5-Brice Peterson: The Antikythera Mechanism

I just learned about this thing today in my Astronomy Before the Telescope class. It's a one-of-a-kind tool used by Ancient Greeks to predict eclipses, phases of the moon, positions of the sun and the moon in the sky, and to calculate how many months would be in each year (most had 12, some had 13 to make up for the fact that lunar months are shorter than solar months), combining technology and astronomical theory from both Greece and Babylon. What's left of this artifact is the image on the bottom. The top and middle are recreations of what the mechanism might have looked like (they're the front and back, respectively). It's fantastically complex, featuring gear work that keeps all that information tabulated with the turn of just one crank. It seems the kind of fascinating thing that's ripe for conspiracy theories. I almost expect Dan Brown to write some kind of novel about the thing.