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94 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
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mathematics. He also invented most of all
known combinations
of gears, the worm gear, the differential gear, the bevel gear and
probably also the crank and connecting rod that transforms uniform
circular motion into alternating linear movement. If there
was at that time somebody in Greece who could have been able
to build the calculator of Rhodes, it was Geminus. Only he could
have had the idea to put together differential
gears with bevel
gears and connecting rods and mathematical and astronomical
dials in a single box to make a navigational computer. The complicated
mechanism of more than thirty separate gears was probably
put together by his pupils—all Greek masters of that time
had apprentices.
The date for which this calculator was set for the last time is
the year 86 e.g., as can be seen by the relative positions of the
dials and pointers. The Roman galley which was transporting the
statues from Rhodes to Rome probably sank near Antikythera
three years later, in 83 b.c.
And the year 86 B.C. was a remarkable date. There were five
conjunctions of planets in four zodiacal signs that year, an ideal
time to set an astronomical calculator precisely if it was already
built or to start constructing one. So here we have another trailblazing
achievement of the famous Greeks, permitting the Graecophils
once more to claim that all science came from Greece.
Unfortunately not all people agree on that, and I am one who
disagrees. In recent years one discovery after another has shown
that all the scientific knowledge of Greeks was inherited and borrowed
from the high priests of Egypt, who had obtained it thousands
of years earlier from an unknown source. The calculator of
Rhodes can give us some indication where this mysterious unknown
source of all science was located or at least it can indicate
the direction in which we will have to look for the beginning of
our civilization.
If somebody wants to construct an astronomical calculator by
using intermeshing gears, the first condition is to find the number
of cycles necessary to obtain an exact number of whole days.
Some of these cycles are easily found but many are nearly impossible.
A good example is the tropical year—also called the "solar
year" or the "calendar year" of 365.2422 mean solar days. To fit a
number of fuU days, we need 5,000 solar years, or 1,826,211 days I