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The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio
A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.
It’s a bronze device that dates back to the first century BCE and was found by divers on an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in the early 1900s. It’s main purpose, as determined by slow study over the past hundred years, was to track the positions of the “planets,” which in its time were the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. At about the 32-minute mark, Mike Edmunds talks about a large wheel in the mechanism that has, he says, 233 teeth, equal to the number of lunar months in the Saros cycle, which is used to predict eclipses.
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