Reconstruction of the Antikythera computer by Dionysis Kriaris. Courtesy Kriaris. Visiting the Golden Age of Greek Science I gave a lecture recently at the Hellenic Library at Bellflower, California. I spoke about the Antikythera Mechanism: a 2,200 years-old computer that predicted the eclipses of the Sun and the Moon and tracked the positions of the planets. This machine worked with gears, that is, scientific technology. This technology was so advanced it took nearly 2,000 years before it appeared in Europe in the eighteenth century.  I explained how and the why the Greeks were almost “modern” so many centuries before modern times. I illustrated my talk with 160 images from ancient Greek culture: ceramic vases, other archaeological artifacts, icons of ancient Greek scientific manuscripts, books and instruments, and exquisite computed tomography images of the outside and x-ray pictures of the inside of the largest mechanism fragments.  These high tech images ...

In a 1977 book,  From Know-How to Nowhere , Elting Morison, an MIT professor, explained the confusion in America between science and the public good.  What do we have to do to be ourselves? “It is not so clear… that the problems solved by modern science and engineering coincide nicely with the fulfillment of needs felt or unfelt in men and women,” he wrote.                      “The chances seem to be that the stream of new artifacts… will not fit… with the nature of human being…. There seems… to be a developing mismatch between our extending knowledge of what we can do with the materials and forces in the world around us and our older, but less certain, understanding of what we have to do to be ourselves. And in this mismatching – such is the power in our machinery and such is the confusion about our real needs – we are likely to come away losers– ground down, blown up...

Heap of black stones from the Christian destruction of a temple for the worship of Hawaiian gods. Ulupo Park, Kailua, Hawaii. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos I first visited Hawaii (Oahu and Maui) in the early 1980s. The islands retained some of the glorious beauty of their pre-American life. I remember the mountains in Oahu. They are not tall. They are smooth, green, with deep ridges. It’s like the Hawaiian goddess Pele drew her fingers over a soft matter at the moment of creation.  Wounded Hawaii Nevertheless, the wounds of foreign occupation and forcible conversion to Christianity and American culture were everywhere. The remnants of Hawaiian life were tucked into the impenetrable Bishop Museum. Only fragments of the natural world survive.  Hawaii is now primarily a vacation destination for Japanese and mainland Americans. Indigenous Hawaiians have been in hiding, intermarrying with Japanese and Polynesians. For the most part, they are invisible. My secon...