Review: Decoding the Heavens by Jo Marchant

TO THE untrained eye, the first analogue computer wasn’t much to look at. Retrieved from a 1st century BC Greek shipwreck, the Antikythera mechanism resembled “a green, flaky pastry”, albeit one with a filling of gears inscribed with enigmatic lettering. Jo Marchant, a consultant for this magazine, tells a fascinating tale of an artifact that upends our estimation of Classical technology. Ignored, misinterpreted and even fobbed off as “alien technology”, it has taken a century to fully recognise the extraordinary gearwork’s purpose in tracking planetary motion. Amid the hazardous dives that raised it and the lives spent in painstaking…