Acceso usuarios
Christián C. Carman
The Antikythera Mechanism is a mechanical astronomical instrument that was discovered in an ancient shipwreck at the beginning of the twentieth century, made about the second century B.C. It had several pointers showing the positions of the moon and sun in the zodiac, the approximate date according to a lunisolar calendar, several subsidiary dials showing calendrical phenomena, and also predictions of eclipses. Scholars agree that it probably also showed the position of the planets in the zodiac. In 2012 Carman and Evans on the one hand, and Freeth and Jones on the other, independently published very similar proposals for the planets based on the pin and slot device, already deciphered for the Moon by Freeth & al. in 2008. One year later, Evans and Carman suggested that the epicycle and deferent system could have been originated using the pin and slot device as an inspiration, and not the other way around. According to that proposal, pin and slot devices were conceived as a mechanical solution for producing anomalistic motions in geared mechanisms and only afterwards, considering the device, some geometer proposed the epicycle and deferent model. We did not propose, however, any particular way in which the pin and slot model could have been designed starting only with astronomical data, being unaware of the epicycle and deferent model. In this article I offer a possible path that the maker of the mechanism could have followed.
