In 1901,sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera recovered a gear from 2,000 years ago

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons) "Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another," said Plato. But even as the skies above us have changed over centuries, the stars have continued to hold the same fascination for those seeking to understand the universe.There are some discoveries that do not immediately reveal to us the extent of what they hold within them, lying quietly beneath layers of dust and corrosion until someone curious enough comes along and happens look a little closer.The discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism is one such story where a seemingly unostentatious piece of corroded bronze was recovered from the depths of the Mediterranean, revealing an extraordinary knowledge of astronomy and mechanical engineering that had existed more than 2,000 years ago.What appeared to be a little more than a lump of metal was, in fact, later revealed to be an elaborate astronomical calculator, built by the ancient greeks to follow the movements of celestial bodies and predict events in the skies.It was in 1990, when a group of Greek sponge divers discovered an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera, an island situated between Crete and Pelo...