Kind: captions
Language: en
based on Babylonian observations the
Greeks built a machine to look into the
future and forecast
eclipses what we realized was that the
ancient Greeks had built a machine to
predict the future it was an
extraordinary idea that you could take
scientific theories of the time and
mechanize them to see what their outputs
would be many decades hence it was
essentially the first time that the
human race had created a
computer the Gear wheels in the
mechanism were like the programs in a
computer but where was the output data
displayed Tony free finds the answer in
fragment F when you first start look at
the x-rays from fragment F there's
nothing much there and then the scales
emerge as you go down through the layers
and not only scales but you see these
little scale divisions blocks of
characters here these look to me a
little bit like Egyptian hieroglyphs so
I called them
glyphs the glyphs must be the eclipse
predictions I soon realized that the
first letter here is a sigma Sigma
standing for the letter S standing for
selini the goddess of the moon that must
indicate a lunar eclipse our next
realized that the letter iter H in the
Greek alphabet must stand for Elios the
Sun so this must indicate a solar
eclipse now what became really tough was
to try and decode the next symbol the
sort of anchor-like symbol and this took
me a long
time by chance I found a book on Greek
horoscopes amongst the whole mass of
symbols I found this symbol in the
document it was a short for or the word
Aura meaning hour so what that told us
was that not only did this mechanism
predict eclipses but it's predicted the
hour of the eclipse as well as the hand
sweeps along the scale here it's just
reaching a lunar eclipse and here then
we've got a solar eclipse in this month
followed by a lunar eclipse in that
month