In 1901, divers exploring the remains of an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, northwest of Crete, recovered a bizarre-looking mechanical object that baffled the international scientific community. The mysterious device, found in 82 fragments heavily encrusted with corrosion, is composed of 30 bronze gear wheels covered with Greek inscriptions. Decades of scientific examination revealed that the ancient device, called the Antikythera mechanism, is an analog computer—the world’s first—designed to calculate the position of heavenly bodies, predict eclipses, and even pinpoint the dates of the Olympic Games. In 2014, James Evans, professor of physics at the University of Puget Sound, and Christián Carman, history of science professor at the University of Quilmes, Argentina, published an article in the Archive for History of Exact Science claiming that the mechanism was timed to begin in 205 ...