The Great Planetary Clockwork

Watchmaking began by stargazing ... a very long time ago.

The idea that time can be sectioned into units of different length is a construction of the mind which started long before the dawn of civilization in people who got that idea from watching the sky.

Long before the pyramids of Egypt rose from the desert sand, there were non-literate people making hand-held records which faithfully displayed the phases of the moon and the paths of the planets across the night sky. These “computers” didn’t plug into anything but were pieces of antler or stone into which were carved notations recording events in the sky. They are remarkable testaments to the intelligence of people living on Earth many thousands of years ago.

Carvings in a fragment of bone depict phases of the moon and motions of the observable planets. It was made by a Paleolithic astronomer living in Europe about 30,000 years ago.

Paleontologists are unsure when that degree of intelligence was reached in humans but the artifacts are there as mute evidence. It’s hard to grasp the idea that folks living that long ago were able to log accurate observations of the heavens in pieces of antler or bone. But somebody did!

Back when those people were walking the earth half the planet was totally dark all night long. The moon, planets and stars shone with a brilliance lost to us nowadays. To approach such an absence of light today, you’d have to be on the blacked-out deck of a wooden-hulled schooner around midnight in the middle of the ocean. Out there the stars are so bright that you can even see faint colors in the Milky Way.

“… The moon, planets and stars shone with a brilliance lost to us nowadays.” And there’s the evidence.

Those bright stars appear to move in unison on a rotating dome of heaven, locked in patterns that never change while the “stars” we know as planets move erratically, some appearing to advance then going back in reverse before continuing. Many thousands of years later astronomers, in order to explain those mysterious movements, plotted those same retrograde motions as cycles within cycles which you can see etched in cave walls and in fragments of bone and stone by those ancient astronomers.

A painting from the cave at Lascaux, France, dated 17,000 years ago, showing the Pleiades constellation just above the head of what later would be named Taurus. On the right is a photograph of the Pleiades. Today the two constellations, Taurus and the Pleiades, are in those same positions in the sky.

The ancients also had another way to record movements and phases in the sky. That was by creating mythical stories of great opposing forces of good and evil. This was thousands of years before the invention of writing so that the myths had to be memorized, word for word, in order to be passed down from generation to generation. They were stories made to explain the behavior of heavenly objects but they were “personified” and deliberately mad bizarre to make them memorable.

Two examples of Artist’s depictions of ancient Greek myths. On the left, Venus emerges from the sea. At right, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and delivers it to mankind..

These stone carvings and myths were the first human efforts to understand things that were going on beyond earthly existence. By recording them over the passing of many generations, people developed an understanding of number and from there to more complicated mathematics, leading ultimately to science.

To the ancients the earth was the center of the universe and the sun and planets revolved around it in a series of epicycles. The planets do move of course but so does the earth and these movements combined cause the visible planets to appear to “back up” periodically before resuming their previous pathways.

It is amazing, when you stop to think about it, that these huge things moving around in the sky are proceeding, eon after eon, with the precision of a swiss watch. I admit that it’s way over my head (so to speak) but it provided ancient people with a template for understanding time and number and eventually complex mathematics.

There is a so-called theory that the right hemisphere of your brain is responsible for your creative and artistic tendencies while your left hemisphere does the math and the logical stuff and, if that’s the case then I actually don’t have a left hemishere at all. In fact I feel that both hemispheres of my brain are completely shut down everytime I try to balance my checkbook.

So I am always stunned by the ability of people living before the beginning of history to figure this stuff out.

In 1900, Greek sponge divers discovered an artifact in a shipwreck off the coast of the island of Antikythera. This object appeared to be an astronomical device and, after close examination, scientists determined it to be a multi-geared analog computer or the solar system —- the first mechanical computer in all of history —- dated to the year 87 BC.

The Antikythera Mechanism showing the original face (R

And to think —- the people who made that device had no cell phones!

Many generations after the construction of the Antikythera Mechanism, some really smart people came up with theories about the world and the Universe that propelled us into the Modern Age. They were part of a long trail a winding that stretches back before the dawn of history when unknown cave painters and antler inscribers were documenting the passage of time.

This is a painting of Isaac Newton doing his thing. To me it’s an image of the Universe trying to figure itself out.