THE SECOND SINKING OF THE "ANTICYTHER MACHINE"
Where we discover how for more than a century, almost no scientist has questioned one of the most beautiful cases of techno scientific anachronism ...
The knowledge of past civilizations is all the more mysterious and haunting that it is partly lost. But not lost for everyone. For ages, charlatans, or wacky searchers, they roam the mysteries of planet Earth in search of secrets hidden under the strata of time. From the pyramids of Egypt through Easter Island to the geoglyphs of Nazca, everything was written, alas, almost, by self-proclaimed specialists, claiming here that it was impossible at the time to realize such feats without the help of extraterrestrials, suggesting that the inclination of a carved stone or dolmen involves a prodigious ancient cosmological knowledge. Astronomy - the oldest of the sciences - is often invoked in the most baroque theses, and so obviously, in the vast majority of cases, researchers smile by discovering this or that crazy thesis, some fables resist time and money. critically...
The most astonishing example of this "archeology before the imposture" to use the bright expression of Jean-Pierre Adam, indefatigable slayer of these extravagant theories, is world famous, it sits, even, in the light of all, in a room dedicated to his only use at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.
This is the very famous ... Antikythera machine. In two words, here is his uplifting story, told from 1902, the year of its discovery. Once upon a time there was a Roman galley sinking off the island of Antikythera in the Aegean Sea. Among the remains (supposed) of the wreck, would have been found the wheels of an old clockwork mechanism, which once reconstituted (an indisputable technical feat, for once) by specialists, has turned out to be a real clock astronomical of a (supposed) sidereal precision. Sidereal and staggering since the techniques sensibly used by the designers of the Antikythera mechanism were invented some eighteen centuries later, at the end of the European Renaissance ...
An antique with such ... modern characteristics!
It is the incredible and ultimately amusing story of this anachronism that Frédéric Lequèvre tells us in two booklets published in the collection Une chandelle dans les ténèbres in book-e-book editions under the title The computer of Archimedes. Doctor of physics, the author knows celestial mechanics at his fingertips, and, for our greatest pleasure, he applied himself to dismantling the workings of the mechanism of Anticythère. Alas for the amateurs of fables and fariboles, it also, by dissecting piece by piece this astronomical clock, deconstructed this myth: the Greeks, more than two thousand years ago, would have built a real portable planetarium worthy of the most beautiful astronomical clocks of the XVII th century ... It is with a precision of goldsmith that our scientific Sherlock Holmes carries out his investigation on an instrument which certain astronomers did not, alas, not hesitate to qualify as "first computer of the history" .
The first booklet therefore endeavors to present the mechanism of Anticythère, the history of its discovery, its functioning, its possible and probable uses, its ((very relative) precision, its (very weak) capacity for astronomical forecasting. above all ... its blinding anachronism.
Appetite for reading, our curiosity spurred, we discover in the second booklet how and why no one wanted to seriously tackle the central, crucial question posed by the mechanism of Anticythère: what is his real age, when was it built?
Why ? Well, when a research group - Antikythera Mechanism Research Project - has been formed for decades, that it tirelessly promotes the beautiful story of this "Greek miracle", when a television producer shoots a feature film to his glory, when a publication is finally accepted by the prestigious journal Nature, when a large Swiss watch brand, Hublot, sponsors the Museum of Athens to restore and highlight this prodigy of ancient techno-science possibly manufactured or used by Archimedes so- even, even Hipparchus, excuse a little, nobody, basically, has any interest in questioning its authenticity ...
Frédéric Lequèvre's “scientific police” investigation is erudite, technical, if we do not know the subtleties of cosmic watchmaking and ... modern watchmaking, but its style, distilling from here and there small ironic touches to some of his peers who have been blind for a hundred years and more, brightens up the reading of these two essential little books for those interested in the history of science and technology.
In order not to spoil the reading of “Archimedes' computer” we will not reveal how Frédéric Lequèvre sets the record straight at the end of his deconstruction work; We bet that the reader will have already understood that the title of his work is eminently ironic, and that the marvelous history of the mechanism of Anticythère ... proves that finally the expression "fake news" is as old as humanity, or almost .