Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer--and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets [Hardcover]

Jo Marchant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2009

The bronze fragments of an ancient Greek device have puzzled scholars for more than a century after they were recovered from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, where they had lain since about 80 BC. Now, using advanced imaging technology, scientists have solved the mystery of its intricate workings. Unmatched in complexity for a thousand years, the mechanism functioned as the world’s first analog computer, calculating the movements of the sun, moon, and planets through the zodiac.

In Decoding the Heavens, Jo Marchant details for the first time the hundred-year quest to decode this ancient computer. Along the way she unearths a diverse cast of remarkable characters—ranging from Archimedes to Jacques Cousteau—and explores the deep roots of modern technology, not only in ancient Greece, but in the Islamic world and medieval Europe. At its heart, this is an epic adventure story, a book that challenges our assumptions about technology development through the ages while giving us fresh insights into history itself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Marchant, editor of New Science, relates the century-long struggle of competing amateurs and scientists to understand the secrets of a 2000-year-old clock-like mechanism found in 1901 by Greek divers off the coast of Antikythera, a small island near Tunisia. With new research and interviews, Marchant goes behind the scenes of the National Museum in Athens, which zealously guarded the treasure while overlooking its importance; examines the significant contributions of a London Science Museum assistant curator who spent more than 30 years building models of the device; and the 2006 discoveries made by a group of modern researchers using state-of-the-art X-ray. Beneath its ancient, calcified surfaces they found "delicate cogwheels of all sizes" with perfectly formed triangular teeth, astronomical inscriptions "crammed onto every surviving surface," and a 223-tooth manually-operated turntable that guides the device. Variously described as a calendar computer, a planetarium and an eclipse predictor,Marchant gives clear explanations of the questions and topics involved, including Greek astronomy and clockwork mechanisms. For all they've learned, however, the Antikythera mechanism still retains secrets that may reveal unknown connections between modern and ancient technology; this globe-trotting, era-spanning mystery should absorb armchair scientists of all kinds.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Discovered a century ago in an ancient Mediterranean shipwreck, the Antikythera mechanism instantly attracted scientific interest. It had gears, which was and remains unique among artifacts from Greco-Roman civilization. So begins Marchant’s mystery about the object, a tale that ends in triumph but not before inveigling individuals who not only puzzled over the device but also became obsessively devoted to figuring it out. Tantalized by the Antikythera mechanism, scholar Derek de Solla Price felt it was the clue with which he could rewrite the history of technology. Price’s conclusions, however, were challenged by a museum curator of Industrial Revolution technologies; he was Michael Wright, who emerges here as the David among academic Goliaths who, by the early 2000s, were closing in on a conclusive interpretation of the Antikythera mechanism. By then, archaeological evidence dated the ship on which it sank to between 70 and 60 BCE and suggested its connection to the astronomer Hipparchus. Science readers will be entranced by Marchant’s vibrant depiction of the characters in this remarkable story of ancient technology. --Gilbert Taylor

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (February 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030681742X
• ISBN-13: 978-0306817427
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #694,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Linking the Ancient and the Modern Worlds through a Remarkable Astronomical Mechanism March 6, 2009

By Roger D. Launius VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

The "Antikythera Mechanism" has baffled archeologists and scientists for more than a century. Discovered in an ancient Greek shipwreck in 1901 near the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, it is the first known mechanical computer in human history. It is rumored to have been used to calculate astronomical positions, and probably dates to the first century before the Common Era (BCE).

The "Antikythera Mechanism" was remarkable in that its many gears betray a complexity not found elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world. Not until the high Medieval era would technological artifacts of similar complexity be found. With more than 30 gears, there is some difference of opinion on the number, it had the potential to enter a date and the mechanism could calculate the position of the Sun, Moon, or the other planets. It also had the capability to predict lunar and solar eclipses.

Jo Marchant, a well-known journalist and the editor of "New Scientist," has written a fascinating account of the discovery of this remarkable relic, its reconstruction, and the process of discovery of scientists gradually coming to understand its use. Made of bronze and found in pieces on the sea floor, it took considerable time to put it back together and to get it to work.

Hundreds of scholars have investigated the "Antikythera Mechanism," and employed high-technology analysis to understand the artifact. Even so, it took a century to unlock its secrets. Michael Wright, curator at the Science Museum in London, worked for more than two decades to build a working model of the artifact, using only tools and methods known to have been available in ancient Greece. Roger Hadland, an engineering entrepreneur, invested heavily to develop high-technology instruments, including a special X-ray machine, to image the object. These and others contributed to a long-term effort to learn the nature of this remarkable ancient machine.

Part detective story as well as a record of remarkable and diligent scientific investigation, "Decoding the Heavens" is a wonderfully researched and written exploration of efforts in the modern era to learn more about activities of the ancient world.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Ancient And Modern Technology Meet Through Archaeology March 22, 2009

By John D. Cofield TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

In 1900 an ancient shipwreck was discovered off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. Divers quickly brought up statues and other readily recognizable pieces, along with, almost as an afterthought, a strange lump of something metallic which at first seemed worthless. Then startled archaeologists and scientists noticed gears and cogs and realized that something far more interesting than any statue had been uncovered. The Antikythera mechanism was to perplex and intrigue investigators throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Jo Marchant, a science writer for Nature and other scientific journals, has the gift of writing clearly and excitingly about subjects which might seem impenetrably obscure to laymen. Decoding the Heavens is her account of the long process of determining what the Antikythera Mechanism was designed to do, how it actually functioned, and who might have been its original designer. She is able to give life to the succession of highly intelligent and sometimes irascible and eccentric investigators who spent much of their lives on the Antikythera Mechanism. She is also able to explain the complexities of modern technological developments which enabled the investigators to finally unravel the secrets of the Mechanism.

I really enjoyed Decoding the Heavens, particularly the parts in which Marchant speculates on who might have been the Mechanism's original designer. While I wish a map of the eastern Mediterranean had been included to help pinpoint Antikythera, Rhodes, Corinth, Syracuse, and the many other places mentioned in the book, I have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone interested in the Greek and Roman world or in ancient and modern technology.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Finding the real use of the Antikithera mechanism September 3, 2009

By Fortunat Mueller-maerki

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Below is a different review of the same book, which I wrote for 'Antiquarian Horology':

JO MARCHANT,Decoding the Heavens :

A 2,000-Year-Old Computer and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets, published by Da Capo Press, Cambridge MA, 2009, hardcover. Also available in a UK edition as Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer. Or borrow from the NAWCC Library in Columbia (Members only)

Most students of the history of timekeeping machinery will have come across various pieces of information on the Antikythera mechanism in their reading and recall the outline account of its discovery. In the fall of the year 1900, the Greek Captain Dimitros Kontos and his crew of sponge divers stumbled upon a shipwreck from antiquity off the island of Antikythera, and thereby started the science of underwater archeology. In addition to a large number of statues and other artifacts, one recovered item was completely different. It consisted of several fragments of a very complex, geared, bronze mechanism with mysterious inscriptions. Whatever that object was, it was destined to substantially rewrite the history of technology.

The book under review is an up-to-date, detailed retelling of the story of this mechanism, its discovery, its interpretation and the search for its function. The author incorporates the discoveries and new theories that have been developed about the Antikythera mechanism during the last several years.

Michael Wright, formerly of the London Science Museum, has constructed a new replica and published his findings in this magazine and elsewhere. Regular readers of Antiquarian Horology are probably familiar with his three major articles on the subject in 2003 (Vol. 27, pp. 270-279), 2005 (Vol.29, pp. 51-63) and 2006 (Vol.29, pp. 319-329), titled `Epicyclic gearing and the Antikythera Mechanism, Part I & II' and `The Antikythera Mechanism and the Early History of the Moon-Phase Display'. Completely independently, British scholars Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth have also become obsessed with decoding the mechanism, just like Derek de Solla Price of Princeton University did half a century earlier. And -most importantly- a Greek based multidisciplinary research team agreed to analyze the object in detail using newly developed, state-of-the art American high energy X-ray technology, which allowed for the first time to examine the inside of the object in amazing detail, yielding new teeth counts and additional ancient inscriptions. Much of this research is ongoing, and every few months additional inscriptions are deciphered, new papers are published, and new physical models are built or existing ones are modified.

This book is not a scholarly treatment of the subject matter. The author is not a scientist publishing new scholarly insights, but a journalist telling a compelling story. In many ways this book reminded this reviewer of Dava Sobel's bestseller Longitude; there, as well, the focus was not primarily on the technical specifics of the physical artifact, but on the `human interest story' behind the object, the story of the struggles of Harrison and Gould. Here, too, the author writes an eminently readable account of the numerous twists and dead ends which various scientists have encountered in researching the functionality of the mechanism. She focuses on the passions and personalities of the scholars, as much as she does on the intricacies of the mechanism, which - as it turns out- is not a `timekeeper' in the narrower sense of the word, but a sophisticated `time calculator', specifically a planetary calculator. `Planets' is here used in Ptolemy's sense, i.e. including sun and moon, and the machine apparently uses epicyclic gearing, the 19 year metonic cycle, and a spiral display.

The main characters in the book are scholars like De Solla Price, Bromley, Wright, Edmunds and Freeth, and a large supporting cast of Greek museum officials, archeologists, philologists and "cryptographers". These people all become alive in the book, as a captivating story of discovery is told, with side plots involving rivalries, egos and national pride. This is a book about both the 'process' of decoding the mechanism and the egos of the key players, rather than a detailed account of the mechanism itself. This reviewer found the book fascinating and informative, mainly due to the fact that virtually everything else that has been published on the history of technology typically covers the objects themselves, and ignores the process of scholarship and the personalities involved.

The book has triggered a wave of criticism from various scholars involved in the recent discoveries. A recent Greek translation of the book contains 84 corrective footnotes; for a list see the Research Project's webpage [...] where a pdf can be downloaded regarding so-called `errors' in Merchant's text. Many of these seem to concern different interpretation of data, or points of Greek national pride. To this reviewer this latest controversy just reinforces one of the key themes of the book: there is hardly a historic object in the history of technology which has triggered as many passions as the Antikythera mechanism.
[...]