The Antikythera Mechanism and Abstract Thought

Scientific discovery and invention is amazing, but dead, without abstract thought

Published: Thursday, July 6, 2017 - 12:03

More than 2,000 years ago a huge ship crashed beneath the cliffs of Antikythera, a small island off the coast of Greece. Later discovered in 1900, the wreck yielded a trove of antiquities, including an amazing geared mechanism that, just for starters, predicted eclipses and the location of the sun and moon and possibly planets, showed the phase of the moon, and tracked the four-year cycle of athletic games.

Consisting of more than 30 bronze gears, including a pin and slot mechanism that allowed the accurate reproduction of eccentric orbits, the Antikythera mechanism was certainly the most advanced calculating device of its time. So why didn’t we discover any mechanisms even remotely as complicated for another 1,000 years? It isn’t until the early- to mid-1300s and Giovanni de Dondi’s planetarium-clock or Richard Wallingford’s St. Albans clock, that we see equal complexity. One would think that such an amazing device as the Antikythera mechanism would have spawned a revolution in clockworks. Certainly that is what we see in today’s innovations—one amazing invention leads to embellishments and spinoffs on that invention. But here, nothing for 1,000 years.

Virtual reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism. You can read more about the Antikythera Mechanism at The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project website.

Perhaps we just haven’t uncovered those in-between pieces. After all, anything made of bronze was constantly being melted down and used for something else. The problem with that theory is that if discovery and invention had continued during the intervening years between 150 BC and the mid-1300s, those later clockworks should have reflected a millennia’s worth of technological advancement. But they don’t. Other than more refined workmanship perhaps, there is nothing particularly revolutionary about de Dondi’s or Wallingford’s inventions compared to the Antikythera mechanism... other than they weren’t hand-driven... which is a critical distinction that we will get to.

The answer to the apparent dormancy may lie in the value of abstract thought as a driver for innovation.

I think former Nature editor Jo Marchant may have gotten hints of this in her 2006 article, “In Search of Lost Time.” In interviews with Serafina Cuomo, a historian of science at Imperial College, and Bert Hall, a science historian at the University of Toronto in Canada, Marchant teases out two ideas. First, according to Cuomo, the Greeks had no real reason to advance the device’s technology. It was simply a model for what they already knew of the universe and did not provide them anything that they saw as useful beyond that. Advancing the device to be a daily timepiece, for instance, may not even have occurred to them because the Greeks already had more primitive timekeeping devices that met their needs.

The Greek’s real interest was the more abstract idea that planetary movements affected our lives. The Antikythera mechanism was a way of modeling movements of the solar system as a way to understand, show, foresee astronomical events. In other words, the abstract idea of astrology drove the development of the device.

A second point that Marchant's article makes is posited by Hall, who suggests that it may have been the introduction of a weight-powered drive mechanism (and I would add, escapement) around the early 1300s that really caused innovation in clockworks to explode. Without the need for a human to constantly interact with the mechanism, all sorts of possibilities opened up, particularly if there was a driving need. And by all accounts, that need came from the Roman Catholic Church, which required multiple times for prayer and attendance during the day. These times could be somewhat erratic and a clock, as we know it, would bring order to ritual.

Thus, you have an old but stagnant technology—geared mechanisms; new technology—weight-drive and escapement; and most important, a problem in need of a solution. An abstract idea, such as the importance of timely worship, was what drove the development of the modern clock.

Abstract vs. concrete thinking

Today we often see innovation as coming up with the next “big idea,” something revolutionary, something nobody has ever really thought of before. But as seen from the Antikythera mechanism, that is not always the case. The next big thing might be right in front of us. We just don’t see it because there is no need to see it. There’s no driver.

Our mistake is in thinking that a new idea is an end in itself as opposed to simply a piece to a bigger invention in search of a reason for existence. I may be overstating it, but I think that great inventions come from the synthesis of abstract ideas with concrete science and mechanics. For synthesis to occur, we need abstract thinking. It isn’t enough to teach science, technology, engineering, and math in the hopes of training up the next innovators. Those skills are simply the nuts and bolts that allow the synthesis with more abstract ideas that we gain from art and literature.

My question is, are we shifting too much emphasis to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and neglecting those studies that explore and develop abstract thinking? Can you have one without the other? Without abstract ideas, often derived from the search for who we are, would there be any motivation to take purely scientific knowledge and put it to use?

In my previous incarnation I worked with several inventor/physicists. Oddly to me at the time was that almost all of them were musicians. As I look back on that now, I don’t think that is coincidence. I believe that their interest in music made them better, or at least more inventive, physicists. I believe it’s the playfulness and—ok, soulfulness—of the arts that allows our mind to make connections that we might not otherwise make.

As parents, or just simply U.S. citizens interested in educating tomorrow’s workforce, we need to be concerned about education and what we are teaching. And while I firmly believe that STEM education and scientific thinking has become more important than ever in today’s complex work environment, it can’t be emphasized at the cost of teaching art of all types.

Abstract thinking is what allows us to expand our view. Exposure to music, literature, and the arts lets our minds soar and leave the bounds of Earth. Concrete thinking lets us realize those dreams.

“The desire to fly,” wrote Wilbur Wright, “is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.”

About The Author

Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest

Dirk Dusharme is Quality Digest’s editor in chief.