Decoding the Heavens

by Decoding the Heavens- Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer (retail) (epub)

  Except for one. A misshapen lump of silver metal, small enough to fit comfortably in your hand, confused its discoverers at first. It turned out to be the most significant find of the expedition: a stack of coins, fused together by the chemical action of the sea in the shape of their original container, which had long since rotted away.

  Coins are an archaeologists’ dream when it comes to dating sites, because they carry markings to identify who issued them and they don’t tend to stay in circulation for very long. Svoronos would have been blown away by this find. Once the pieces in the lump had been cleaned and separated, they turned out to be silver coins from the city of Pergamon, worth four drachmas each. One, bearing the image of an ivy-wrapped basket of sacred snakes, carried the initials of a magistrate who had served in the city from 85 to 76 BC.

  There were several bronze coins in the same hoard – they were in a sorry state, but two of them could be identified as coming from the city of Ephesus, which is about 100 miles south of Pergamon. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, stared out from the front face of each coin with bow and quiver at her shoulder, while revealed on the back was a kneeling stag and the inscription Demetrios, perhaps the name of the issuing magistrate. They were slightly younger than the silver pieces, issued in 70–60 BC.

  These coins pinned down the ship’s origin even more precisely than Grace’s reading of the amphoras’ curves. It must have sunk sometime between 70 and 60 BC, and it had probably set sail from Pergamon on the Asia Minor coast, where most of the coins had been minted.

  This makes the ship a little late to have carried Sulla’s loot – after a life spent partying as hard as he fought, Sulla died from liver failure in 78 BC. But by this time a new young general was ravaging the eastern Greek cities – and fighting the persistent King Mithridates, who was still managing to drive the Romans to distraction. The name of this upstart was Pompey the Great. He travelled to Asia Minor and finally defeated Mithridates’ troops in 65 BC, though even then he still didn’t manage to kill him. A fleeing Mithridates tried to take his own life by poison, but years of consuming a small dose of poison every day to strengthen his constitution had rendered him immune to it; in the end, it is said, a servant had to run him through with a sword.

  Pompey had long clashed with Sulla in Rome and if anything he was more greedy than his elder, and more desperate to prove his glory back home. With boyish features and self-consciously swept back hair, his supporters said he looked like Alexander the Great, although Sulla is rumoured to have given him the nickname ‘Great’ as a sarcastic joke. Pompey had a talent on the battlefield (and on the sea – it took him just three months in 67 BC to clear the Mediterranean of pirates) and he was efficient at managing provinces once they were conquered, and ensuring a constant flow of goods and treasures back to Rome. After beating Mithridates, Pompey killed and looted his way through Pontus, Syria, Palestine and even Jerusalem, turning them all into Roman territories.

  When he returned to Rome in 61 BC he held the greatest triumphal parade in the city’s history, so huge that the spoils were carried into the harbour on 700 ships and it took two days for the spectacle to pass through the streets. Placards inscribed with the names of the many lands he had conquered were followed by his troops, royal prisoners, spoils from the raided cities, exotic animals from his travels, and gold and silver statues of his dead enemies, including Mithridates. It didn’t all go as Pompey had hoped, though. According to the ancient historian Plutarch he had planned to enter the city on a gem-studded chariot drawn by four elephants that he’d brought back from Africa. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t fit through the city gates and he had to switch to horses at the last minute.

  It was a sign of things to come. By the time Pompey got back to Rome another new star had risen: Julius Caesar (the great uncle and guardian of the boy who was to become Emperor Augustus). Caesar was a gifted general, too, and much cleverer politically than Pompey. Both hoped to become Rome’s next dictator, but after several years of manoeuvring the prize was awarded to Caesar. Pompey was unceremoniously stabbed in the back when he fled to Alexandria in 48 BC, by officials who hoped to impress the new Roman leader.

  We may never know for sure whose cargo was on the Antikythera ship, but the latest dating of the wreck fits the time that Pompey’s troops were sending back bounty from his eastern conquests – perhaps the statues were reparations extracted from Pergamon and Ephesus after the wars with Mithridates. With the rich nature of some of the cargo, in particular the bronze statues, gold jewellery and ornate furniture (the marble statues are still thought to be newer copies of classical originals), maybe some of the items were even destined to be carried through the streets of Rome in the triumphal parade.

  So was the Antikythera mechanism also taken from Asia Minor, or could the ship have picked it up at a subsequent port of call? Pergamon, where the ship most likely set off from, was an extremely rich and civilised city, and a scientist working there at the time would certainly have had access to bronze and to engineering skills. But from the scattered records we have access to today, we don’t know of any major astronomers or instrument-makers based in Pergamon at the time. And by the first century BC the Romans had taken over the city, so scientific activity may have been on the wane.

  At Alexandria the royal family, the Ptolemies, paid for a huge school attached to the city’s famous library, the Museum of Alexandria, where many ancient scholars would work at some time or another. The Antikythera ship might have stopped off at Alexandria, but the evidence is circumstantial – it’s not too far out of the way, and some of the luxury glassware it was carrying could have been made there, but similar items have since been found in several other sites around the Mediterranean. And by the 60s BC the importance of the school was at a low. Academic activity had been interrupted by King Ptolemy VIII, who persecuted and expelled the city’s intelligentsia in 145–144 BC and put the library under the control of the army. It was many decades before any scholars of note appeared again.

  Rhodes, on the other hand, seems a more promising prospect. Because of its location in the south-east Aegean, the island was a key trading centre, especially for grain from Egypt. Virtually every passing vessel would have stopped there for supplies, and the large number of Rhodian amphoras found at the wreck site suggests that the Antikythera ship was no exception. Rhodes was extremely wealthy because of its strong trading position, and its capital city glittered with thousands of bronze and marble statues. ‘Rhodes had more statues than trees,’ staff at the Athens museum still like to say. ‘And it had a lot of trees . . .’

  The Rhodians tried hard to stay politically neutral as the Romans clashed with all around them, and, helped by their impressive naval fleet and siege defences, they managed to stay relatively independent as the rest of the Aegean succumbed, at least until the island was brutally sacked in 43 BC. As the second century BC turned into the first, it was one of the few cities where scientists were still free to work, and we know that there were some big names there, particularly in the field of astronomy. Two notable examples are Hipparchus, the possible inventor of the astrolabe, who lived on Rhodes in the second century BC, and a teacher called Geminus, who made observations there several decades later.

  The islanders were on reasonably good terms with Pompey, who visited Rhodes several times. They would have engaged in trade with his ships as they passed. But they would also have offered treasured possessions as gifts to ensure Pompey’s protection, and the general or his men would have felt free to carry off any valuable or intriguing items that caught their fancy. A mechanical computer! How better to impress the notables back home.

  But what was this computer? How did it work, and what was it for? While Virginia Grace and her colleagues scrutinised the salvaged pots and plates, an English scientist called Derek de Solla Price began to decode the device itself. What had ultimately thwarted all those who had studied the Antikythera mechanism before him was the fact that their research was limited to the barely legible det
ails on the surface of the broken pieces. Price used the developing technology of X-rays to see what was hidden beneath.

  4

  Rewriting History

  Knowledge works rather like a large jigsaw puzzle. You wait until somebody puts down a piece and try to find a piece of your own to place on that living edge.

  — DEREK DE SOLLA PRICE

  DEREK DE SOLLA PRICE falls in love with many things. One of them was Athens, the first time he saw it in the summer of 1958. It is dirty and loud, and uncomfortably hot, and compared to his home city of London the atmosphere is abrupt, almost angry. But a few minutes walk from the car fumes and hooting of the busy Constitution Square, the winding back streets of the Plaka district delight him, with their little shops selling brass and coffee and spices and flowers.

  Every so often the cobbled street opens out into a tiny square, and squashed between the other buildings a little Byzantine church or Ottoman mosque appears – the various mosaics, spires and arches telling the story of the city’s colourful past. Then, as Price keeps walking south, the alleys open out in front of him and suddenly the noise and the centuries fall away. Straight ahead, the steep rock of the Acropolis draws his eyes upward and from the top rise the perfectly symmetrical lines of the Parthenon temple, still as awesome as when the Athenians dedicated it to their virgin goddess in the fifth century BC.

  At the foot of the hill lie the remains of the Athens Agora. This is the Roman market place (the older square of classical Greek times is a little further away, with no visible trace above ground until archaeologists started their work there a couple of decades before). Here, in the quiet of early morning, dozens of broken columns rest on the dry grass, with lonely heads, bodies and legs from once-proud statues strewn among them. Just one building – an octagonal marble tower decorated with carvings representing the eight winds – stands intact as a reminder of the gleaming city centre this once was.

  But it isn’t the Parthenon or the Tower of the Winds that Price is here to see. Before the glaring sun rises too high, he heads the 20 minutes or so walk across town to the elegant rectangular building that is the National Archaeological Museum. Inside, in a basement storeroom, he is finally going to see the mysterious object that has brought him all this way.

  Price is 33. In a sense, his whole career so far has been a preparation for this moment. All of his various passions and interests have converged in leading him to this single artefact. It holds, he hopes, the ultimate answer to the questions he has been asking all his working life.

  Some of the questions started even earlier, during his childhood in London’s East End. He was born in 1922 to Philip Price, a tailor, and Fanny de Solla, a singer. The couple didn’t have many material possessions, but they had enough money to indulge their young son in his love of Meccano, which was all the rage at the time. With enough ingenuity, the red and green painted girders, pulleys and cogs could be built into pretty much anything a boy could imagine – a bridge, a crane, a car, a spaceship – and Price wasn’t short of either ingenuity or imagination. The toy instilled in him a passion for mechanics and for how things work, which stayed with him for life. One of his favourite stories when he was older was about the Scottish physicist James Maxwell, who, growing up in Edinburgh nearly a century earlier, once asked a workman operating a piece of machinery, ‘What’s the go of it?’ Frustrated to receive only a vague reply, the boy stamped his foot impatiently. ‘No! No! What’s the particular go of it?’

  Price recognised this urgent desire to know in his own character, although the ease with which he compared himself to one of the country’s greatest scientists is perhaps equally revealing. When he wasn’t building models, the young Price snapped up science-fiction pamphlets, printed on cheap paper and decorated with sensational cover images, with names like Amazing Stories and Marvel Tales and bold stories inside that took him far from the grey world of 1930s London. At school, he showed an aptitude for physics and maths, and plucked up the courage to send some of his original proofs to the eminent Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy.

  Despite his talent, Price didn’t have the money or the background to go to university, so he followed a less conventional route to pursuing the subjects that he loved. He got a job as a lab assistant at the newly opened South West Essex Technical College, which enabled him to study part-time for a degree at the University of London. The physics equipment there was one glorious step up from Meccano. Square and black with clunky dials and flickering green screens, the oscilloscopes, voltmeters and spectrometers were as heavy as stones, and packed full to bursting with valves and wiring. With such instruments you could make sense of things; you could measure the whole world! Price spent hours taking these devices apart, tinkering with them and putting them back together, until his fingers and his heart were intimately familiar with their workings.

  He got his degree in physics and maths in 1942 and the college – seriously short-staffed because of the war – instantly promoted him to lecturer. He worked in one classroom, often for eight hours straight, learning the curriculum as he taught it. He also carried out research for the military on the optics of molten metals, and the University of London awarded him a PhD for it in 1946. Once the war ended, however, there was no job for him in London, so he took two big leaps into the unknown. He accepted a teaching position at the young Raffles College in Singapore. And he married a Danish girl called Ellen Hjorth.

  Singapore was wonderful and exotic and it inspired in Price a new love for oriental culture and its history. It also introduced him to the history of science. Raffles College acquired a full set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – the journal of Britain’s foremost scientific body, with such worthy members over the centuries as Humphry Davy, Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke. The college library was still being built, so Price seized his chance and took the beautiful calf-bound volumes home with him – into ‘protective custody’, he joked. Accustomed by now to teaching himself everything, he used them as bedtime reading, starting with the first volume from 1665 and working his way through. In the journal’s pages he learned how scientific knowledge had gradually accumulated, with each generation of scientists building on the work of the next to bring the world around them into ever sharper focus.

  As he read, Price put the finished volumes into neat chronological piles on his bedside shelves. Then he noticed something strange. Though all the stacks covered the same number of decades, each was twice as tall as the one before. He stared at the pattern, trying to absorb what it meant – curves and lines and numbers flashing through his mind faster than his linear, more logical thoughts could keep up. He had always thrown himself into physics because it was measurable, dependable. It turned an uncertain world into numbers that followed rules. And once you knew the rules of the world you could understand it, predict it, control it – from the bouncing of a billiard ball to the splitting of an atom. Physics had its limits, of course. He had learned to accept that. It couldn’t help you understand history or knowledge, for example, any more than truth or love. How could you plot knowledge on a graph?

  But here, against his bedroom wall, it had happened. The scientific knowledge acquired over centuries had stacked itself up on his shelves and was displaying itself to him as a beautiful exponential curve. In other words, it showed a perfect and predictable mathematical relationship that doubled and doubled and doubled over time, as regular as clockwork. Of course! By counting scientific papers, you could measure science as it advanced. Price rushed to the university to check every other journal he could find, adding them together for each subject then piling up the volumes with trembling hands. For every one it was the same – the size of the stacks followed the same pattern. From Isaac Newton laying the groundwork of classical mechanics to Ernest Rutherford probing the atomic nucleus in the twentieth century, it made no difference – the pages inscribed with the scientists’ results fitted the curve; they grew exponentially over time. Price had discovered the law that governed
the path of knowledge itself.

  That moment set him in a new direction. He felt his insight opened a window to a bright and certain future in which scientists would illuminate the uncertainty of the world at an explosive rate, until there could be no dark corners left. Price discussed this discovery excitedly with his badminton partner, a young British historian called Cyril Northcote Parkinson; the two men batting ideas back and forth breathlessly as they volleyed the shuttlecock over the net.

  Not to be outdone, Parkinson formulated his own law from these verbal matches, which he felt was just as revolutionary. The inexorable growth of bureaucracies, too, could be described by a mathematical equation. Not bad, said Price, but he bet Parkinson that his own law would bring him the greater fame. He lost. Parkinson’s Law, in the more general form of ‘work always expands to fill the time available’, soon flew around the globe, while Price’s sank without trace. He later observed that for a while there was a Price’s Law in metallurgical physics, but his friends knew that it was little consolation.

  Still, Price was now hooked on the idea of studying how scientific knowledge had accumulated, and he couldn’t wait to apply his physicist’s mind to the history of science. He left Singapore and enrolled for a second PhD at the University of Cambridge. Reflecting his love of lab equipment, his thesis was to be on the history of scientific instruments. He felt that these measuring devices – from the microscope to the oscilloscope – were the key to scientific advance. Rutherford couldn’t have split the atom without the accelerators he used to fire particles at each other, while Einstein had relied on recent experimental results to come up with the equation that described the energy locked up in those atoms: E = mc2. Right back to the seventeenth century, supposedly the birth of modern science, Price felt that the real credit should not go to the gentlemen scientists playing with their new toys and discussing their latest observations over dinner or at the Royal Society. It belonged to the unsung instrument-makers, who blended technical ability with science and applied skills handed down over centuries to craft precision equipment for their wealthy customers. These were the men who determined not only what questions could be asked, but what could be discovered, and Price resolved to tell their story.