Ancient Technology Unraveled Using Wolfram Technology

An arm that moves around, and when it points to, well, it's written as an H, but it's actually a capital eta or a capital sigma marking it indicates a possible sun or moon eclipse. So the way of setting dates on this device is a bit funky. After all, modern calendar would not be invented for more than 1500 years after this device was produced. But if one takes, for example, the simulation from our Walton Demonstrations project and turns the crank to set the device for April 8, 2024, one gets this picture that I'm showing here of this kind of clockwork thing with arms pointing to a place where the sun and the moon line up, corresponding to an eclipse. And sort of amazing to see this computation successfully happen on a device that was designed 2,000 years ago.