the last two hundred years that strong alloys were developed for industrial applications.
There are more people enslaved today than any other time in human history.
Thread and a far larger circle.
Any theories how they achieved such an impressive degree of accuracy?
These statements are 100% pseudo-scientific woo. If you look at the mechanism, you can't measure anything on it even with 1mm precision, let alone 0.037mm.
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/AF613...
I can't believe so many people people for for that kind of woo.
Good job we have something a bit better than human eyes:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258728873_X-ray_Tom...
For $10 you can buy one of this that can measure .1mm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calipers and there are better devices.
Bro. "Aliens" ;D
The paper notes a (to me) amazing thing. The object of the researchers' Bayesian analysis is the number of holes likely to have been made in a metal ring, of which only a fragment remains. They think either 354 or 355 holes, on a 77.1mm radius.
The amazing thing is that the holes were placed with an average radial variation of only 28µm. This is about 0.001 inches. 2000 years ago. Our ancestors had some serious skills.
> Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on…
Seems like they are a bit out of their lane, as light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, a completely different force from gravitation.
More seriously: the fact that the two scientists happen to have been doing data analysis on gravitational data isn’t really relevant to the work, rather it was pulled out to make us click on the article title.
Super interesting work though, and not what I would have expected!
I would love a website with a 3D breakdown of the Antikythera mechanism that let one peruse it in space, (dis)assemble it, and see how it functions (at least, to be best of our understanding.) Are we far enough along in what we know of it to have such a resource?
This guy is re-creating using only materials available at the time: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...
For anyone who's not familiar, "this guy" is Chris Budiselic of Clickspring, who's mentioned as an inspiration for this research:
> In 2020, new X-ray images of one of the mechanism’s rings, known as the calendar ring, revealed fresh details of regularly spaced holes that sit beneath the ring. Since the ring was broken and incomplete, however, it wasn’t clear how just how many holes were there originally. Initial analysis by Antikythera researcher Chris Budiselic and colleagues suggested it was likely somewhere between 347 and 367.
Not merely inspiration, but https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BHI-Antikythera... is Budiselic et. al.'s paper on the hole count. (It's kind of a big deal to fans because he stopped putting out youtube videos to get the paper ready for publication - where we learned that this was far more than a machining-technique obsession, and that the "British Horological Institute" was a real thing :-)
Clickspring is the most skilled machinist of youtube. Watching him work is so incredibly satisfying.
What about the bald dude with the moustache?
Definitely the most interesting to me.
Not sure about "most skilled", as there are some very good machinist with skills in different areas. I'd say he's definatley the most patient, learning and explaining ancient methods and every step along the way. And the videos are certainly of the most visually appealing.
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Is there evidence that it was actually made in Greece or could it simply have ended up there?
You mean besides being found in Greece, made at a time range where Greeks were both powerful in the context of the hellenistic empire and had important mathematicians and astronomers like Archimedes and Hipparhos, the labels being in Greek, and the whole on-device manual being in Greek?
It was found in the ocean from what I understand, not actually in Greece. And I would consider that weal evidence anyways, e.g. coins from land found in another.
I wasn't aware it had Greek symbols on it. That's all I meant.
>It was found in the ocean from what I understand, not actually in Greece.
Well, it was found in the Aegean sea, a few hundrend feet off the coast of the namesake Greek island, thousands of miles away from any ocean.
Not any different than Arabic coins in Skandinavien burials
Very different, except if any example of "something of one culture found someplace else" applies to anything else ("The Pyramids might have been built by Celts!", "The Rosetta Stone? Possibly a work of the Chinese!", "Mayan artifacts? Aliens!"), regardless of context and circumstances.
First you commented without knowing about the mechanism, or bothering to read to learn the very basic fact that it had Greek inscriptions.
Then you came back to comment that you believe it was found "in the ocean", again not bothering to read up, which would have told you it was found next to a Greek island in the eastern Aegean sea, as far away from the ocean as possible. Clearly didn't care to know the archeaologists' consensus either.
It seems like you have some bias to make it non-Greek for some reason?
My understanding of the evidence is that it suggests the mechanism was made in Rhodes.
Where else, at the time?