Ancient "computer"
God, there are some days when I am ashamed to call myself a scientist.
This is a link to an article about the Antikythera mechanism, which to be brief has been dated somewhere around the first century BC, and was a Greek device that could, amongst other things, apparently predict the cycle of the moon, with eclipses, and another article said could do basic math functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division). The device is purely mechanical, of course, consisting of a ton of gears, and about a millenium before its time (comparable to clock mechanisms).
Anyway, all that having been said, what really drives me crazy is this. The guy who figured out a lot about the Antikythera mechanism, who devoted years of his life and research to it, didn't have his research on the device accepted until very very recently, decades after his death.
It's a pattern repeated over and over again in the scientific world, and it drives me up the wall. There are SO many cases where great, even revolutionary ideas, simply aren't accepted by the scientific community for years after the person who thought them up has died. And the reason, I think, that they AREN'T accepted is that they're against the norm, they're against the popular theories of the time, or very far advanced beyond current theory. In other words, they challenge what becomes sort of the current religion of science - instead of people stopping and thinking that current theory needs some work, or might possibly be wrong, they simply ignore it because it doesn't fit in with what they believe.
In other words, facts are mutated and molded to fit in with an idea, when the idea, the theory, should be based on the facts to begin with, or changed when new discoveries are made. Not the other way around.
You should be open-minded, in any scientific field - not that you should immediately accept any idea, but you should not immediately disregard challenges to your worldview either. I see this all the time in my own chemistry job, a person's ego gets twisted up in his/her theory - it's like a personal insult when things actually don't end up working that way. But why should that be the case? Shouldn't the goal of any scientist be to find the truth, instead of twisting or ignoring the facts to fit some preconceived idea of truth?
Okay, really boring, heavy, badly-written rant over. Do at least skim the article, the Antikythera mechanism is an amazing find.
This is a link to an article about the Antikythera mechanism, which to be brief has been dated somewhere around the first century BC, and was a Greek device that could, amongst other things, apparently predict the cycle of the moon, with eclipses, and another article said could do basic math functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division). The device is purely mechanical, of course, consisting of a ton of gears, and about a millenium before its time (comparable to clock mechanisms).
Anyway, all that having been said, what really drives me crazy is this. The guy who figured out a lot about the Antikythera mechanism, who devoted years of his life and research to it, didn't have his research on the device accepted until very very recently, decades after his death.
It's a pattern repeated over and over again in the scientific world, and it drives me up the wall. There are SO many cases where great, even revolutionary ideas, simply aren't accepted by the scientific community for years after the person who thought them up has died. And the reason, I think, that they AREN'T accepted is that they're against the norm, they're against the popular theories of the time, or very far advanced beyond current theory. In other words, they challenge what becomes sort of the current religion of science - instead of people stopping and thinking that current theory needs some work, or might possibly be wrong, they simply ignore it because it doesn't fit in with what they believe.
In other words, facts are mutated and molded to fit in with an idea, when the idea, the theory, should be based on the facts to begin with, or changed when new discoveries are made. Not the other way around.
You should be open-minded, in any scientific field - not that you should immediately accept any idea, but you should not immediately disregard challenges to your worldview either. I see this all the time in my own chemistry job, a person's ego gets twisted up in his/her theory - it's like a personal insult when things actually don't end up working that way. But why should that be the case? Shouldn't the goal of any scientist be to find the truth, instead of twisting or ignoring the facts to fit some preconceived idea of truth?
Okay, really boring, heavy, badly-written rant over. Do at least skim the article, the Antikythera mechanism is an amazing find.