I noticed this photograph of a scientist with a pipe. That’s a stereotype for sure! It is Derek de Solla Price (1922-1983), a British science historian and Yale University professor. In the photo, he is holding what appears to be a massive Danish freehand with a huge plateau top bowl. In front of him on the table is a proposed reconstruction model of the Antikythera Mechanism. The Antikythera is an Ancient Greek hand-powered model of the movements of bodies in our solar system, and estimated to have been constructed in 150 BC. It is the world’s oldest known example of an analogue computer. Discovered in an ancient shipwreck on the seabed in 1900, the encrusted mechanism was studied in the 1950s and later, and was found to contain something like 35+ bronze gears with high precision teeth. Nothing like that had been thought possible to have been manufactured in antiquity, and machines with similar complexity would not appear for another 1,400 years. I had read previous articles about the Antikythera here and there, and was listening to a podcast last evening about it, and looked it up again on Wikipedia when I noticed the pipe smoking photograph of de Solla Price.
