Question #ca87c
1 Answer
This is not a physics problem but actually a history question asked by someone who has seen one too many episodes of "Ancient Aliens".
Archimedes Sphere is a term for lost wonders.
Archimedes is believed to have designed and built many spherical devices and machines, including a planetarium.
Descriptions of actual Archimedes Spheres, as written of by witnesses from his day, vary so greatly as to suggest that he had designed at least two very different spheres with different purposes.
According to: NYU's math department:
http://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Sphere/SphereIntro.html
The greek Mathematician Pappas wrote that Archimedes had completed work on a book called "On Sphere-making" which Pappas called Archimedes's only work on practical matters.
"On Sphere-making", though, is a lost work and we may never know what what was in it or what Archimedes's spheres really were.
In 1900 an ancient shipwreck from about the first century BC(E) was discovered near Greece and had aboard a complex gear machine which is known as the Antikythera Mechanism, which is believed to be the gearbox mechanism for an Archimedes Sphere planetarium.
