Something Super Cool
- Thread starter Nitefly
- Start date
Soldato
Can the iPhone xr by default only use the low aperture mode when taking portraits?
Soldato
That's the part I like most - the artist created that piece to invoke conversation (as all artists do) but could he ever have imagined how a man in Greece would have captured his work and instantly transported the image half way around the world in this way - 2,000 years later?
Soldato
You’ve reminded me of something else that blew my mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
The thing that gets me about that isn't the mechanism as such (Which is nevertheless pretty damn impressive!)
The actual clockwork itself would have been easy enough to construct using the tools and materials available all those years ago.
It is the staggering level of mathematics, the thought, the detailed observations over a very long period of time, and the cosmological understanding that went into its design that boggles my mind.
(It even allows for the fact that the Moons orbit round the earth is an eclipse! )
Since the machine actually comes with instructions, it is likley that many of these were made though only one example has been discovered.
My own personal theory is that the idea of the "Ptolemaic Universe" (Geocentric) is actually a dark ages error based on a traveler once seeing one of these machines and misunderstanding what it actually represented.
Of course, since it is a planetarium in a box, it is designed to show what the sky will look like from a geocentric perspective. (and particularly from the perspective of concentric circles, a common example of the Ptolemaic layout but simply a representation of how a machine like this was constructed) then it is designed to give a geocentric view of the solar system.
But I am sure that whoever it was who designed this machine (Archimedes??) would have appreciated that a heliocentric solar system would make far more sense. if only because it would have made constructing a machine to represent it (Like an Orrery) would involve a far less complex mechanism.
After all, these were people who had not only worked out that the Earth and Moon were spheres (Moon=Obvious, Earth by inference I guess) but also the the size of the earth.
They had also worked out the relative distances of a the Sun and the Moon (An experiment that I would like to duplicate some day. It is not actually that hard conceptually but does require the accurate measurement of angles that are very close to 90)
They had also deduced that the Sun was a very long way away (Otherwise the size of the earth calculations would have been wrong) and even managed a stab at working out what the actual distances are!
I do not find the idea that astronomers and scientists as brilliant as these people undoubtedly were would not have come to the "obvious" conclusion as to the true nature of the solar system an intelectually sustainable one. I just dont!