Our Deluded Moment

What the Antikythera Mechanism tells us about Truth

Two storms, a couple of thousand years apart, tore through the waters between Crete and mainland Greece. If they hadn’t taken overlapping paths, we might’ve missed one of the greatest technological discoveries of ancient history.

And we definitely would have missed one of the most compelling metaphors for our current moment.

The first storm sank a merchant vessel filled with beautiful bronze sculptures, finely blown glassware, exquisite pottery, and lavish jewelry. It was sailing between Rhodes and Rome and was most likely a tribute ship to honor Julius Caesar.

For the next couple of millennia, the wreck lay in a hundred and fifty feet of water off the island of Antikythera, slowly decomposing and gathering silt.

Until the summer of 1900, when a second storm drove a crew of sponge divers to shelter behind that same rocky headland. The next morning, after the weather had passed, they decided to try the local waters for sea sponges. One diver donned a brass helmet and canvas suit and swam down. A few minutes later he broke the surface shouting frantically about a “heap of dead naked people!” trapped in a wreck below.

The “naked people” weren’t dead–they were marble statues. And they weren’t alone. In addition to the other treasures, sat a lumpy, clumpy calcified thing, not much bigger than a shoe box. Once the divers brought it up to the deck, it fell apart, revealing tiny bronze gears.

This delicate, corroded “Antikythera Mechanism” has fascinated scholars for the last century. First with magnifying glasses and then x-rays, archeologists, historians, mathematicians and astronomers all puzzled over its sophisticated gearing. In fits and starts they tried to piece together its original purpose, but it was too fused together and fragile to yield more than educated guesses.

Then in 2005, lead researchers from University College London wrangled an eight-ton industrial CT scanner all the way to Athens. It was so massive that police had to stop traffic on its way to the National Archeology Museum where the mechanism lay in permanent repose–too fragile to ever move again. The team took the better part of a day just to find a crane big enough to haul it into place.

Once set up, this industrial-strength scanner peered into the clogged-up depths of the ancient device. Combined with an advanced computing technique the team had borrowed from the video gaming industry, they were able to read the finely etched and eroded instructions.

For the first time since the wreck was discovered, researchers could accurately count the actual number of teeth on those intricate, overlapping gears. And they could finally decipher the text explaining how it was all supposed to work.

What emerged was an anachronistic marvel of engineering. Historians had known that the Greeks and Romans had used crude gears for wind and water mills, granaries and engineering. But the kind of millimeter mill work and corkscrew gearing of this contraption, didn’t reemerge in the historical record until the watchmakers of fifteenth century Europe.

It turns out, the Antikythera Mechanism is the hand-cranked equivalent of a cosmic cuckoo clock.

Beyond the incredible engineering challenge milling and assembling the device, sat the even more impressive mathematical calculations behind it. The mechanism built on Babylonian lunar astronomy, marked the 365 day calendar year, phases of the moon, eclipses, and even the four year procession of the Olympic games!

Cicero, the Roman philosopher and statesman described this kind of device “on which were delineated the motions of the sun and moon and of those five stars which are called Wanderers …(the five planets). Archimedes …had thought out a way to represent accurately by a single device for turning the globe those various and divergent movements with their different rates of speed.”

While Archimedes, the philosopher of Eureka hot tub fame died several decades before the shipwreck, the lead researcher for the London College team thinks his fingerprints are all over the Antikythera device. “Calculating the epicyclic theory of the moon with epicyclic pin-and-slot gears in this subtle and indirect way was an extraordinary conception by the ancient Greeks. This ingenuity reinforces the idea that the machine was designed by Archimedes.”

And those ingenious epicyclic gears, which function like the spinning tea cups going round in circles on the Mad Hatter’s ride at Disney World, allowed the mechanism to precisely calibrate heavenly movements that didn’t neatly match the ratios of fixed cogs.

No one in Europe would rediscover this ingenious engineering for another fifteen hundred years.

But they showed up again in Ancient Rome in the mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy’s model of the universe. As we all dimly remember from high school, Ptolemy struggled to reconcile a geocentric view of the heavens, (with the Earth firmly at its center), with the strange behavior of those “five wanderers” we now know to be Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Because they are so much closer to us than distant stars, planets don’t trace a clear arc across our night skies. Instead, they will occasionally stall, and trace loop-the-loops, heading backwards (the dreaded “retrograde” of Mercury) before moving on again.

For Ptolemy, and Archimedes a few centuries before him, the only way to reconcile the planets was to insist on epicyclic orbits. Loop the loops. All to keep Earth, “the hearth of the universe” stationary at its center.

And that epicyclic solution was so ingenious that it remained the most accurate model of celestial movements for the next fourteen hundred years.

Even Copernicus, who correctly assessed the sun as “the hearth of the universe,” still tried to calculate circular orbits for the planets. That threw his night-sky predictions off, even as his larger heliocentric theory was right.

It wasn’t until Johannes Kepler figured out elliptical orbits in the early 1600s that the new sun-centric model booted out the epicycles of Antikythera.

***

And while it’s easy to feel smug about those geocentric astronomers of yesteryear and laugh at how misguided they were, they’ve got lessons for us today.

Like them, we are engineering geniuses, able to create technologies that far outstrip our deeper understanding of the way things work.

Like them, we can arrive at explanations that correctly predict events (like the march of the wandering planets across the sky) while incorrectly describing root causes (the whole lot of us actually spinning around the sun).

And like them, we can disappear into the ruins of the past, with barely a trace beneath the waves, if we’re not careful.

We’re all Antikytherans at heart, engineering precocious systems that are superficially correct but false at a deeper level.

The question becomes, what fundamental truths might we be missing?

What are our Mad Hatter Tea Cup contortions? The wheels within wheels spinning to keep our predictions working? What epicycles have we built into our model of reality?

For starters, we’ve assumed for some time that free market capitalism is the bees knees. When it doesn’t work the way we imagined, we rely on charity and subsidies to make up the difference. We bus our homeless off to poorer zip codes. And load up on debt to borrow against a future abundance that never quite arrives. We contemplate utopian ideas like Universal Basic Income as a way to buy off the proletariat before they get bored enough or mad enough for revolution.

But never do we question that free markets sit at the center of our firmament.

Or how about the American Dream? When two kids, station wagons and picket fences can’t hack it, we medicate. Retail therapy, credit cards and psychoactive pharmaceuticals. Prozac to feel 10% happier, Ambien to get some sleep and Oxycontin to feel nothing at all.

We don’t address the hollowness, shallowness or increasingly inescapable destructiveness. Just have more, do more, be more.

And if that doesn’t work, we create a fictional airbrushed version of our #bestlife to live online, where distant friends and total strangers can validate that version of us as even more real than the real us.

Don’t worry about the collateral damage of Late Stage Capitalism either, the smoldering rainforests and giant garbage patches in the ocean. Instead imagine that we will invent our way out of this mess by the very same mechanisms and incentives that got us into it!

Or if that fails, we can always hold on for a near future where work is over, and we can be delighted by ChatGPT and OnlyFans all day, (while Uber Eats robo delivers our biohacker meal replacements).

#nuttychiapudding

#dontdiecry

Epicycles, the lot of ‘em. Wheels within wheels.

In the same way that Archimedes and Ptolemy insisted on reconciling known facts like the procession of the planets with a presumed truth like the Earth sitting at the center of existence, we’ve insisted on reconciling known facts of our civilization with presumed truths at the center of it all.

Because here’s the thing about that little cuckoo clock Antithykera mechanism–it was ingenious. It was functional.

And it was wrong.

But precisely because it was so ingenious (seriously, think about calculating all that insane gearing, let alone fabricating it! That’s a task that would stump 99% of MIT PhDs and the Ancient Greeks figured it out with pencils and a metal forge) and because it was sooo close to accurate it obscured a deeper truth that it was missing.

And it wasn’t a small truth. It was literally foundational to our conception of ourselves and our role in the Universe–whether we sit at its center, or whether we orbit around a greater light at the heart of it all.

If the revisions of Copernicus and Kepler freed us to divine distant planets, topple the power of the church, and send telescopes into space, what might happen if we undo some of our own misguided stories?

And accept instead that we might not be the center of the universe after all. That the planets and all the firmament do not revolve around us. That in fact, at the center of things is Light. And that is what makes all of our lives even possible.

Wouldn’t it be nice to stop all those loop the loop contortions and back bends?

We’d be Mad as Hatters not to.