The Science of the Ancients
Megalithic Creations of Time and
Space
'The important thing is to not stop
questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.'
-
Albert Einstein
by Christopher
Knight and Alan Butler
In the 1930s a young Scottish engineer
noticed that several of the widely ignored, prehistoric Megalithic sites near his home
appeared to have lunar alignments. He decided to study some of the sites and he
began a process of careful surveying that was eventually to lead him to make a
discovery of staggering importance.
As a young engineer at Glasgow University,
Alexander Thom visited a number of prehistoric stone structures near to his
home in Scotland during the 1930s. He marvelled
at the grandeur and admired the way so many of the giant stones had
survived the weather of more than 5,000 years, as well as providing resistance
to the thieving tendencies of croft and road builders across dozens of
centuries. As he contemplated the various sites he mused over their purposes.
When he checked out the rising and setting points of the Sun and Moon across
the year his hunch appeared to be born out.
His first survey was at the site known as
Callanish, on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.
This complex of standing stones revealed many astronomical alignments and is
today often referred to as the 'Moon Temple'. Thom went on to spend nearly a
half a century carefully surveying the so-called megalithic (the word means
giant stone) structures that lay scattered across the countryside from the
islands off northern Scotland down to the French region of Brittany. Along the
way he became a highly respected professor of Engineering at Oxford University
until his retirement in 1961.
Thom has quickly realized that these
prehistoric builders were engineers like himself and that they had a
surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of geometry and astronomy. The approach
taken by this talented engineer was to assess what he believed the site had
been intended to do - and then redesigned it himself. He quickly gained an
empathy with the Stone Age builders that gave him a real insight into the
purpose of each site that would possibly be lost on the conventional
archaeologist. Once he had a picture in his mind of what he thought their plan
had been, he went away to create his own solution to the assumed problem.
Having drawn up his own design he then returned to compare the site layout to
his own blueprint. Through this process he could predict the location of missing
stones and, on further inspection, he would usually reveal the socket hole that
confirmed his theory.
Thom developed a new statistical technique to
establish the relative positions of the stones and, over time, something
spectacularly unusual emerged from the amassed data. These prehistoric builders
had not been lugging huge stones willy-nilly; they had manufactured these
structures working with a standard unit of measurement across a huge area of
thousands of square miles of what was then dense forest and barren moorland.
It was amazing that these supposedly
primitive people could have hand an 'international' convention for unit of
length, but the mystery deepens because Thom was eventually able to describe
the supreme accuracy of a unit he called the Megalithic Yard. This was no approximate measure taken from
paces or body parts; it was equal to 2.722 feet + / - 0.002 feet (82.96656cm +
/ 0.061cm). Thom was also able to demonstrate that the unit was frequently
used in its double and half form as well as being broken down into forty
sub-units for use in design work that he designated as 'Megalithic Inches'.
Most archaeologists refuted the finding on
the basis that the idea that a unit of measurement that was more accurate than
modern measurement tape was absurd. Thom admitted that he could not suggest how
it could have been achieved but he stood by his evident that simply said it
'had' been done. In our previous book, Civilization One, we describe how we set
out to investigate the concept of the Megalithic Yard. Our initial hypothesis
was that if the unit was not an error of Thom's data analysis it logically
should've two properties:
1. It should have an origin in something
meaningful, rather than just being an abstraction that was adopted by everyone.
2. It should have a means of reproduction
that could be used by anyone without reference to any sort of standard
measuring rod, that would have been difficult to manufacture and impossible to
keep accurate across centuries.
We realize that our assumption could be wrong
on either or both counts but as it turns out, we were correct on both. Thom had
not made an error.
As we describe in Civilization One, the
Megalithic Yard is a geodetic unit, in that it is integral (has a whole number
relationship) to the polar circumference of the Earth. We found that these
early Megalithic builders viewed a circle as having 366 degree rather than the
360 degrees that we use today. We realize that there really should be 366
degrees in a circle for very good reason that there are 366 rotations of the
Earth in one orbit of the Sun - the most fundamental of all circles in human
existence.
One solar orbit is, of course, a year but
there is a very slight difference between the number of rotations of the planet
and the 365 days in a year. This is because the mean solar day is based on the
time between the Sun being at its zenith on two consecutive days (86,400
seconds) but an actual rotation or 'sidereal day' takes 236 seconds less. All
of those 'saved' seconds add up to exactly one more day over the year. A
sidereal day can be easily appreciated by observing a star returning to the
same point in the heavens on two consecutive nights. This is one spin of our
planet because it is unaffected by the secondary motion of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
Wheels within wheels
Early cultures frequently took their lead
from nature and they were fond of 'wheels within wheels'. If the circle of
heavens had 366 parts, why should every circle not follow the same rule? We
were able to confirm this hypothesis by a variety of means including evidence
from later cultures that appear to have adopted the 366-degree principle.
The approach our Megalithic ancestors took,
we argue, was to hypothetically divide the circle of the Earth into 366 degrees
within sixty minutes per degree and six seconds per minute. It was reasonable
to assume that these ancient builders used the polar circumference of the Earth
that passed through the area around the British Isles. Our planet is nearly
spherical but it does not have a bulge in the centre between poles, so the
equatorial circumference is a little longer than the polar. There are varying
estimations of the Earth's polar circumference, with NASA, for example, quoting
an average figure of 39,941km, whilst other sources regularly quote 40,006km or
40,010km - but the most frequently used figure appears to be 40,008km.
Undoubtedly much depends on where the measurement is taken or if an average of
them all is calculated.
Interestingly, the shortest polar
circumference (one that has least landmass) is the one that passes through the
British Isles and is now considered as the zero line of longitude. But there is
also another possibility. Just for interest, we looked at the flattest possible
circumference achievable on the globe, i.e. a line that equally bisects the
planet that has most sea and least land. We were amazed to discover that a
person standing in the middle of Salisbury Plain Wiltshire, England (where
Stonehenge and the Megalithic circle at Avebury were built) is in the absolute
centre of such a line. This means that if we consider Stonehenge to be the
'top' of the world, the imaginary equator from that point is almost 98 percent
sea - more than any other point on Earth. This line passes across the South
Atlantic, skims just below Africa, moves up across the Indian Ocean, clips
small pieces of land at Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Thailand and Vietnam, over the
South China Sea and then more than 20,000 kilometres across the Pacific to pass
over a section of South America.
As far as we know such a line has not been
measured without the aid of modern satellite technology. However, just because
we do not know how it could have been done does not mean that is was not done.
Without further evidence we have to assume that it is pure coincidence that
Stonehenge stands on the only place on Earth to be equidistance from the
optimum and near perfect sea-level circumference of the globe.
We can only assume that a polar circumference
was used and taking the 40,008km figure it translate to 48,221838 Megalithic
Yards using Thom's central value for the unit. It was then subdivided as
follows;
Polar circumference = 48,221,838 MY
1 Degree (1/366th) = 131,754 MY
1 Minute (1/60th) = 2,196 MY
1 Second (1/6th) = 366 MY
So, this brilliant system of geometry starts
with 366 degrees and finishes with seconds of arc that are 366 Megalithic Yards
long. Self-evidently, an amazing set of 'wheels within wheels'!
We knew that the system mutt work this way
because we found that the later Minoan culture, which developed on the
Mediterranean island of Crete around 2000 BC, also used the Megalithic second
of arc. However, the Minoans sub-divided it into 1,000 parts to become their
standard unit of measure that was equal to 30.36cm. This unit was dubbed the
'Minoan Foot' by the Canadian archaeologist, Professor Joseph Graham who first
detected its use in the places of ancient Crete.
We went on to demonstrate how any person could generate a highly accurate
Megalithic Yard by measuring the movement of Venus in the evening sky using a
rope, some twine, a blob of clay, and a few sticks. The secret was to take one
366th part of the horizon and time the passage of Venus across it, and then to
cause a piece of twine with a blob of clay on the end to swing like a pendulum
366 times during that period. From fulcrum to the centre of the blob was a
mathematically perfect 1/2 Megalithic Yard or twenty Megalithic Inches.
The process was simply to carry out and works
on the fact that a pendulum is responsive to only two factors: the length of
the pendulum and the mass of the Earth. If the pendulum beat 366 times during
the transit of Venus across 366th part of the sky - you had your measure! (See
Appendix 1 for a more detailed explanation of the pendulum method.)
It is doubtful that these ancient stonemasons
realized that fact but the period of time that they watched Venus and elected
to subdivide into 366 beats, is equal to the difference between a mean solar
day and a sidereal day.
Our starting point had been to search for all
possible sources of reliable measurement available from nature. And we found
that there was only one: the turning of the Earth on its axis as seen by watching
the movement of the heavens. It was possible to time the passage of a star, or
in this case the planet Venus, with reliable accuracy using a pendulum. The
pendulum then turned a unit of time into a unit of length because the timed
beat will always produce a fixed length - with tiny variations due to latitude
and altitude.
It was then a simple matter to turn a unit of
length into a measure of volume and capacity by creating cubes and filling them
with liquid or dry goods such as barley or wheat. However, we were not prepared
for the shock we received when we
created a cube with sides of four Megalithic Inches and found that it held a
pint that was accurate to a staggering one part in 5,000 against the standard
laid down in the year 1601. Doubling the sides to eight Megalithic Inches
produced an accurate gallon and doubling again produced the old dry measure
known as bushel. The mystery was compounded when we filled the 'pint' cube with
barley and found that it weighted exactly one pound!
Things turned from the sublime to the
ridiculous when further experimentation showed that a sphere with a diameter of six Megalithic Inches held virtually one
litre and one ten times the size weighted a metric tonne when filled with
water; all to an accuracy of better than 99 per cent.
The fact that Thom's apparently meaningless
Megalithic Yard, extracted from surveying hundreds of prehistoric ruins,
produces these cubic and spherical feats is not debatable. No one, on matter
how special they might be, can deny the simple maths. Neither can they deny
that the odds of such compounded apparent connections being coincidence are
very high. Yet, the pound and the pint are thought to be Medieval and the litre
and the tonne were invented at the end of the eighteenth century.
A connection seemed impossible.
Then we looked at the Sumerian people who
lived in the region we now call Iraq some 5,000 years ago. They are attributed
with inventing writing, glass, the wheel, the hour, minute and second of time
as well as the 360-degree circle with its subdivision of 60 minutes and 60
seconds of arc. Quite amazing people.
As we probed the achievements of this
civilization we found that the unit of length the Sumerian had used was
virtually a metre at 99.88cm and that they had also used weights and capacities
that were as equally matched to the kilo and litre of the French metric system
created thousands of years later. Quite a coincidence we thought - but it was
nothing of the kind, for when we applied the principle of the pendulum to the
Sumerian unit of length called the 'double kush' we found that a pendulum of
this length beat at the rate of one per second.
This means that the Sumerian's key unit of length and their key unit of time were two
sides of the same coin when used as a pendulum. A double-kush pendulum would
always beat out a second and a pendulum that beat at the range of a second
would always be a double kush in length. This demonstrates beyond all
reasonable doubt that the Sumerians used pendulums to define their
measurements. The question was, had they used the same Venus-watching
principles as the Megalithic builders of the British Isle to reproduce their
units?
Sumerian written records tell us that the
planet Venus was considered to be the goddess Inanna, who was of central
importance to their culture, so it seemed entirely plausible. If they had used
the same principle it seemed logical that they would have employed their own
values; essentially keeping the same 'software' but inputting their own data.
Instead of the 366 degrees of the Megalithic system we would have to use the
more familiar 360 degrees first used by the Sumerians. And when we checked out
the results for such a process it worked perfectly.
When the horizon was divided into 360 parts
and Venus was timed across that part of the sky at the appropriate time of the
year the double-kush pendulum metres out exactly 240 seconds. And the period of
240 seconds is recorded as being so important to the Sumerians it had its own
name - a 'gesh'. It therefore seems certain that these people followed the
Megalithic idea of creating a unit of length from timing the movements of Venus
across the evening sky.
The American connection
Later in our research we came across a letter
written by the great American statesmen, Thomas Jefferson and sent to the
House of Representatives on July 4th 1776. In this letter Jefferson laid out a
recommendation for a new system of weights and measures for the new United
States that he had helped to establish. He gave his reasoning and described
some unusual facts he had uncovered whilst developing his inter units.
He explained how he had realized that there
was only one aspect of nature that gave rise to any reliable unit of measure -
which he named as the turning of the Earth. So, like ourselves and the
Megalithic builders of five and six millennia before him, he used the heavens
to provide a basis for all measurement. In his letter he stated that he come to
realize that the imperial system of measurement used in Britain was not an
accumulation of unrelated units as generally imagined. On the contrary, he said
that their harmony indicated to him that they were members of a group of
measurements units 'from very high antiquity'.
He gave a number of reasons for this belief
including his astonishment that the foot, made up of twelve inches, was
directly related to the ounce weight through the use of cubes. He said: 'It has been found by accurate experiments
that a cubic foot of rain water weighs 1000 ounces avoirdupois (Imperial).'
It could be coincidence that a cubic foot
holds 1,000 ounces of rain water, not .999 or 1.001, but exactly 1,000 - or
that the cube has sides that are a perfect 10x10x10 one-tenth of a foot. But
Jefferson did not think so. And nor do we. However, it was Jefferson's proposed
units that fascinated us. They were never adopted but their properties are
amazing.
Jefferson's logical mind also caused him to
use a pendulum to convert time into a liner unit. He decided that he should use
a pendulum that had a beat of one second as the basis for his measuring system.
Of course, Jefferson had no idea that the second had come from the Sumerian
culture or that it had been created by the use of the pendulum in the first
place. Jefferson added one improvement suggested to him by a certain Mr Graham
of Philadelphia - that he use a rigid pendulum of very thin metal without a
weight on the end because it is more accurate than a conventional type of pendulum.
The rules change with such a pendulum (known as a rod). A rod has to be exactly
50 percent longer than a pendulum to the same time period. Jefferson's timing
piece, that beats once per second, is known as a 'second rod; and is 149.1581cm
in length.
The world knew nothing of the Sumerian
culture in Jefferson's time and he could not possibly have been aware that his
rod that beat once per second was essentially three kush in length - just a
whisker less than one and a half metres (remembering that the metre had not
been invented at that time).
The three-kush rod behaves exactly like a
double-kush pendulum and therefore it beats 240 times during one 360th part of
a day; observable by watching Venus move across 360th part of the sky.
Jefferson was therefore accidentally re-enacting the ritual used by Sumerian
astronomer priest nearly 5,000 years earlier and connecting with the principles
of prehistoric measurement. The units that Jefferson identified from this
ancient process were all based on the length of this 'second rod'. He wrote:
'Let the second rod, then, as before
described, be the standard of measure; and let it be divided into five equal
parts, each of which shall be called a foot; for, perhaps, it may be better
generally to retain the name of the nearest present measure, where one is
tolerably near. It will be about one quarter of an inch shorter than the
present foot.
Let the foot be divided into 10 inches.
The inch into 10 lines;
The line into 10 points;
Let 10 feet make a decad;
10 decades one rood;
10 roods a furlong;
10 furlongs a mile;
We can see that his proposed 'decad' was
based on a double-seconds rod. It was equivalent to six Sumerian Kush, and his
furlong was equal to kush. This brings about an even deeper connection with the
people of ancient Iraq because they used a system of counting that was
sexagesimal; which means it used a combination of base ten and base sixty. They
had a system of notation that worked as follows:
Step multiple Value
1. 1 = 1
2. x10 = 10
3. x6 = 60
4. x10 = 600
5. x6 = 3,600
It can be seen that the figure of 600 is
indeed a Sumerian value for a Sumerian unit of length.
But not only is the Jefferson furlong equal
to 600 kush - it is also an almost perfect 360 Megalithic Yards.
Strangely, Jefferson had connected well with
both the Megalithic and the Sumerian system. But something even stranger
happened when we took Jefferson's furlong and multiplied it by 366 degree and
366 again: 366 2 furlongs = 36,961,257km
As we have already mentioned, the range of
assumed length of the Earth circumference varies by a few kilometres depending
on what source one consults, probably because each cross section will differ
and tides and plate tectonics involving mountains leave room for some debate.
At the higher end 40,008 kilometres is widely used, however if we take NASA
preferred figures they quote a polar radius of 6,356.8 kilometres which equates
to a polar circumference of 39,941.0 kilometres. That means that 366 2
Jefferson's furlongs match Nasa's estimate of the Earth's size to an accuracy
of 99.95 percent - which is as perfect as it gets!
“The moon is always
falling. It has a sideways motion of its own that balances its falling motion.
It therefore stays in a closed orbit about the Earth, never falling altogether
and never escaping altogether.”
Problems with
Foucault's pendulum
We became more and more fascinated by
everything to do with pendulums. During one particular telephone conversation, which had
gone on for over an hour, we had, yet again, discussed at length the idea that
there might be some unknown law of astrophysics - that was revealed by
pendulums - at work here. We considered some highly speculative thoughts that
range from standing electromagnetic sine waves due to a gyroscopic effect of
the Earth's spin though to gravitons containing containing packets of information
about 'geometrical shape'. But we agree that we just did not know enough to
even start to investigate such ideas. Chris wrote the following paragraph into
a draft of this chapter as a summary of our mutual frustration and finished
work for the day.
'We have to admit that we still do not
understand why it is so, but the use of the pendulum in association with these
ancient values appear to be elemental to the planet Earth - some physical
reality seems to be at work here. Every pendulum reacts to the mass of the
Earth but there seems to be some kind of 'harmonic' responses at certain
rhythms; points where the mass and the spin of the planet resonate in some
way.'
But at that very point in time everything
changed.
At five o'clock the following morning Chris
was unable to sleep and decided to get up and make a cup of tea. It was then
that a 'library angel' turned up. Looking for something to read he pulled the
delivery sleeve of a magazine that had arrived in the post the previous day and
flicked it open. The main feature article in this edition of New Scientist was
entitled: 'Shadow over gravity'. It sounded interesting even early on a dark
November morning. But he quickly realized it was far more important than merely
'interesting'. The opening paragraph was incredibly similar to that which opens
this book, carrying a description of how it feels to witness a total eclipse -
and then it transpired that the thrust of the article was that solar eclipses
have a profound effect on pendulums! A debate is presently raging as to why
this should be the case, because the suggestion has been made that pendulums
may well be the key to a significant hole in Einstein's theory of relativity.
The starting point concerns the work of Jean
Bernard Leon Foucault who demonstrated a special quality of pendulum at the
Great Exhibitions, held in London in 1851. His pendulum, now always referred to
as 'Foucault's pendulum; is simply a very heavy weight fastened to a very long
wire attached to a ceiling inside a very tall building, with a universal joint
allowing it to rotate freely around a fixed point so that it will swing in a
slow arc in any direction. Giant pendulums of this kind are now routine
exhibits at some of the major museums around the world including the Smithsonian
in Washington and the Science Museum in London.
Once set in motion its direction of swing
will appear to rotate at a rate of about twelve degrees an hour. But this is
actually an illusion because it is the observer and the rest of the world that
is moving whilst the pendulum is maintaining a fixed swing back and forth in
relation to the Universe. This happens because the pendulum is independent of
the movements of the Earth, which is rotating underneath the pendulum, making
it appear that the pendulum is changing direction. The reason a pendulum swings
is because the Earth's gravity continually tugs down on it. According to
Einstein's general theory of relativity this relentless tugging is due to the
fact that every mass bends the fabric of space-time around it causing other
masses to slide down into the dimple it creates in space-time.
The amount of rotation of a Foucault pendulum
is dependent on latitude. At the North or South pole the pendulum appears to
rotate through an entire 360 degrees once every turn of the Earth (each
sidereal day) because the planet rotates all the way around underneath it. In
the Northern hemisphere at the latitude of the British Isles the rate of
rotation is reduced to around 280 degrees per day and the rate of rotation
continues to fall the closer one get to the equator, where a Foucault pendulum
does not rotate at all.
For over a hundred years everyone knew that a
Foucault's pendulum would swing in an entirely predictable manner at any
specific location. Then in 1954 a French engineer, economist and would-be
physicist by the name of Maurice Allais found that this was not always the
case. He was conducting an experiment at the school of Mining in Paris to
investigate a possible link between magnetism and gravitation, in which he released
a Foucault pendulum every fourteen minutes for thirty days and nights,
recording the direction of rotation in degrees. By chance, a total solar
eclipse occurred on one of those days.
Each day the pendulum moved with mechanical
precision but on June 30th 1954, when a partial eclipse occurred, one of
Allais' assistants realized that the pendulum had gone haywire. As the eclipse
began, the swing plane of the pendulum suddenly started to rotate backwards. It
veered furthest off course twenty minutes before maximum eclipse, when the Moon
covered a large portion of the Sun's surface before returning to its normal
swing once the eclipse was over. It seemed that the pendulum had somehow been
influenced by the alignment of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun.
This was totally unexpected and utterly
startling. Allais' experiment was being conducted indoors, out of the sunlight
so there was no apparent way the eclipse could have affected it. Allais was at
a loss to explain what had taken place but when he conducted an improved
version of his experiment in June and July 1958 with two pendulums six
kilometres apart he found the same effect. Then during the partial solar
eclipse on October 22nd 1959, Allais once again witnesses the same erratic
rotation - but this time similar effects were reported by three Romanian
scientist who knew nothing of Allais' work.
Many people have questioned his results,
mainly because science does not like that which it cannot explain. Many others
have now repeated the experiment with mixed results: some found no measurable
effect, but most have confirmed the result at different locations - including
one conducted in an underground laboratory!
It is interesting to note that in 1988 Allais
was awarded a Noble Prize for economics. Like Alexander Thom (and many other
paradigm busters) a major discovery had come from someone working outside their
own field. These are bright people who are driven by curiosity and who are not
the products of conventional training.
Allais despairs at the standards of those
that oppose without logic or reasoning: In the history of science, every
revolutionary result meets with very strong opposition… Relativists say I'm
wrong without providing any demonstration. Most of them haven't ever read what
I wrote.'
In 1970 Erwin Saxl and Mildred Allen of Mount
Holyoke College, Massachusetts, studied the behaviour of a pendulum before,
during and after a total eclipse. The pair took a slightly different approach
to Allais as they used a torsion pendulum, which is a massive disc suspended
from a wire attached to its centre. Rotating the disc slightly caused the wire
to twist. When it is released, the disc continues to twirl first clockwise,
then anticlockwise, with a fixed period. But during an eclipse, their pendulum
sped up significantly. They concluded that gravitational theory needs to be
modified.
In India in 1995, D C Mishra and M B S Rao of
National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad observed a small but
sudden drop in the strength of gravity when using an extremely accurate
gravimeter during a solar eclipse. But results have been mixed. When the
eclipse Sun rose above Helsinki on July 22nd 1990, Finnish geophysicists found
no disturbance to the usual swing, yet in March 1997 scientist observed
gravimeter anomalies during an eclipse in a very remote area North-east China.
The mystery continues and yet no academic
institution appears willing to invest time and money to study this phenomenon
in depth. However, Thomas Goodey, a self-funding independent researcher from
Brentford in England, has decided that he will investigate the Allais effect by
using several pendulums during an eclipse. Because modern equipment is much
more accurate and sensitive than that available in 1954 - giving twenty to one
hundred times resolution, he is confident of a clear result.
Goodey plans to travel the world over the
next few years with twelve specially constructed pendulums. In May 2004, he
presented his strategy at a meeting of the Society for Science Exploration in
Las Vegas and invite physicists to join him. As new Scientist reported, several
leapt at the chance.
Goodey suspects that the anomalies occur when
an observer is near the line that connects the centre of masses of the Sun and
the Moon. During a total solar eclipse, the Sun-Moon line intersect the surface
of the Earth at two points on roughly opposite sides of the globe. This theory
would explain why the sunrise eclipse in Helsinki did not produce a result.
Goodey is quoted as saying that observations at this 'anti-eclipse' point where
no eclipse is visible might carry much greater weight.
We wait with interest to hear the final
results of Thomas Goodey's experiments. At this point it seems as though we
might well have been right to suspect that pendulums reveal a great deal about
the nature of our planet's gravity and its gravitational relationship with the
Moon and Sun. Could it be that because the Moon blocks out the disc of the Sun
so perfectly it is actually a shield to an ongoing interaction between the
Earth and the Sun? Or perhaps it is because all three centres of mass are lined
up and something physical occurs at this time?
We also wonder whether the unknown
individuals who devised the Megalithic Yard and its inherent geometry
understood much more about this pendulum effect than we do. Or previous
findings strongly suggest that they knew a great deal more about the
Earth-Moon-Sun relationship.
A special
relationship
Our initial findings about megalithic
geometry,
described in Civilization One, had caused us to examine all kinds of
unexpected relationships between the Earth and ancient measures. This had
further prompted us to wonder whether the 366 geometry, that produced the
Megalithic Yard, was in some way planet specific. Was there some connection
between the mass, spin and solar orbit that made it special to the Earth?
First we applied the principles of Megalithic
geometry to all of the planets of the solar system. No DISCERNABLE pattern
emerged - they appeared to be completely random results. For example Mars
produced 19.78 Megalithic Yards per second of arc and Venus an unimpressive
347.8. We also checked out the major moons of other planets to no avail.
A good friend of Chris, Dr Hilary Newbigen,
suggested that, for thoroughness, we try using the number of days per orbit for
each planet to see if there was a relationship to the individual dimensions,
but again the results were negative.
Then we looked at Earth's Moon.
The result here was anything but meaningless.
We took the Moon's radius, defined by NASA as being 1,738,100 kilometres, to
calculate a circumference of a meaningless sounding 10,920,800 metres. We then
converted this distance into Megalithic Yards, which gave us the equally
apparently arbitrary value of 13,162,900.
We then applied the rules of megalithic
geometry by dividing this circumference into 366 degrees, sixty minutes and six
seconds of arc. To our total amazement there were 100 Megalithic Yards per
lunar Megalithic Yard is so elegantly 'lunardetic' as well as geodetic! Our
next thought was the Sun. Because we know that the Sun is 400 times the size of
the Moon it should logically have a perfect 40,000 Megalithic Yards per second
of arc. For thoroughness we checked out the sums and it did indeed work as
perfectly as we expected.
This all seemed very odd. The megalithic
structures that were built across western Europe were frequently used to
observe the movements of the Sun and Moon, but how could the unit of measure
upon which these structures were based so beautifully integer to the
circumference of these bodies as well as of the Earth?
Is it coincidence? On top of all the other
strange facts regarding the Moon it becomes rather unrealistic to keep putting
everything down to a random fluke of nature. Of course, we were well aware that
the numbers we were looking at were only integer when one uses base ten - and
we will deal with that issue later.
If it is not coincidence then there are only
two other options. The first is that there is some unknown law of astrophysics
at work, causing relationships to emerge that were spotted in some way by our
Stone - Age forebears. The other is conscious design. The idea of deliberate
design seemed plum crazy - common sense tells us it's wrong. Then we, once
again, considered more wise words from Albert Einstein: 'Common sense is the
collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.'
At the age of eighteen we, like everyone
else, 'knew' that everything in the world was natural. But when we put our
prejudices of what can and cannot be, to one side and thought laterally about
it, the more reasonable it seemed.
It was not unreasonable to believe that the
stonemasons of the Neolithic period were smart enough to measure the polar
circumference of the Earth and that they devised a unit of measure that was
integer to the planet. Such a feat can be achieved with every simple tools as
demonstrated by the Ancient Greeks. But could they really have measured the
circumference of the Moon and Sun?
Or was this mysterious property of pendulums
something to do with it?
Most of all we marvelled at the fact that,
yet again, it was the size and position of the Moon that revealed that there is
an issue to resolve.
Xcerpted from Who Built the Moon – Copyright 2005 by Christopher
Knight and Alan Butler, Chapter Two
Watkins Publishing,
London
ISBN 13:
978-1-84293-163-9
ISBN 10: 1-84293-163-6
For more information
about ancient mysteries see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/forbidden%20archaeology
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