Watch an Accurate Reconstruction of the World’s Oldest Computer, the 2,200 Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, from Start to Finish

in Astronomy, History, Science | June 14th, 2021

There’s noth­ing like an ancient mys­tery, espe­cial­ly one as seem­ing­ly insol­u­ble as the ori­gins of “the world’s first com­put­er,” the Antikythera mech­a­nism. Dis­cov­ered off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the cor­rod­ed col­lec­tion of gears and dials seemed fake to sci­en­tists at first because of its inge­nious­ness. It has since been dat­ed to 100 to 150 BC and has inspired decades of research and spec­u­la­tive recon­struc­tion. Yet, no one knows who made it, and more impor­tant­ly, no one knows how it was made.

“The dis­tance between this device’s com­plex­i­ty and oth­ers made at the same time is infi­nite,” says Adam Woj­cik, a mate­ri­als sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don. “Frankly, there is noth­ing like it that has ever been found. It’s out of this world.”

The expres­sion should not make us think of ancient aliens — the Antikythera mech­a­nism con­tains more than enough evi­dence of human lim­i­ta­tion, show­ing a geo­cen­tric mod­el of the cos­mos with the only five plan­ets its mak­er would have known.

The 2,000-plus year-old device con­tin­ues to reveal its secrets, includ­ing hid­den inscrip­tions found dur­ing CT scans of the object, as Smith­son­ian report­ed in 2015. The mech­a­nism is “sim­i­lar in size to a man­tel clock, and bits of wood found on the frag­ments sug­gest it was housed in a wood­en case. Like a clock, the case would’ve had a large cir­cu­lar face with rotat­ing hands. There was a knob or han­dle on the side, for wind­ing the mech­a­nism for­ward or back­ward. And as the knob turned, trains of inter­lock­ing gear­wheels drove at least sev­en hands at var­i­ous speeds. Instead of hours and min­utes, the hands dis­played celes­tial time.”

If the Antikythera mech­a­nism is a “celes­tial clock,” who bet­ter to design and build its recon­struc­tion than a clock­mak­er? That is exact­ly what we see in the videos above, cre­at­ed for the clock­mak­ing YouTube chan­nel Click­spring. Using the best sci­en­tif­ic mod­el of the mech­a­nism to date — pub­lished this year by Dr. Tony Freeth and col­leagues of the Antikythera Mech­a­nism Research Project — Click­spring shows how the device might have fit togeth­er and makes edu­cat­ed guess­es about the right place­ment of its dozens of small parts.

You can see a pre­view of the Antikythera recon­struc­tion project at the top, watch the full project above, and see indi­vid­ual episodes show­cas­ing dif­fer­ent phas­es of con­struc­tion on YouTube. The mod­el “con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence,” Freeth writes, “and match­es the descrip­tions in the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself.” What no one can fig­ure out, how­ev­er, is just how the ancient Greek arti­sans who made it shaped pre­ci­sion met­al parts with­out lath­es and oth­er mod­ern tools of the machine-mak­ers trade. Researchers, and clock­mak­ers, may have pieced togeth­er the Antikythera puz­zle, but the mys­tery of how it came into exis­tence at all remains unsolved.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Researchers Devel­op a Dig­i­tal Mod­el of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, “the World’s First Com­put­er”

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Finnish Astrophotographer Spent 12 Years Creating a 1.7 Gigapixel Panoramic Photo of the Entire Milky Way

in Astronomy, Photography | March 22nd, 2021

In the final, cli­mac­tic scene of Japan­ese nov­el­ist Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Coun­try, the Milky Way engulfs the pro­tag­o­nist — an aes­thete who keeps him­self detached from the world, a uni­ver­sal per­spec­tive over­tak­ing an insignif­i­cant indi­vid­ual.

We now know the Milky Way itself to be a minus­cule part of the whole, just one of 100 to 200 bil­lion galax­ies. But until Edwin Hub­ble’s obser­va­tions in 1924, it was thought to con­tain all the stars in exis­tence.

The Milky Way-as-uni­verse is a pow­er­ful image, and cer­tain­ly more com­pre­hen­si­ble than the uni­verse as astronomers cur­rent­ly under­stand it. Its vast­ness can’t be com­pressed into a sym­bol­ic form like the via lactea, “Milky Way,” or as the Greeks called it, galak­tikos kýk­los, “milky cir­cle.” Andy Brig­gs sum­ma­rizes just a few of the ancient myths and leg­ends:

To the ancient Arme­ni­ans, it was straw strewn across the sky by the god Vahagn. In east­ern Asia, it was the Sil­very Riv­er of Heav­en. The Finns and Esto­ni­ans saw it as the Path­way of the Birds.… Both the Greeks and the Romans saw the star­ry band as a riv­er of milk. The Greek myth said it was milk from the breast of the god­dess Hera, divine wife of Zeus. The Romans saw the riv­er of light as milk from their god­dess Ops.

A barred spi­ral galaxy spin­ning around a “galac­tic bulge” with an emp­ty cen­ter, a “mon­strous black hole,” notes Space.com, “bil­lions of times as mas­sive as the sun”… the Milky Way remains an awe­some sym­bol for a uni­verse too vast for us to hold in our minds.

Wit­ness, for exam­ple, the just-released image fur­ther up, a 1.7 gigapix­el panoram­ic pho­to of the Milky Way, from Tau­rus to Cygnus, 100,000 pix­els wide, pieced togeth­er from 234 pan­els by Finnish astropho­tog­ra­ph­er J‑P Met­savainio, who began the project all the way back in 2009. “I can hear music in this com­po­si­tion,” he writes at his site, “from high sparks and bub­bles at left to deep and mas­sive sounds at right.”

Over 12 years, and around 1250 hours of expo­sure, Michael Zhang writes at Petapix­el, Met­savainio “focused on dif­fer­ent areas and objects in the Milky Way, shoot­ing stitched mosaics of them as indi­vid­ual art­works.” As he began to knit the galac­tic clouds of stars and gasses togeth­er into a Pho­to­shop panora­ma, he dis­cov­ered a “com­plex image set which is part­ly over­lap­ping with lots of unim­aged areas between and around frames.” Over the years, he filled in the gaps, shoot­ing the “miss­ing data.” He describes his equip­ment and process in detail, for those flu­ent in the tech­ni­cal jar­gon. The rest of us can stare in silent won­der at more of Metsavainio’s work on his web­site (where you can also pur­chase prints) and Face­book, and let our­selves be over­tak­en by awe.

via Petapix­el and Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

How Sci­en­tists Col­orize Those Beau­ti­ful Space Pho­tos Tak­en By the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope

Earth­rise, Apol­lo 8’s Pho­to of Earth from Space, Turns 50: Down­load the Icon­ic Pho­to­graph from NASA

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Researchers Develop a Digital Model of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, “the World’s First Computer”

in Astronomy, History, Science | March 18th, 2021


What’s the world’s old­est com­put­er? If you answered the 5‑ton, room-sized IBM Mark I, it’s a good guess, but you’d be off by a cou­ple thou­sand years or so. The first known com­put­er may have been a hand­held device, a lit­tle larg­er than the aver­age tablet. It was also hand-pow­ered and had a lim­it­ed, but nonethe­less remark­able, func­tion: it fol­lowed the Meton­ic cycle, “the 235-month pat­tern that ancient astronomers used to pre­dict eclipses,” writes Rob­by Berman at Big Think.

The ancient arti­fact known as the Antikythera mech­a­nism — named for the Greek Island under which it was dis­cov­ered — turned up in 1900. It took anoth­er three-quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry before the secrets of what first appeared as a “cor­rod­ed lump” revealed a device of some kind dat­ing from 150 to 100 BC. “By 2009, mod­ern imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy had iden­ti­fied all 30 of the Antikythera mechanism’s gears, and a vir­tu­al mod­el of it was released,” as we not­ed in an ear­li­er post.

The device could pre­dict the posi­tions of the plan­ets (or at least those the Greeks knew of: Mer­cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Sat­urn), as well as the sun, moon, and eclipses. It placed Earth at the cen­ter of the uni­verse. Researchers study­ing the Antikythera mech­a­nism under­stood that much. But they couldn’t quite under­stand exact­ly how it worked, since only about a third of the com­plex mech­a­nism has sur­vived.

Image by Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don

Now, it appears that researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don have fig­ured it out, debut­ing a new com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports. “Ours is the first mod­el that con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence and match­es the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself,” lead author Tony Freeth tells The Engi­neer. In the video above, you can learn about the his­to­ry of the mech­a­nism and its redis­cov­ery in the 20th cen­tu­ry, and see a detailed expla­na­tion of Freeth and his team’s dis­cov­er­ies.

“About the size of a large dic­tio­nary,” the arti­fact has proven to be the “most com­plex piece of engi­neer­ing from the ancient world” the video informs us. Hav­ing built a 3D mod­el, the researchers next intend to build a repli­ca of the device. If they can do so with “mod­ern machin­ery,” writes Guardian sci­ence edi­tor Ian Sam­ple, “they aim to do the same with tech­niques from antiq­ui­ty” — no small task con­sid­er­ing that it’s “unclear how the ancient Greeks would have man­u­fac­tured such com­po­nents” with­out the use of a lathe, a tool they prob­a­bly did not pos­sess.

Image by Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don

The mech­a­nism will still hold its secrets even if the UCL team’s mod­el works. Why was it made, what was it used for? Were there oth­er such devices? Hope­ful­ly, we won’t have to wait anoth­er sev­er­al decades to learn the answers. Read the team’s Sci­en­tif­ic Reports arti­cle here. 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Little-Known Female Scientists Who Mapped 400,000 Stars Over a Century Ago: An Introduction to the “Harvard Computers”

in Astronomy, Gender, Harvard, Science | March 2nd, 2021

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

As team names go, the Har­vard Com­put­ers has kind of an odd­ball ring to it, but it’s far prefer­able to Pickering’s Harem, as the female sci­en­tists brought in under the Har­vard Observatory’s male direc­tor were col­lec­tive­ly referred to ear­ly on in their 40-some years of ser­vice to the insti­tu­tion.

A pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal sto­ry has it that Direc­tor Edward Pick­er­ing was so frus­trat­ed by his male assis­tants’ pokey pace in exam­in­ing 1000s of pho­to­graph­ic plates bear­ing images of stars spot­ted by tele­scopes in Har­vard and the south­ern hemi­sphere, he declared his maid could do a bet­ter job.

If true, it was no idle threat.

In 1881, Pick­er­ing did indeed hire his maid, Williami­na Flem­ing, to review the plates with a mag­ni­fy­ing glass, cat­a­logu­ing the bright­ness of stars that showed up as smudges or grey or black spots. She also cal­cu­lat­ed—aka computed—their posi­tions, and, when pos­si­ble, chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion, col­or, and tem­per­a­ture.

The new­ly sin­gle 23-year-old moth­er was not une­d­u­cat­ed. She had served as a teacher for years pri­or to emi­grat­ing from Scot­land, but when her hus­band aban­doned her in Boston, she couldn’t afford to be fussy about the kind of employ­ment she sought. Work­ing at the Pick­er­ings meant secure lodg­ing and a small income.

Not that the pro­mo­tion rep­re­sent­ed a finan­cial wind­fall for Flem­ing and the more than 80 female com­put­ers who joined her over the next four decades. They earned between 25 to 50 cents an hour, half of what a man in the same posi­tion would have been paid.

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

At one point Flem­ing, who as a sin­gle moth­er was quite aware that she was bur­dened with “all house­keep­ing cares …in addi­tion to those of pro­vid­ing the means to meet their expens­es,” addressed the mat­ter of her low wages with Pick­er­ing, leav­ing her to vent in her diary:

I am imme­di­ate­ly told that I receive an excel­lent salary as women’s salaries stand.… Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a fam­i­ly to take care of as well as the men?… And this is con­sid­ered an enlight­ened age!

Har­vard cer­tain­ly got its money’s worth from its female work­force when you con­sid­er that the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems they devel­oped led to iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of near­ly 400,000 stars.

Flem­ing, who became respon­si­ble for hir­ing her cowork­ers, was the first to dis­cov­er white dwarfs and the Horse­head Neb­u­la in Ori­on, in addi­tion to 51 oth­er neb­u­lae, 10 novae, and 310 vari­able stars.

An impres­sive achieve­ment, but anoth­er diary entry belies any glam­our we might be tempt­ed to assign:

From day to day my duties at the Obser­va­to­ry are so near­ly alike that there will be lit­tle to describe out­side ordi­nary rou­tine work of mea­sure­ment, exam­i­na­tion of pho­tographs, and of work involved in the reduc­tion of these obser­va­tions.

Pick­er­ing believed that the female com­put­ers should attend con­fer­ences and present papers, but for the most part, they were kept so busy ana­lyz­ing pho­to­graph­ic plates, they had lit­tle time left over to explore their own areas of inter­est, some­thing that might have afford­ed them work of a more the­o­ret­i­cal nature.

Anoth­er diary entry finds Flem­ing yearn­ing to get out from under a moun­tain of busy work:

Look­ing after the numer­ous pieces of rou­tine work which have to be kept pro­gress­ing, search­ing for con­fir­ma­tion of objects dis­cov­ered else­where, attend­ing to sci­en­tif­ic cor­re­spon­dence, get­ting mate­r­i­al in form for pub­li­ca­tion, etc, has con­sumed so much of my time dur­ing the past four years that lit­tle is left for the par­tic­u­lar inves­ti­ga­tions in which I am espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed.

And yet the work of Flem­ing and oth­er notable com­put­ers such as Hen­ri­et­ta Swan Leav­itt and Annie Jump Can­non is still help­ing sci­en­tists make sense of the heav­ens, so much so that Har­vard is seek­ing vol­un­teers for Project PHaE­DRA, to help tran­scribe their log­books and note­books to make them full-text search­able on the NASA Astro­physics Data Sys­tem. Learn how you can get involved here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Women Sci­en­tists Launch a Data­base Fea­tur­ing the Work of 9,000 Women Work­ing in the Sci­ences

Real Women Talk About Their Careers in Sci­ence

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Surface of Mars Shown in Stunning 4K Resolution

in Astronomy, Travel | February 18th, 2021

Could you use a men­tal escape? Some­thing that trans­ports you beyond the con­fines of your pan­dem­ic-nar­rowed world? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above and below, you can find high def­i­n­i­tion footage cap­tured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Oppor­tu­ni­ty and Curios­i­ty. The footage (also con­tributed by JPL-Cal­tech, MSSS, Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty and ASU) was stitched togeth­er by Elder­Fox Doc­u­men­taries, cre­at­ing what they call the most life­like expe­ri­ence of being on Mars.

Safe trav­els.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lec­tures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar Sys­tem … For Kids (1977)

Mars Rover, Curios­i­ty, Will Face Sev­en Min­utes of Ter­ror on August 5

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

Leonard Nimoy Nar­rates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voy­age to the Ori­gins of the Solar Sys­tem

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A 16th-Century Astronomy Book Featured “Analog Computers” to Calculate the Shape of the Moon, the Position of the Sun, and More

in Astronomy, Books, History | January 13th, 2021

If you want to learn how the plan­ets move, you’ll almost cer­tain­ly go to one place first: Youtube. Yes, there have been plen­ty of worth­while books writ­ten on the sub­ject, and read­ing them will prove essen­tial to fur­ther deep­en­ing your under­stand­ing. But videos have the capac­i­ty of motion, an unde­ni­able ben­e­fit when motion itself is the con­cept under dis­cus­sion. Less than twen­ty years into the Youtube age, we’ve already seen a good deal of inno­va­tion in the art of audio­vi­su­al expla­na­tion. But we’re also well over half a mil­len­ni­um into the age of the book as we know it, a time that even in its ear­ly phas­es saw impres­sive attempts to go beyond text on a page.

Take, for exam­ple, Peter Api­an’s Cos­mo­graphia, first pub­lished in 1524. A 16th-cen­tu­ry Ger­man poly­math, Api­an (also known as Petrus Api­anus, and born Peter Bienewitz) had a pro­fes­sion­al inter­est in math­e­mat­ics, astron­o­my and car­tog­ra­phy. At their inter­sec­tion stood the sub­ject of “cos­mog­ra­phy” from which this impres­sive book takes its name, and its project of map­ping the then-known uni­verse.

“The trea­tise pro­vid­ed instruc­tion in astron­o­my, geog­ra­phy, car­tog­ra­phy, nav­i­ga­tion, and instru­ment-mak­ing,” writes Frank Swetz at the Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca. “It was one of the first Euro­pean books to depict and dis­cuss North Amer­i­ca and includ­ed mov­able volvelles allow­ing the read­ers to inter­act with and use some of the charts and instru­ment lay­outs pre­sent­ed.”

Pop-up book enthu­si­asts like Ellen Rubin will know what volvelles are; you and I may not, but if you’ve ever moved a paper wheel or slid­er on a page, you’ve used one. The volvelle first emerged in the medieval era, not as an amuse­ment to liv­en up chil­dren’s books but as a kind of “ana­log com­put­er” embed­ded in seri­ous sci­en­tif­ic works. “The volvelles make the prac­ti­cal nature of cos­mog­ra­phy clear,” writes Katie Tay­lor at Cam­bridge’s Whip­ple Library, which holds a copy of Cos­mo­graphia. “Read­ers could manip­u­late these devices to solve prob­lems: find­ing the time at dif­fer­ent places and or one’s lat­i­tude, giv­en the height of the Sun above the hori­zon.”

Api­an orig­i­nal­ly includ­ed three such volvelles in Cos­mo­graphia. Lat­er, his dis­ci­ple Gem­ma Fri­sius, a Dutch physi­cian, instru­ment mak­er and math­e­mati­cian, pro­duced expand­ed edi­tions that includ­ed anoth­er. “In all its forms,” writes Swetz, “the book was extreme­ly pop­u­lar in the 16th cen­tu­ry, going through 30 print­ings in 14 lan­guages.” Despite the book’s suc­cess, it’s not so easy to come by a copy in good (indeed work­ing) con­di­tion near­ly 500 years lat­er. If these descrip­tions of its pages and their volvelles have piqued your curios­i­ty, you can see these inge­nious paper devices in action in these videos tweet­ed out by Atlas Obscu­ra. As with plan­ets them­selves, you can’t ful­ly appre­ci­ate them until you see them move for your­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Atlas of Space: Behold Bril­liant Maps of Con­stel­la­tions, Aster­oids, Plan­ets & “Every­thing in the Solar Sys­tem Big­ger Than 10km”

An Illus­trat­ed Map of Every Known Object in Space: Aster­oids, Dwarf Plan­ets, Black Holes & Much More

When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion, The Dream (1609)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Watch a Young Carl Sagan Appear in His First TV Documentary, The Violent Universe (1969)

in Astronomy, Science, Television | October 5th, 2020

Much of the world got to know Carl Sagan through Cos­mos: A Per­son­al Voy­age, the thir­teen-part PBS series on the nature of the uni­verse — and the inten­si­ty of Sagan’s own pas­sion to dis­cov­er that nature. First aired in 1980, it would become the most wide­ly watched series in the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can pub­lic tele­vi­sion. But it’s not as if Sagan had been lan­guish­ing in obscu­ri­ty before: he’d been pub­lish­ing pop­u­lar books since the ear­ly 1970s, and 1977’s The Drag­ons of Eden: Spec­u­la­tions on the Evo­lu­tion of Human Intel­li­gence won him a Pulitzer Prize. When Cos­mos made its impact, some view­ers may even have remem­bered its host from a series of sim­i­lar­ly themed broad­casts a decade ear­li­er, The Vio­lent Uni­verse.

Pro­duced by the BBC in 1969 and broad­cast just three months before the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing, The Vio­lent Uni­verse (view­able above) explains in five parts a range of dis­cov­er­ies made dur­ing the then-recent “rev­o­lu­tion in astron­o­my,” includ­ing infrared galax­ies, neu­tri­nos, pul­sars and quasars, red giants and white dwarfs.

In so doing it includes footage tak­en in obser­va­to­ries not just across the Earth — Eng­land, Puer­to Rico, Hol­land, Cal­i­for­na — but high above it in orbit and even deep inside it, beneath the bad­lands of South Dako­ta. One install­ment pays a vis­it to Kōchi, the rur­al Japan­ese pre­fec­tur­al cap­i­tal where gui­tarist-astronomer Tsu­to­mu Seki makes his home — and his small home obser­va­to­ry, where he had worked to co-dis­cov­er Comet Ikeya–Seki just four years before.

All of this inter­na­tion­al mate­r­i­al — or rather inter­stel­lar mate­r­i­al — is anchored in the stu­dio by tele­vi­sion jour­nal­ist Robert Mac­Neil, lat­er of PBS’ The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, and a cer­tain pro­fes­sor of astron­o­my at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty by the name of Carl Sagan. Despite exud­ing a more delib­er­ate seri­ous­ness than he would in Cos­mos, the young Sagan nev­er­the­less explains the astro­nom­i­cal and astro­phys­i­cal con­cepts at hand with a clar­i­ty and vig­or that would have made them imme­di­ate­ly clear to tele­vi­sion audi­ences of half a cen­tu­ry ago, and indeed still makes them clear to the Youtube audi­ences of today. Apart, per­haps, from its Twi­light Zone-style theme music The Vio­lent Uni­verse has in its visu­al ele­ments aged more grace­ful­ly than the 70s series that made Sagan into a sci­ence icon. And how many oth­er oth­er pub­lic-tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­taries about the uni­verse include poet­ry recita­tions from Richard Bur­ton?

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lec­tures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar Sys­tem … For Kids (1977)

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Carl Sagan on the Virtues of Mar­i­jua­na (1969)

Carl Sagan Issues a Chill­ing Warn­ing to Amer­i­ca in His Final Inter­view (1996)

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Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Science Fiction, The Dream (1609)

in Astronomy, Literature, Religion, Sci Fi, Science | July 21st, 2020

The point at which we date the birth of any genre is apt to shift depend­ing on how we define it. When did sci­ence fic­tion begin? Many cite ear­ly mas­ters of the form like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as its prog­en­i­tors. Oth­ers reach back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 Franken­stein as the gen­e­sis of the form. Some few know The Blaz­ing World, a 1666 work of fic­tion by Mar­garet Cavendish, Duchess of New­cas­tle, who called her book a “her­maph­ro­dit­ic text.” Accord­ing to the judg­ment of such experts as Isaac Asi­mov and Carl Sagan, sci-fi began even ear­li­er, with a nov­el called Som­ni­um (“The Dream”), writ­ten by none oth­er than Ger­man astronomer and math­e­mati­cian Johannes Kepler. Maria Popo­va explains at Brain Pick­ings:

In 1609, Johannes Kepler fin­ished the first work of gen­uine sci­ence fic­tion — that is, imag­i­na­tive sto­ry­telling in which sen­si­cal sci­ence is a major plot device. Som­ni­um, or The Dream, is the fic­tion­al account of a young astronomer who voy­ages to the Moon. Rich in both sci­en­tif­ic inge­nu­ity and sym­bol­ic play, it is at once a mas­ter­work of the lit­er­ary imag­i­na­tion and an invalu­able sci­en­tif­ic doc­u­ment, all the more impres­sive for the fact that it was writ­ten before Galileo point­ed the first spy­glass at the sky and before Kepler him­self had ever looked through a tele­scope.

The work was not pub­lished until 1634, four years after Kepler’s death, by his son Lud­wig, though “it had been Kepler’s intent to per­son­al­ly super­vise the pub­li­ca­tion of his man­u­script,” writes Gale E. Chris­tian­son. His final, posthu­mous work began as a dis­ser­ta­tion in 1593 that addressed the ques­tion Coper­ni­cus asked years ear­li­er: “How would the phe­nom­e­na occur­ring in the heav­ens appear to an observ­er sta­tioned on the moon?” Kepler had first come “under the thrall of the helio­cen­tric mod­el,” Popo­va writes, “as a stu­dent at the Luther­an Uni­ver­si­ty of Tübin­gen half a cen­tu­ry after Coper­ni­cus pub­lished his the­o­ry.”

Kepler’s the­sis was “prompt­ly vetoed” by his pro­fes­sors, but he con­tin­ued to work on the ideas, and cor­re­spond­ed with Galileo 30 years before the Ital­ian astronomer defend­ed his own helio­cen­tric the­o­ry. “Six­teen years lat­er and far from Tübin­gen, he com­plet­ed an expand­ed ver­sion,” says Andrew Boyd in the intro­duc­tion to a radio pro­gram about the book. “Recast in a dream­like frame­work, Kepler felt free to probe ideas about the moon that he oth­er­wise couldn’t.” Not con­tent with cold abstrac­tion, Kepler imag­ined space trav­el, of a kind, and peo­pled his moon with aliens.

And what an imag­i­na­tion! Inhab­i­tants weren’t mere recre­ations of ter­res­tri­al life, but entire­ly new forms of life adapt­ed to lunar extremes. Large. Tough-skinned. They evoked visions of dinosaurs. Some used boats, imply­ing not just life but intel­li­gent, non-human life. Imag­ine how shock­ing that must have been at the time.

Even more shock­ing to author­i­ties were the means Kepler used in his text to reveal knowl­edge about the heav­ens and trav­el to the moon: beings he called “dae­mons” (a Latin word for benign nature spir­its before Chris­tian­i­ty hijacked the term), who com­mu­ni­cat­ed first with the hero’s moth­er, a witch prac­ticed in cast­ing spells.

The sim­i­lar­i­ties between Kepler’s pro­tag­o­nist, Dura­co­tus, and Kepler him­self (such as a peri­od of study under Dan­ish astronomer Tycho Bra­he) led the church to sus­pect the book was thin­ly veiled auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal occultism. Rumors cir­cu­lat­ed, and Kepler’s moth­er was arrest­ed for witch­craft and sub­ject­ed to ter­ri­tio ver­balis (detailed descrip­tions of the tor­tures that await­ed her, along with pre­sen­ta­tions of the var­i­ous devices).  It took Kepler five years to free her and pre­vent her exe­cu­tion.

Kepler’s sto­ry is trag­ic in many ways, for the loss­es he suf­fered through­out his life, includ­ing his son and his first wife to small­pox. But his per­se­ver­ance left behind one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing works of ear­ly sci­ence fiction—published hun­dreds of years before the genre is sup­posed to have begun. Despite the fan­tas­ti­cal nature of his work, “he real­ly believed,” says Sagan in the short clip from Cos­mos above, “that one day human beings would launch celes­tial ships with sails adapt­ed to the breezes of heav­en, filled with explor­ers who, he said, would not fear the vast­ness of space.”

Astron­o­my had lit­tle con­nec­tion with the mate­r­i­al world in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry. “With Kepler came the idea that a phys­i­cal force moves the plan­ets in their orbits,” as well as an imag­i­na­tive way to explore sci­en­tif­ic ideas no one would be able to ver­i­fy for decades, or even cen­turies. Hear Som­ni­um read at the top of the post and learn more about Kepler’s fas­ci­nat­ing life and achieve­ments at Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mary Shelley’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script of Franken­stein: This Is “Ground Zero of Sci­ence Fic­tion,” Says William Gib­son

Stream 47 Hours of Clas­sic Sci-Fi Nov­els & Sto­ries: Asi­mov, Wells, Orwell, Verne, Love­craft & More

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics Avail­able on the Web (Updat­ed)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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