Imaging the Antikythera Mechanism

Google Tech Talk
March 5, 2010

ABSTRACT

Presented by Tom Malzbender.

The Antikythera Mechanism is an astronomical mechanical computer built by the ancient Greeks in 200 B.C.E. and resides in the National Archeological Museum in Athens. In 2005, Dan Gelb and I travelled to Athens to apply our Reflectance Transformation methods to the device in the hopes of uncovering faint writing on its surface. The trip - part of an international collaboration described in the Dec. 2009 issue of Scientific American - was a success and subsequent epigraphers have been able to decipher enough new writing to allow researchers to understand what the device was and how it operated. I will give an overview of both our imaging method and the Antikythera Mechanism itself.

Tom Malzbender is a senior research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Tom works at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision and signal processing and has developed the techniques of Reflectance Transformation, Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) and Fourier Volume Rendering. He also developed the capacitive sensing technology that allowed HP to penetrate the consumer graphics tablet market. His PTM methods are used by the National Gallery in London, the Tate Gallery and in the fields of criminal forensics, paleontology and archeology. Tom is on the program committees for several 3D graphics and vision conferences. More information can be found at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Tom_Malzbender/ .

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• tech
• talk
• ancient
• greece

[gandreou]

Great video. I want to try this technique!

[gamedevMike]

Interesting how this is used on images of real world objects.

[katheryncruz24]

Great.

[adelle0001]

great video! very informative

[whotaughtyou]

IMAGINATION

[gedankenwelten]

Cool stuff and great that the software I available to play with it :) .

[axlent123]

@HowardFair I have not watched this video yet, but to my point, Christianity is not anti science. problem is that some sides of science bow to the religion of the "Big Bang" and the evoultion of chemicals to life to cells and bugs, and monkeys, and man, It takes a lot of faith to believe that life started from absolutely nothing and become self aware living beings over time without the help of a higher power who was involved in this process.

[iRocPink20]

Umm okay

[HowardFair]

@215bgdogg, it's hard to imagine because knowledge does not always advance. It we hadn't had the excesses of the Romans and the anti-science of Christianity we'd and the way the Greeks thought we might have warp drive by now. We have been learning about how the universe works since the Renaissance, but there was a period of over 1000 years where nobody cared in the West.

[unapologeticmind]

@STEVEDIGIBOYtv Well, you just need to provide an alternative theory on how a few sponge divers driven off course in 1905 happened to find it in a Roman shipwreck together with a whole number of other Greek artefacts from that time period. Also, you would have to explain the ancient Greek dialect used on the device and the presence of a dial for the Olymic Games which were abolished in 393AD, among other things. Cicero mentioned the existence of such mechanical devices taken from the Greeks...

[Domytar]

i think they just set it every time they looked up at the stars.

like an astrolabe daddy