"Science and the technical wonders it produces CAN blaze suddenly towards the heavens and then just as quickly return to the desert sands, lost and forgotten." Quote from a 2007 article in The Arkansas Oklahoma Astronomical Society online journal. The article is a reflection on all that was lost from science in the ancient world with events like the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria:
Suffice it to say that the sophistication of the Antikythera Mechanism gives all lovers of science and civilization pause, for it challenges the idea of continued uninterrupted human progress. Science and the technical wonders it produces CAN blaze suddenly towards the heavens and then just as quickly return to the desert sands, lost and forgotten. Indeed, the Hellenistic world that the Mechanism was created in did just that.
The great city of Alexandria in Egypt, the center of Hellenistic culture, once boasted a library and museum containing over half a million books, attracting scholars from all the known world. It was the first deliberately built great research center, museum, and library all in one, lavishly supported by the first three Ptolemy pharaohs. The library flourished for almost 300 years until it was burned in 48 B.C. during Julius Caesar’s war with Pompey. Many books were lost, but many also survived in a branch library in Alexandria at a temple complex called the Serapeum. With the Roman conquest, Alexandria’s golden age had passed but scholars still regarded the city as the place to complete their studies, that is, until the fourth century A.D. when the Serapeum was destroyed by an angry Christian mob. The books were either burned or lost in time. It is sobering to think that a scroll describing how to construct the Antikythera Mechanism may have been destroyed either in the library’s first fire or in the destruction of the Serapeum.
What else was lost in the fires? We have an idea partly from what was saved. Copies from the library of priceless works on science and the arts located in other cities eventually made their way back to Europe to ignite the Renaissance a thousand years later. Just a small sample of Alexandria’s genius - - Euclid’s Elements, the textbook in geometry used well into the 20th Century; Eratosthenes’ calculations for the tilt of the earth (he was off by only 5 seconds) and the circumference of the earth (off by only 225 miles); Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography (a copy of which would eventually reach the young explorer Christopher Columbus), his Optics (describing refraction), and his amazing Almagest on astronomy which includes the oldest surviving star catalogue; and Hero’s brilliant technical works including Automata, the first book on robotics, and his Pneumatica, Metrica, Mechanica, and Catoptrica covering a breathtaking range from the measurement of surfaces, to how to move heavy objects, to the physics of curved mirrors. There were histories written of the ancient world, treatises on medicine and anatomy, art, literature, rhetoric and religion, more works outlining scientific principles (including Hero on the principles of what we call today the steam engine), all lost, and known only by brief mentions in other preserved works from that era. Perhaps most heartbreaking of all is the disappearance of a work by the astronomer Aristarchus written in the third century B.C., describing the sun as the center of a system where the much smaller planets, including the earth, revolve around it; in other words, a heliocentric solar system 1,800 years before Copernicus! Today, we know of Aristarchus’ brilliant insight because it is mentioned and then dismissed by Archimedes in his The Sand Reckoner, a copy of which managed to survive to the present day.
A sketch of the internal workings of the Antikythera Mechanism.
Twenty four years after the burning of the Serapeum and the destruction of its library, Alexandria’s last great scientist, a woman named Hypatia, was pulled from her chariot by an angry mob of religious fanatics and brutally murdered. "It was," as Carl Sagan writes in his Cosmos, "as if an entire civilization had undergone some self-inflicted brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, ideas, and passions were extinguished irrevocably."
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