So, I'm several beers into my research. The mercury looks fine. Now I just need to find the bowl that spins. I'm embarrassed to say that my mental image at this point was a simple paraboloid bowl that was basically whipped around by hand (maybe the bottom of the bowl would have circular scratch marks or something.)
I spend a few hours browsing images of Mayan pottery. Because I have little idea what I'm looking for, I figure I'll sample the space to get a sense of what is common, then look for bowls that are outliers (because there should only be 1 telescope for every 10000 cooking pots.) Bonus points if the outlier looks like a scientific instrument and seems amenable to spinning. I am so Bayesian.
Finally, I google for "classic Mayan shallow pottery bowl." The bowl shows up on the first page. I dismiss it at first because it has legs: no way will this thing spin nicely. But it's got a lot of things going for it: it's the right shape, it has no decoration, it's described as well-balanced, it even has a small vertical wall around its rim (just like the Large Zenith Telescope - nice to see a design choice repeated across 2000 years.)
I'm not sure how objective I'm being. So, when my kids show up, I ask each of them to find the pot that does not look like the others on the page of images. They both pick the target as their second choice.
I still don't know why the thing has legs, though. How does it spin?
No comments:
Post a Comment