Most Tech Today Would be Frivolous to Ancient Scientists - Facts So Romantic

Surrounded by advanced achievements in medicine, space exploration, and robotics, people can be forgiven for thinking our time boasts the best technology. So I was startled last year to hear Sarah Stroup, a professor of classics at the University of Washington, Seattle, give a speech called "Robots, Space Exploration, Death Rays, Brain Surgery, and Nanotechnology: STEMM in the Ancient World." Stroup has created a college course integrating classics and science to show how 2,000 year-old Greek and Roman STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine) underlie and illuminate the sciences today. The Greeks made self-acting machinery such as an automaton theater, a first step toward building a real robot, and they imagined a mythological one. Talos, a bronze being made by the god Hephaestus (later the Roman Vulcan) patrolled the island of Crete and threw rocks at threatening ships, anticipating today's development of intelligent battlefield weaponry that chooses its own targets.