Pseudoscientific metrology
Encyclopedia
Some approaches in the branch of historic metrology
are highly speculative and can be qualified as pseudoscience
. Interest in ancient metrology was triggered by research into the various Megalith
building cultures and the Great Pyramid of Giza
.
, professor of geometry
at Gresham College
, made his first of several studies in Egypt and Italy, making numerous measurements of buildings and monuments, including the Great Pyramid. These activities fuelled many centuries of interest in metrology of the ancient cultures by the likes of Isaac Newton
and the French Academy.
, however,
Flinders Petrie, a disciple of Charles Piazzi Smyth
, is of the opinion that it was used earlier by the ancient Egypt
ians. Writing in an article in Nature
, 1933 Petrie says:
No explanation is offered as to why no Egyptian pendulums have been found, despite the extremely rich archaeological material from this culture, nor to the question as to why none of the rich historic material from Egypt mentions this, or indeed why a divisor of 105 would have been chosen or measured.
, in his 1859 book "The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? & Who Built It?", claimed that the Great Pyramid was planned and the building supervised by the biblical Noah
, and that it was:
A paper presented to the Royal Academy
on the topic was rejected.
Taylor's theories were, however, the inspiration for the deeply religious archeologist Charles Piazzi Smyth
to go to Egypt to study and measure the pyramid, subsequently publishing his book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (1864), claiming that the measurements he obtained from the Great Pyramid of Giza
indicated a unit of length, the pyramid inch
, equivalent to 1.001 British inch
es, that could have been the standard of measurement by the pyramid's architects. From this he extrapolated a number of other measurements, including the pyramid pint, the sacred cubit, and the pyramid scale of temperature.
Smyth claimed—and presumably believed—that the inch was a God-given measure handed down through the centuries from the time of Israel
, and that the architects of the pyramid could only have been directed by the hand of God. To support this Smyth said that, in measuring the pyramid, he found the number of inches in the perimeter of the base equalled 1000 times the number of days in a year, and found a numeric relationship between the height of the pyramid in inches to the distance from Earth to the Sun, measured in statute miles.
Smyth used this as an argument against the introduction of the metre in Britain, which he considered a product of the minds of atheistic French radicals.
Livio C. Stecchini claims in his A History of Measures:
Stecchini makes claims that imply that the Egyptian measures of length, originating from at least the 3rd millennium BC
, were directly derived from the circumference of the earth with an amazing accuracy. According to "Secrets of the Great Pyramid" (p. 346 http://www.csus.edu/indiv/v/vonmeierk/3-03INC.html), his claim is that the Egyptian measurement was equal to 40,075,000 meters, which compared to the International Spheroid of 40,076,596 meters gives an error of 0.004%. No consideration seems to be made to the question of, on purely technical and procedural grounds, how the early Egyptians, in defining their cubit, could have achieved a degree of accuracy that to our current knowledge can only be achieved with very sophisticated equipment and techniques.
, in his book Sun, Moon & Stonehenge, connects the megalithic yard (and thus Stonehenge) to the imperial foot, and manages to connect a few astronomical phenomena, and the Egyptian Royal Cubit (and thus the Great Pyramid) into one grand equation (MY is an abbreviation for megalithic yard):
This seems to bring pseudoscientific metrology to new heights, especially in view of the conclusion:
and Alan Butler further develop the work of Smyth's and Stecchini's "Grand Scheme" in their Civilization One hypothesis, which describes a megalithic system of units. This system is claimed to be the source of all standard units used by civilization, and is so named after the Neolithic
builders of megaliths. Knight and Butler contend the reconstructed megalithic yard
(0.82966m) is a fundamental part of a megalithic system. Although the megalithic yard is the work of Alexander Thom
, Knight and Butler make a novel contribution by speculating on how the MY may have been created by using a pendulum calibrated by observing Venus
. It also explains the uniformity of the MY across large geographical areas. The accuracy claimed for this procedure is disputed by astronomers.
Knight and Butler describe a procedure for Neolithic
astronomers to make a "Venus Pendulum", using the transit of Venus across the sky to give both time and distance units.
Measures of volume and mass are derived from the megalithic yard. It is divided into 40 megalithic inches. Knight and Butler claim that a cube with a side of 4 megalithic inches has a volume equal to one imperial pint
and weighs one imperial pound
when filled with unpolished grain. They also posit ratio relationships with the imperial acre and square rod.
Metrology
Metrology is the science of measurement. Metrology includes all theoretical and practical aspects of measurement. The word comes from Greek μέτρον , "measure" + "λόγος" , amongst others meaning "speech, oration, discourse, quote, study, calculation, reason"...
are highly speculative and can be qualified as pseudoscience
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
. Interest in ancient metrology was triggered by research into the various Megalith
Megalith
A megalith is a large stone that has been used to construct a structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. Megalithic describes structures made of such large stones, utilizing an interlocking system without the use of mortar or cement.The word 'megalith' comes from the Ancient...
building cultures and the Great Pyramid of Giza
Great Pyramid of Giza
The Great Pyramid of Giza is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in the Giza Necropolis bordering what is now El Giza, Egypt. It is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the only one to remain largely intact...
.
Origins
In 1637 John GreavesJohn Greaves
John Greaves was an English mathematician, astronomer and antiquary.-Life:He was born in Colemore, near Alresford, Hampshire. He was the eldest son of John Greaves, rector of Colemore, and Sarah Greaves...
, professor of geometry
Geometry
Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
at Gresham College
Gresham College
Gresham College is an institution of higher learning located at Barnard's Inn Hall off Holborn in central London, England. It was founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham and today it hosts over 140 free public lectures every year within the City of London.-History:Sir Thomas Gresham,...
, made his first of several studies in Egypt and Italy, making numerous measurements of buildings and monuments, including the Great Pyramid. These activities fuelled many centuries of interest in metrology of the ancient cultures by the likes of Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
and the French Academy.
The pendulum
The first known description and practical use of a physical pendulum is by Galileo GalileiGalileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei , was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism...
, however,
Flinders Petrie, a disciple of Charles Piazzi Smyth
Charles Piazzi Smyth
Charles Piazzi Smyth , was Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1846 to 1888, well-known for many innovations in astronomy and his pyramidological and metrological studies of the Great Pyramid of Giza....
, is of the opinion that it was used earlier by the ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
ians. Writing in an article in Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
, 1933 Petrie says:
If we take the natural standard of one day divided by 105, the pendulum would be 29.157 inches at lat 30 degrees. Now this is exactly the basis of Egyptian land measures, most precisely known through the diagonal of that squared, being the Egyptian double cubit. The value for this cubit is 20.617 inches, while the best examples in stone are 20.620±0.005inches.
No explanation is offered as to why no Egyptian pendulums have been found, despite the extremely rich archaeological material from this culture, nor to the question as to why none of the rich historic material from Egypt mentions this, or indeed why a divisor of 105 would have been chosen or measured.
Charles Piazzi Smyth
John TaylorJohn Taylor (1781-1864)
John Taylor was a publisher, essayist, and writer born in East Retford, Nottinghamshire, the son of James Taylor and Sarah Drury. Although in pyramidical circles, he may be remembered for his contributions to Pyramidology and his use of that subject in the fight against adopting the metric system...
, in his 1859 book "The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? & Who Built It?", claimed that the Great Pyramid was planned and the building supervised by the biblical Noah
Noah
Noah was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the tenth and last of the antediluvian Patriarchs. The biblical story of Noah is contained in chapters 6–9 of the book of Genesis, where he saves his family and representatives of all animals from the flood by constructing an ark...
, and that it was:
- built to make a record of the measure of the Earth.
A paper presented to the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
on the topic was rejected.
Taylor's theories were, however, the inspiration for the deeply religious archeologist Charles Piazzi Smyth
Charles Piazzi Smyth
Charles Piazzi Smyth , was Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1846 to 1888, well-known for many innovations in astronomy and his pyramidological and metrological studies of the Great Pyramid of Giza....
to go to Egypt to study and measure the pyramid, subsequently publishing his book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (1864), claiming that the measurements he obtained from the Great Pyramid of Giza
Great Pyramid of Giza
The Great Pyramid of Giza is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in the Giza Necropolis bordering what is now El Giza, Egypt. It is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the only one to remain largely intact...
indicated a unit of length, the pyramid inch
Pyramid inch
The pyramid inch is a unit of measure claimed by pyramidologists to have been used in ancient times. Supposedly it was one twenty-fifth of a "sacred cubit", 1.00106 imperial inches, or 2.5426924 centimetres.-History:...
, equivalent to 1.001 British inch
Inch
An inch is the name of a unit of length in a number of different systems, including Imperial units, and United States customary units. There are 36 inches in a yard and 12 inches in a foot...
es, that could have been the standard of measurement by the pyramid's architects. From this he extrapolated a number of other measurements, including the pyramid pint, the sacred cubit, and the pyramid scale of temperature.
Smyth claimed—and presumably believed—that the inch was a God-given measure handed down through the centuries from the time of Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
, and that the architects of the pyramid could only have been directed by the hand of God. To support this Smyth said that, in measuring the pyramid, he found the number of inches in the perimeter of the base equalled 1000 times the number of days in a year, and found a numeric relationship between the height of the pyramid in inches to the distance from Earth to the Sun, measured in statute miles.
Smyth used this as an argument against the introduction of the metre in Britain, which he considered a product of the minds of atheistic French radicals.
The grand scheme
By the time measurements of Mesopotamia were discovered, by doing various exercises of mathematics on the definitions of the major ancient measurement systems, various people (Jean-Adolphe Decourdemanche in 1909, August Oxé in 1942) came to the conclusion that the relationship between them was well planned.Livio C. Stecchini claims in his A History of Measures:
- The relation among the units of length can be explained by the ratio 15:16:17:18 among the four fundamental feet and cubits. Before I arrived at this discovery, Decourdemanche and Oxé discovered that the cubes of those units are related according to the conventional specific gravities of oil, water, wheat and barley. http://www.metrum.org/measures/length.htm
Stecchini makes claims that imply that the Egyptian measures of length, originating from at least the 3rd millennium BC
3rd millennium BC
The 3rd millennium BC spans the Early to Middle Bronze Age.It represents a period of time in which imperialism, or the desire to conquer, grew to prominence, in the city states of the Middle East, but also throughout Eurasia, with Indo-European expansion to Anatolia, Europe and Central Asia. The...
, were directly derived from the circumference of the earth with an amazing accuracy. According to "Secrets of the Great Pyramid" (p. 346 http://www.csus.edu/indiv/v/vonmeierk/3-03INC.html), his claim is that the Egyptian measurement was equal to 40,075,000 meters, which compared to the International Spheroid of 40,076,596 meters gives an error of 0.004%. No consideration seems to be made to the question of, on purely technical and procedural grounds, how the early Egyptians, in defining their cubit, could have achieved a degree of accuracy that to our current knowledge can only be achieved with very sophisticated equipment and techniques.
Robin Heath
Later, these ideas were further developed as defence for the Imperial units against the emerging metric system, and adopted by parts of the anti-metric movement. Robin HeathRobin Heath
Robin F. Heath is a British historian, astronomer, archaeoastronomer, astro-archaeologist and author.-Biography:Heath graduated with a degree in Science and is now an Honorary Research Fellow within the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wales, Lampeter...
, in his book Sun, Moon & Stonehenge, connects the megalithic yard (and thus Stonehenge) to the imperial foot, and manages to connect a few astronomical phenomena, and the Egyptian Royal Cubit (and thus the Great Pyramid) into one grand equation (MY is an abbreviation for megalithic yard):
- if the lunar year is represented by 12 MY then 1 ft corresponds precisely to the extra 10.875 days to coincide with the end of the solar or seasonal year. Furthermore, the period between the end of the solar year and 13 lunations - 18.656 days - is represented by another unit of length from antiquity, the 'Royal Cubit' of 20.63" or 1.72 ft. http://www.bwmaonline.com/Lunations.htm
This seems to bring pseudoscientific metrology to new heights, especially in view of the conclusion:
- Hence the equally astonishing revelation that 1 MY = 1 ft + 1 RC. Assuming that the MY was the primary unit, then the derivative foot and cubit appear to have formed a logical and essential part of the astronomical and calendrical researches of our Neolithic ancestors. If, however, the foot preceded the MY in time - and here we must remember that 1/1,000th of a degree of arc around the equatorial circumference of the Earth is just 365.244 ft in length! - then knowledge of the roundness of the Earth must have predated use of the MY…i.e. well before 3,000BC. There are no other choices readily apparent!
The megalithic system
Christopher KnightChristopher Knight (author)
Christopher Knight is an author who has written several pseudoarcaeological and pseudohistorical books dealing with theories such as 366-degree geometry and the origins of Freemasonry...
and Alan Butler further develop the work of Smyth's and Stecchini's "Grand Scheme" in their Civilization One hypothesis, which describes a megalithic system of units. This system is claimed to be the source of all standard units used by civilization, and is so named after the Neolithic
Neolithic
The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...
builders of megaliths. Knight and Butler contend the reconstructed megalithic yard
Megalithic Yard
A Megalithic Yard is a unit of measurement, about , that some researchers believe was used in the construction of megalithic structures. The proposal was made by Alexander Thom as a result of his surveys of 600 megalithic sites in England, Scotland, Wales and Britanny...
(0.82966m) is a fundamental part of a megalithic system. Although the megalithic yard is the work of Alexander Thom
Alexander Thom
Alexander "Sandy" Thom was a Scottish engineer most famous for his theory of the Megalithic yard, categorization of stone circles and his studies of Stonehenge and other archaeological sites.- Life and work :...
, Knight and Butler make a novel contribution by speculating on how the MY may have been created by using a pendulum calibrated by observing Venus
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...
. It also explains the uniformity of the MY across large geographical areas. The accuracy claimed for this procedure is disputed by astronomers.
Knight and Butler describe a procedure for Neolithic
Neolithic
The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...
astronomers to make a "Venus Pendulum", using the transit of Venus across the sky to give both time and distance units.
Measures of volume and mass are derived from the megalithic yard. It is divided into 40 megalithic inches. Knight and Butler claim that a cube with a side of 4 megalithic inches has a volume equal to one imperial pint
Pint
The pint is a unit of volume or capacity that was once used across much of Europe with values varying from state to state from less than half a litre to over one litre. Within continental Europe, the pint was replaced with the metric system during the nineteenth century...
and weighs one imperial pound
Pound (mass)
The pound or pound-mass is a unit of mass used in the Imperial, United States customary and other systems of measurement...
when filled with unpolished grain. They also posit ratio relationships with the imperial acre and square rod.
See also
- Pyramid inchPyramid inchThe pyramid inch is a unit of measure claimed by pyramidologists to have been used in ancient times. Supposedly it was one twenty-fifth of a "sacred cubit", 1.00106 imperial inches, or 2.5426924 centimetres.-History:...
- PseudoarchaeologyPseudoarchaeologyPseudoarchaeology — also known as alternative archaeology, fringe archaeology, fantastic archaeology, or cult archaeology — refers to interpretations of the past from outside of the academic archaeological community, which typically also reject the accepted scientific and analytical methods of the...
- PseudohistoryPseudohistoryPseudohistory is a pejorative term applied to a type of historical revisionism, often involving sensational claims whose acceptance would require rewriting a significant amount of commonly accepted history, and based on methods that depart from standard historiographical conventions.Cryptohistory...
- John Michell (writer)John Michell (writer)John Frederick Carden Michell was an English writer whose key sources of inspiration were Plato and Charles Fort...
- Hugh Harleston Jr.Hugh Harleston Jr.Hugh Harleston Jr. was an American civil engineer who proposed fringe theories about ancient megalithic monuments after making extensive surveys of the Teotihuacan complex in the 1970s...
External links
- Amazing Pyramid "Facts", a critical look at some claims of Piazzi Smyth