Christy Hovanetz, Ph.D., is a Senior Policy Fellow for ExcelinEd focusing on school accountability and math policies.
With an 88 percent audience score on the Rotten Tomatoes rating site, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is on my summer movie viewing list. How about you? The movie’s “dial of destiny” is an interesting device that serves as a MacGuffin—a random object in a story that keeps the plot rolling. It enables Dr. Jones to detect fissures in time to facilitate time travel.
In the movie, Professor Jones expects to travel back to 1939. However, continental drift impacted the timeline coordinates (imagine that math!), and he lands more than two millennia earlier, in 212 BCE. That’s where he encounters the presumed inventor of the dial, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. You may remember him from math class—the original Pi guy.
Not exactly, although other movies also have devices that enable time travel. There was a DeLorean car in Back to the Future, a pocket watch in Men in Black III and a phone booth in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The dial of destiny is also based on a real object: the Antikythera mechanism. It doesn’t actually allow time travel, but the mantle-clocklike device is real and dates to antiquity. It is believed to be invented by Archimedes himself.
The Antikythera mechanism was rediscovered in 1902 by sponge divers off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera. It wasn’t until the mechanism was x-rayed decades later, in the 1970s and 1990s, that scientists realized it was a type of ancient computer that accurately mapped the movements of the heavens.
The mechanism uses a differential, which are trains of interlocking gearwheels, to move the hands on the mechanism’s face. These hands were precisely geared to determine the angle between the ecliptic positions of the sun, moon and visible planets. This extraordinary device was able to predict moon phases as well as solstice dates and times in successive years.
Construction of the Antikythera mechanism required advanced knowledge of differential gearing, a technology once thought to be too advanced for ancient times. Differential gearing is complex—it uses the same math models for gearing today’s modern cars.
As for time travel, we don’t have all the math needed for that…yet! Time distortion does exist, but theories vary on the amplitude. Currently, Einstein’s theory of general relativity can precisely predict time distortion at small distances. More testing is underway to compare the distortion of time with that of space over large distances.
Figuring out math fact or fiction in summer blockbusters is a lot of fun. Figuring it out for real life is essential, and there’s no time like the present to gear up with an effective math policy. Set aside some time to review ExcelinEd’s math policy fundamental principles and the comprehensive K-8 math model policy. Both are based on the recommendations of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.
Did you know?
Scientists have confirmed that time is speeding up as the universe ages. By studying quasars in different wavelengths of light, astronomers showed that Einstein’s general theory of relativity is right once again—by proving that time and space are not fixed but are, well, relative.
