Calculating the next solar eclipse the Greek way
Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk&feature=player_embedded
The video would have you be astonished that we did this using Legos, because everybody knows that Legos are just a kid’s toy and toy’s can be useful . But really I think the awesomeness you should take away from this is how much knowledge the Greek civilization had.
I believe it to be a common miss perception by human civilization today that any societies that have come in the past were necessarily less advanced or understood things less than we did. After all we all know that everybody thought the world was flat until Christopher Columbus sailed across the ocean, for example. Or that the Earth was not at the center of the universe. Except that these assertions are obviously false, and the above video proved it. It wold have been incredibly difficult the Greeks to have built a calculating machine to predict solar eclipses eclipses unless they understood the nature of the solar system and that the earth was both round and rotated around the sun.
It really was the fall of Rome and the onset of what is called “The Dark Ages” which robed humanity of so much technological advancement, knowledge, and culture. I’m not saying everything Greece, Rome, and other older societies were perfect by any stretch, but I think it would be amazing where humanity would be right now if their scientific and technological advances had survived, rather than having to be reinvented piece meal.
For example, here is a piece of trivia to pull away from this article. Did you know that Rome practiced surgery and other “advanced” medical procedures regularly but that it wasn’t rediscovered until the Victorian area. Click here for an article regarding Roman medical practices.
So yes. We can reproduce what past societies have done using the toys of our culture, but they were the ones that did it first. It gives real credence to the adage: “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.”
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