contact: Jeff Matthews

A 2,000-year-old device often called the world's oldest "computer" has been recreated. The Antikythera Mechanism was found on a Roman-era shipwreck in Greece in 1901. It is named for Antikythera, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, between Crete and Peloponnese. (On the map, below, Crete is the large island 30 km/20 mi to the SE below Antikythera.) The island of Antikythera, is narrow, 10km/6 miles long with a port for occasional ferry traffic. There are only about 50 residents, who are joined during the summer by 300-400 others. Many come to dive on the site of the famous wreck.

The device is thought to have been used to predict eclipses and other astronomical events. Only a third of the device survived, leaving us wondering how it worked and what it looked like. The back of the device was solved by earlier research, but the complex gearing system at the front has remained a mystery. Researchers from University College in London think they have finally figured it out using 3D computer modelling. They have recreated the entire front panel and hope to build a full-scale replica of the Antikythera device using modern materials. In mid-March, 2021, they published a new display of the gear system that showed its fine details and complex parts (image).

"The Sun, Moon and planets are displayed in an impressive tour de force of ancient Greek brilliance," the paper's lead author, Professor Tony Freeth, said. "Ours is the first model that conforms to all the physical evidence and matches the descriptions in the scientific inscriptions on the mechanism". The device has been described as an astronomical calculator as well as the world's first analogue computer. It is made of bronze and has dozens of gears. The back cover features a description of the cosmos display, showing the motion of the five planets known at the time. But only 82 fragments - about a third of the device - have survived and have to be assembled. This meant scientists have had to piece together the full picture using X-Ray data.

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supplemental article #4 in the Science Portal - added Mar 15, 2021

Extrusive Igneous Rock - a ready-made movie set


Devils Tower is a butte  A butte was, countless ages ago, much larger and possibly part of a "concordant coastline", a range of elevated land along a sea. Today, Devils Tower is a strikingly symmetrical, awe-inspiring tower of igneous rock (that is, originally molten lava spewed from a volcano. The National Park Service section on Devils Towers says:

"Although much of the Tower’s geologic story is agreed upon, theories differ on certain details. The simplest explanation is that Devils Tower is a stock— a small intrusive body formed by magma which cooled underground and was later exposed by erosion. Other ideas have suggested that Devils Tower is a volcanic plug or that it is the neck of an extinct volcano, but the limited evidence of volcanic activity (volcanic ash, lava flows, or volcanic debris) in the area creates doubt that the Tower was part of a volcanic system. It is possible that this material may simply have eroded away. The concept of erosion exposing the Tower is common to all of its modern formation theories  [empasis added]. Ironically, the erosion which exposed the Tower also erased the evidence needed to determine which theory of Devils Tower’s formation is the correct one."

But you can still enjoy it. This magnificent tower is in the U.S.A., in the Black Hills, near Hulett and Sundance in north-eastern Wyoming. It rises above the Belle Fourche River and stands 265 meters (867 feet) from summit to base. The summit is 1,559 m (5,112 ft) above sea level. Devils Tower was the first national monument in the U.S., established on September 24, 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt. The monument has an area of 1,347 acres (545 hectares). The name "Devil's Tower" comes from 1875 when explorers misinterpreted a native name to mean "Bad God's Tower". All signs in that area omit the apostrophe. It is now simply "Devils Tower". The oldest rocks visible in the National Monument were laid down about 250 million years ago in the Triassic period of the Mezosoic era. That was the one before the Jurassic period, a term familiar to movie-goers.

Speaking of which, the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind used Devils Tower as a plot element -- the flat  summit was the runway for an alien star-ship landing on Earth in the climax of the film. That film caused a large increase in visitors and climbers to the monument. Ray Bradbury, famed science fiction writer and master story teller, called the film the "greatest science-fiction film ever made". When Ray Bradbury says something, I tend to listen, but I don't agree with his assessment. It was a fine film, but harmless, more of a fairy tale for adults. There was nothing in it that frightened me. I admit to liking dystopian films. "Blade Runner" still scares me. Even Bradbury's own Fahrenheit 451 (both his novel and the film) --as dystopian as they come-- scares me. We saw a real-life prequel in Nazi book-burnings.

So there are not many Devils Towers in the world, but there are a number of examples of extrusive igneous rock that are fascinating and inevitably draw comments such as "those blocks look like they were put in place -- that can't be natural." For example, "The Giant's Causeway" on the north coast of Northern Ireland (image,left)--40,000 interlocking basalt columns, the result of an ancient volcanic fissure eruption. The 40,000 tops of the columns create the illusion of a road surface --"The Giant's Causeway"-- like paving stones of a Roman road, cut and laid into place. But it's just exstrusive igneous rock doing what it does very well -- fool you. In Italy we have the Cyclopean Isles (Italian: Isole Ciclopi) off of Sicily, noted for their rows of basaltic columns piled one above another, some set back from others, staggered, looking like intentionally built terraces. They lie not far from Mount Etna off the eastern coast of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea. Formed about 500,000 years ago, the Cyclopean Isles are of volcanic origin and may at one time have been attached to Sicily. They all look like they were built. Certainly the Cyclopean Isles play a role in mythology and literature. Homer tells us when Ulysses and his crew on their Odyssey, fled from the one-eyed monsters, the Cyclopes, and escape back to their ship, when...
                         "The monster suddenly hoisted a boulder --far larger--
                                and heaved it, putting his weight behind it,
                                massive strength, and the boulder crashed close,
                                landing just in the wake of our own dark stern..."
                                          (transl. Robert Fagles)

You can see the site of all this action from Capo Mulini

  above: View of the Cyclopean Isles as seen from Capo Mulini

A few of other places in Italy that have the same extrusive igneous rock "constructed" look in Italy are the Alcantara River Gorges in Sicily; Lake Bolsena in Lazio; Cuccureddu de Zeppara in Sardinia; and Seiser Alm in South Tyrol.



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supplemental article #5 in the Science Portal - added May 26, 2023

Mary Somerville, Mistress of Science, in Naples
by
Luciano Mangiafico with Jeff Matthews

There's a monument tomb to Mary Somerville in the old English cemetery in Naples (image below). She died here in 1872. Like other Italian cities, Naples has a small cemetery for non-Catholics who died here in the city in the 19th century. (There's another one on the nearby isle of Capri, for example. The one in Naples is now a public park on Corso Garibaldi, halfway between the main train station and Piazza Carlo III. The mortal remains were removed in 1990, but nine prominent funerary monuments remain on the site. They really do add to the beauty of the place. Mary Somerville's monument is lovely. Her two daughters commissioned it in 1873 from a 19-year-old Calabrian sculptor, Francesco Jerace. It shows an older woman sitting on a chair and gazing into the distance, just as she did in her last years on the old Riviera di Chiaia. It's a valuable work of art, since Jerace went on to become well-known as the "Neapolitan Rodin". I like Jerace over Rodin, and I like to think that Mary Somerville would feel the same way. Everything I read about her makes me wish I had known her.

painting by Thomas Phillips, 1834                           

I don't know if her life was exciting and splendid to her while she lived it. But it is if you read her — let's say, one achievement after another. It's like reading about Leonardo da Vinci. A total polymath, a Jill of all trades and mistress of every one of them. Her maiden name was Fairfax, and she was born in Jedburgh, Scotland, in December 1780. Her father, a naval officer, thought women should learn about cooking, sewing and womanly things. She was a girl and thus had a limited formal education. The other stuff —Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, geology, geography, astronomy and classic literature— she did those on her own. Her husband didn't think much of that. They were married in 1804 and had two children. He died in 1807. She left London and went back to Scotland and resumed her mathematics, astronomy, and the rest.

She remarried in 1812 and this time lucked out. William Somerville (1771-1860) was an established medical doctor, who encouraged his wife’s studies, acted as her advisor and manager, and introduced her to the many intellectuals and scholars in his circle of friends. As they say: behind every great woman of science, there's a thirsty husband who's happy his wife has a brain, so he can go out with the guys for a few drinks. That circle of friends included:

• Charles Babbage, at the time working on his Calculating Engine, the precursor of the modern computer;

•  painter J.M.W. Turner;

•  novelist Sir Walter Scott;

• William Wallace, the brilliant mathematician, one of whose students was Mary Somerville; 

•  Lord Henry Brougham, a British statesman who played a prominent role in the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.
  

Mary shared her own rapidly increasing knowledge. She was a generous woman. She gave lessons in mathematics to Ada Gordon Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord George Byron. If you know something about computers, that will ring a bell— Ada...Ada...yes...the first to see that Babbage's Calculating Engine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, Ada Lovelace is called the first computer programmer. She met Charles Babbage through Mary Somerville. The girls were chatting over tea and quadratic equations. Science is, indeed, a great adventure.

Mary Somerville’s fame as a mathematician and a scientist of the first rank was evident early on. In 1826 inventor David Brewster called her "the most extraordinary woman in Europe". When Lord Brougham asked her to translate French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace's, Mecanique Celeste, into English, she did such a fine job that she was elected to several learned societies and the British government granted her a pension. Her second book, On the Connection of the Physical Sciences (1834), popularized science and was a best-seller, leading historian of science William Whewell to actually coin the term "scientist" in his review of the book, so impressed was he by her "showing how detached branches have, in the history of science, been united by the discovery of general principles." That is the sign of the great polymath. They don't know it all, but they know it's all connected. In 1848 she published Physical Geography, where she stressed the mutual dependence between living organisms and nature; it became a university textbook for close to a century. Her fourth book, Molecular and Microscopic Science, came out in 1869 in two volumes and was another success.

Her life underwent a dramatic change of venue in the mid-1830s. Mary, her husband and two daughters from her first marriage moved to Italy, where the climate was better for her husband's frail health. They lived first in Rome and then in Florence, where her husband passed away in 1860. Then they lived in La Spezia until 1866. Before her husband’s death, the family had been all over north and central Italy and to Germany.

Sometime in 1866, Mary Somerville and her two daughters, Martha Charters and Mary Charlotte, moved to Naples, and spent their summers in the hills above Sorrento. Advanced years did not keep the scientist from her studies, and she kept up correspondence with scientists from Italy and elsewhere. At the age of 86, accompanied by her daughters, she climbed Mt. Vesuvius! It's a volcano and that's what you'd expect a scientist to do —climb it.  Also, in 1866, she was one of the signatories of John Stuart Mill's unsuccessful petition to the British House of Commons for female suffrage, and the first to sign his later petition on the same subject in 1868. She grew hard of hearing, but she still had a keen mind and dictated her memoirs to her daughter Martha, who edited and published them in 1873. She told her daughter, “Though far advanced in years, I take as lively an interest as ever in passing events. I regret that I shall not live to know the results of the expedition to determine the currents of the ocean, the distance of the earth from the sun determined by the transits of Venus, and the source of the most renowned of rivers, the discovery of which will immortalize the name of Dr Livingstone...”

What did she "believe", if anything? It's hard to say, but I am taken by something American astronomer, Maria Mitchell, said. Mitchell came along just a few years later and went to Europe in 1857 to see European astronomy facilities and, of course, to find Mary Somerville, by then the elderly stateswoman of science. Mitchell wrote:

"I could but admire Mrs. Somerville as a woman. The ascent of the steep and rugged path of science had not unfitted her for the drawing-room circle; the hours of devotion to close study have not been incompatible with the duties of wife and mother; the mind that has turned to rigid demonstration has not thereby lost its faith in those truths which figures will not prove. ‘I have no doubt,’ said she, in speaking of the heavenly bodies, ‘that in another state of existence we shall know more about these things.’

Mary Somerville died in her sleep on 29 November 1872, a month before her 92nd birthday. Her two daughters, who died  in 1875 and 1879, respectively, joined her in the memorial tomb they had commissioned for her in the English Cemetery in Naples. In her obituary of December 2, 1872, The Morning Post wrote that “whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science, there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science.” Recognition of her role in science continues to this day. In 1879, seven years after her death, Somerville College was established at Oxford, an Arctic island and a crater on the moon are named for her, and her portrait even graces the £10 note of the Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the few women besides royalty to appear on UK currency.

Things have changed since Somerville’s early life, says Dr Patricia Fara, the President of the British Society for the History of Science. She explained that when Somerville’s first scientific paper, on magnetism in the sun, was  published by the Royal Astronomical Society in 1826, her husband had to present the paper for her. The Royal Society now has a marble bust of Mary Somerville on the premises, but she wouldn't have been allowed in the building when she wrote it.

Alexander Graham Bell, a supporter of women’s rights, wrote ironically to his wife on October 5, 1875, “Mrs. Mary Somerville was guilty of the most unladylike conduct in daring to write works on the Connection of the Physical Sciences. Why should any ambitious woman be allowed to invade man’s sacred domains?”

Selected References
1. Chapman, Allan. Mary Somerville: Pioneering Pragmatist. Astronomy and Geophysics,
Volume 57, Issue 2, April 2016.
https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/57/2/2.10/2468642;
2. Secord, James. Mary Somerville’s Vision of Science. Physics Today 71 (1), 46–52 (January 2018)
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/1/46/819012/Mary-Somerville-s-vision-of-science;
3. Strickland, Elisabeth. Mary Fairfax Somerville, Queen of Science. Notices of the American
Mathematical Society, Vol. 64, No. 8 (September 2017), 929-931.
https://www.ams.org/publications/journals/notices/201708/rnoti-p929.pdf;
4. Wikipedia. Mary Somerville.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville;
5. Somerville, Martha, editor. Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874.
6. https://electricscotland.com/history/women/lifeofmarysomerville.pdf
7. A Bust of Mary Somerville in Vassar Encyclopedia at
    https://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/