Page 560 - Atlas of Creation Volume 2

A TWO-THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD ANALOG COMPUTER:

A DISCOVERY TO CONFOUND

THE EVOLUTIONISTS' SCENARIO

In the year 1900, in one of modern archaeology's first major underwater finds, a sunken ship was discovered
at the western entrance to the Aegean Sea between the islands of Crete and Kythera. The ship had been
loaded full of figurines and amphorae, now in fragments.

Most of the remains were determined to be the works of Greek artists of the early pre-Christian period. But
among them was a calcified bronze fragment whose purpose was unknown. But after years of research, it
was discovered that this mysterious artifact was an amazingly complex scientific device.

As this interesting device slowly dried out, its old wooden case and inner parts cracked, revealing four flat
parts. On the inner side of a geared wheel was an inscription that proved very difficult to decipher. Scientists
suggested that this was a navigating instrument. There have been many ideas put forward about this object
but no clear conclusions. Speculations about it continued until the investigations in 1951 by Yale professor

Derek J. de Solla Price.

In order to reconstruct the device, Price and his Greek colleagues investigated it by bombarding it with X-
rays and gamma rays. Inside, they discovered layers of gears of various sizes arranged one above another.
After long calculations of the probable original proportions of the gears, Price came to a stunning conclusion:
The ancient Greeks had designed a mechanism to reproduce the actual movements of the sun, moon and
planets in their past, present and future. This "Antikythera" mechanism was a 2,000-year-old analog com-
puter. 1

This discovery confounded the claims of evolutionists that only rudimentary mechanisms were invented

and utilized before the Hellenistic period.

The mechanism had originally been a bronze mechanism inside a rectangular wooden box. In front and at
the rear were bronze doors on which the craftsman-inventor had inscribed detailed information. To read the
information generated by the device, there were three dials. The first contained two scales, one of which dis-
played the signs of the Zodiac; the other was inscribed with the Greek names for the months of the year.

*The first dial showed the position of the Sun on every day of the year as it moved throughout the Zodiac.

* The second dial showed the eighteen-year cycle of solar eclipses.

* The third dial depicted the various phases of the moon.

An input was provided by a handle that needed to be turned once a day to turn a wheel of some thirty-nine
bronze gears, which were meshed on parallel planes. This moved a driving-wheel that was attached with
two trains of gears that were connected through a toothed turntable. The turntable acted as a differential gear
train and when the input handle was turned, the two shafts rotated at different speeds. The differential

gears, now used in modern-day automobiles that provide the tires to revolve at different rates of speeds on
curves, were invented only in the 17th century. Price called the device one of "the greatest basis mechanical
inventions of all time." 2

This discovery caused a major repercussion around the world. With it, the evolutionists' fictitious schema of
"technological evolution" was upended. According to evolutionists, any civilization 2,000 years old ought to
have no sophisticated technology and have used only simple tools. However, this device invented by ancient
Greek mechanics showed that civilizations of the past were not as evolutionists imagine. They produced a
celestial computer centuries ago and were more advanced than many medieval civilizations. (The first ana-

3
log computer was developed in 1931 by Vannevar Bush.) In his book, The Puzzle of Ancient Man: Advanced
Technology in Past Civilizations?, Donald E. Chittick makes this comment:
Even more surprising perhaps is the discovery of an object located on a ship that was sunk in the Aegean Sea before

the time of Christ. It appeared to be some type of mechanical computing device. Modern computers are of two types:
analog and digital. The object discovered on this ship sunk before Christ's time was a fairly sophisticated analog com-
puter. 4

558 Atlas of Creation Vol. 2