It's not just a question of valuing the output of technology but also caring about the details.
the mechanism could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years.
The concept of leap years is part of our calendar system but that was invented far after this device was created. Yet, that type of accuracy is simply glossed over. Perhaps the device actually accounted for leap years in their ancient calender system or perhaps the somewhere in the chain from researcher to writer someone failed to understand that leap years having nothing to do with eclipses so it's a non problem. But, the lack of details suggests someone did not really care.
When most people know how to make something that technology is rarely lost but consider how many accidental deaths it would take to set something like CPU fabrication technology back 10 years. Realistically is probably not a real threat, but there is little redundancy in much of our society.
Um...actually the concept of leap years were enshrined in the Julian Calendar a mere 100 years after this device was created, and although this subsequently mutated into the Gregorian calendar (with adjustments for centenary years) the basic idea was contemporary with this device.
Aristarchus, who lived through most of the 3rd century BC, identified the length of the sidereal year with reasonable accuracy and is also the first person that we know of who argued that the earth rotated around the sun, among other insights. Knowing the exact periods of the terrestrial and lunar orbits would obviously have been a necessity for constructing this wondrous machine.
Sorry about the ambiguous that, I was talking about the idea of systematic leap years not our calendar system. It was my understanding that during this time period the calendar was still being reset based the vernal equinox and a hard and fast rule had yet to be added. Otherwise there would have been no need to adopt the Julian calendar in the first place.
According to the later writers Censorinus and Macrobius, the ideal intercalary cycle consisted of ordinary years of 355 days alternating with intercalary years, alternately 377 and 378 days long. On this system, the average Roman year would have had 366¼ days over four years, giving it an average drift of one day per year relative to any solstice or equinox. Macrobius describes a further refinement wherein, for 8 years out of 24, there were only three intercalary years, each of 377 days. This refinement averages the length of the year to 365¼ days over 24 years. In practice, intercalations did not occur schematically according to these ideal systems, but were determined by the pontifices. So far as can be determined from the historical evidence, they were much less regular than these ideal schemes suggest. They usually occurred every second or third year, but were sometimes omitted for much longer, and occasionally occurred in two consecutive years.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar
Quite so - but remember the calendar computer was of Greek origin. It wouldn't surprise me if accurate information about times and seasons were held close to the political and priestly elites rather than publicly disseminated.
I think what the blog writer meant was that they device accounted for the length of the sidereal year accurately...perhaps they calculated exact dates from the nearest solstice or equinox?
the mechanism could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years.
The concept of leap years is part of our calendar system but that was invented far after this device was created. Yet, that type of accuracy is simply glossed over. Perhaps the device actually accounted for leap years in their ancient calender system or perhaps the somewhere in the chain from researcher to writer someone failed to understand that leap years having nothing to do with eclipses so it's a non problem. But, the lack of details suggests someone did not really care.
When most people know how to make something that technology is rarely lost but consider how many accidental deaths it would take to set something like CPU fabrication technology back 10 years. Realistically is probably not a real threat, but there is little redundancy in much of our society.