Join us for our December lecture in our 2023-24 AAA Lecture Series with speaker Alexander Jones of New York University. The topic will be: The Antikythera Mechanism: a Box of Astronomical Delights
The Amateur Astronomers Association Lecture Series is held on the second Tuesday of each month, from October–May, beginning at 7:00 PM Eastern time.
Lectures are free and open to the public, but registration via Zoom is required.
In the National Archaeological Museum in Athens are displayed 82 small and heavily corroded fragments of an ancient Greek bronze gearwork mechanism, recovered in 1901 from the site of a shipwreck that occurred around 60 BC. Seventy years of intense study, aided by progressively more powerful imaging technologies, have led to a surprisingly definite and detailed understanding of what the device did and how it worked: it simulated, at a greatly accelerated rate, various chronological cycles and the apparent movements and phenomena of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars. In this talk, the focus will be on what this remarkable artifact tells us about the astronomy of the time when it was made.
Alexander Jones is a classicist and historian of science whose work centers on the history of astronomy and related fields in Greco-Roman antiquity. He is the author of A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World (Oxford University Press). He is the Leon Levy Director and Professor of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU.
