Debunked: The Great pyramid of Giza and the Speed of Light

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mrfintoil

mrfintoil

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Many years ago I was confronted with a claim that the location coordinates of the Great Pyramid of Giza match the exact number sequence for the speed of light in vacuum measured in metres. This claim can be found here for example: http://world-pyramids.com/en/world-...za-plateau/great-pyramid-pillar-of-light.html

I'm just going to focus on the claims concerning the coordinates of this pyramid in relation to the speed of light.

The claim is usually put like this:
  • Speed of light through vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s.
  • Both contain the number sequence 299792458, which to some is too peculiar to be a coincidence.
  • Therefore architects must have had "secret knowledge" about the properties of light, information some believe must have been passed down by higher intelligent beings.
However, there are a number of aspects we must take into consideration before we jump to such conclusions. And most importantly we must realize that we are tweaking a number of factors to get a perfect match. Without these tweaks we quickly realize that the match is in fact not much of a match at all.

  • To get a latitudinal hit on the pyramid you actually need no more than five digits, as opposed to all nine. The last four numbers are basically redundant and pointless.
  • The speed of light through vacuum is an integer. A latitude of 299,792,458 isn't a valid degree so we have to consciously put a decimal in the right place. Two options are available, 2.99792458 and 29.9792458, so another conscious decision must be made to fit the speed of light claim.
  • We have the option to switch the latitude value with the longitude, but doing this points to another completely uninteresting place. A conscious decision has been made to put the right value in the right place for no other reason than to support the claim.
  • The longitude can be just about any value between -180 and 180, but we consciously pick the one that will end up on the Giza pyramid, forcing a connection.
  • A latitude of 29.9800000 also gives us a hit on the pyramid, but as an integer this value would actually be faster than the speed of light through vacuum. We make a conscious decision to limit this value downward.
  • We consciously choose to use the metres as unit when there are many other distance units to choose from.
  • The ancient Egyptians never used metres as a unit. They used 'cubits'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubit) If they actually knew about the metre one would expect them to use such unit for measurement as well. They simply did not.
Conclusion: In order to make the connection we have to actively include various options that fit the original claim, and exclude the many that doesn't, even though they are still fully valid options. A matching sequence of five digits is not particularly strange or extraordinary. People have won the lottery matching far longer sequences than just five digits. Sometimes numbers simply match up without any connection whatsoever. So because this argument require some forcing we can conclude that this is likely nothing but a coincidence.

Please mention if any errors have been made in my analysis.
 
This showed up on my FB wall today.

http://www.endalldisease.com/two-gi...-found-in-the-center-of-the-bermuda-triangle/

Of course, I had to see what I could find. Some of it. It seems to be a new rehash of a World News Weekly story from the 90s.


http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q...ids-of-glass-found-under-the-bermuda-triangle


"Suddenly this thing pops up all over the internet. A crystal pyramid, that reportedly has appeared or been discovered on a deep sea investigation about 2000 metres under the surface of the ocean in the area of the Bermuda Triangle. The person who discovered it is named "oceanographer Dr. Verlag Meyer". I did a search online for this person, and found nothing, except the reference to this alleged crystal pyramid. Not very surprising, since 'verlag' is not exactly a name, but the German word for 'publisher' (German Wikipedia, scroll down and see where the English link points to if you are curious. Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing)

Meyer Verlag, by the way, is an existing publishing company in Germany (the town of Aachen to be exact). Perhaps they are grateful for the free advertising, I have not asked them. Perhaps they are not even aware of it, as they are publishers for sports of all kinds."

http://nlpagan.net/?p=251



http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?noframes;read=235564

http://www.snopes.com/photos/supernatural/crystalpyramid.asp
 
Mick West said:
And the meter was not even invented until the late 1700s. And it is defined as 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator through Paris. And Paris didn't exist back then either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre
Click to expand...

Wikipedia.. The site that tells what you are 'supposed' to know.

How did they calculate the size of a cubit then?

They used the meter with Pi and the Golden Number to determine the length.

Interesting factoid. If you take the perimeter of the base and then divide it by the height multiplied by 2 you'll get Pi (1760/560 = 3.14). maybe they didn't know pi either back then?


The length of a base side is 9,131 Pyramid Inches measured at the mean socket level, or 365.24 Pyramid Cubits, which is the number of days in a year [9,131/25 = 365.24, accurate to 5 digits].

The length of the antechamber of the King's Chamber times Pi = length of a sidereal year [116.26471 Pyramid Inches * 3.14159 = 365.25636 days, accurate to 8 digits]

And in regards to the speed of light. If you draw two circles, one inside the square of Giza and one outside the square and you subtract the inner circumference from the outer circumference, the answer is equal to nothing else What? The speed of light.

When there are so many 'coincidences', as contemporary science would say, at what point do we just hold our hands up and submit to the fact that ancient civilizations were highly advanced? The sheer pride of modern science is holding back almost as much as religion!
 
David Fox said:
Interesting factoid. If you take the perimeter of the base and then divide it by the height multiplied by 2 you'll get Pi (1760/560 = 3.14). maybe they didn't know pi either back then?
Click to expand...

Well, let's start by you presenting the evidence for this. What units are you using, and how did you measure those values?
 
David Fox said:
They used the meter with Pi and the Golden Number to determine the length.
Click to expand...

Please explain this unit of length in more detail. What is the conversion between this meter and a Pyramid Inch?

When there are so many 'coincidences',
Click to expand...

There may seem like a lot of coincidences but only if you ignore the huge number of other possible comparisons and the many different things you try to compare them to. Stuart Robbins made a video about the claims about artificial structures on Mars and found the alleged coincidences fell within random chance.

 
Ignoring that you're using modern units which the Egyptians did not use, you're also using longitude, and... Well, that's just bunk.

Latitude is always the same (and the Egyptians eventually had a pretty good way of measuring latitude due to contact with the Greeks - it was through contact between the cultures that they estimated the Earth's diameter to a pretty respectable margin. This was long after the Pyramids were built, but let's ignore that),

But longitude is a weird coordinate. It's actually really hard to measure without a precision timepiece. The Egyptians and Greeks were learned enough in navigation and cartography to know how useful it would be, and to know how limited their abilities with it were.

And, even if they could measure it precisely, longitude has an arbitrary 0. There's no particular reason that the prime meridian has to go through the Royal Observatory other than England said so and eventually the rest of the world got on board with that. That happened thousands of years after the Pyramids - Greenwich was not there yet.

The first longitude system to use coordinates (coming long after the Pyramids, but again, let's ignore that), had as its prime meridian a place called the Fortunate Isles, which was probably either the Canary or Cape Verde Islands. This is actually a more logical place to put the prime meridian than we did, particularly if you don't know America is there, since it doesn't create direction changes in the middle of land (the main reason the isles were chosen, as they were the farthest thing west on maps and negative numbers weren't invented yet). Logical or not, it means you have to add something between 13 and 25 degrees to the longitude coordinate to match the most contemporary system available, and that erases two of the coincidences.


A hypothetically advanced Egyptial civilization could have determined c, and even developed c-based metric measuring systems. It woulds be a major coincidence for them to develop an exact meter (our c-based meter is the product of a series of adjustment of an arbitrary and fairly modern unit of measure, the same process in Egypt would probably have developed something like a c-based metric cubit instead). However, they would not have put longitude 0 at the same place we did unless they were also time travelers from England, and I'm pretty sure in a society with such prolific artwork, eventually one of them would have drawn the police box.

Logically, without mathematical use of negative numbers, their prime meridian would also be something west of the tip of Africa, out in the Atlantic Ocean, for the same reason as Ptolemy's. With the use of negative numbers (which we know they didn't use, but let's assume they did), an origin through their capital or a significant monument would also be logical. But our Prime Meridian, at the time was a line through an empty part of a sparsely inhabited and largely uncontacted island hopelessly distant from the contemporary civilizations.
 
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David Fox said:
Wikipedia.. The site that tells what you are 'supposed' to know.

How did they calculate the size of a cubit then?

They used the meter with Pi and the Golden Number to determine the length.

Interesting factoid. If you take the perimeter of the base and then divide it by the height multiplied by 2 you'll get Pi (1760/560 = 3.14). maybe they didn't know pi either back then?


The length of a base side is 9,131 Pyramid Inches measured at the mean socket level, or 365.24 Pyramid Cubits, which is the number of days in a year [9,131/25 = 365.24, accurate to 5 digits].

The length of the antechamber of the King's Chamber times Pi = length of a sidereal year [116.26471 Pyramid Inches * 3.14159 = 365.25636 days, accurate to 8 digits]

And in regards to the speed of light. If you draw two circles, one inside the square of Giza and one outside the square and you subtract the inner circumference from the outer circumference, the answer is equal to nothing else What? The speed of light.

When there are so many 'coincidences', as contemporary science would say, at what point do we just hold our hands up and submit to the fact that ancient civilizations were highly advanced? The sheer pride of modern science is holding back almost as much as religion!
Click to expand...
It seems the Egyptians favored certain slopes in the design of their pyramids which was also a good approximation to 'pi', which leads mathematicians to believe it's an accidental coincidence.
https://www.math.washington.edu/~greenber/PiPyr.html
External Quote:
The main point that I will make in this essay is that when one takes into account what we know about ancient Egyptian mathematics (based primarily on the Rhind Papyrus), especially their ways of representing lengths and slopes, then the relationship between &pi and the Great Pyramid no longer seems very remarkable. The essential point is that the measurement system which the ancient Egyptians used would lead the architects to use certain slopes in the design of pyramids. One of those slopes just happens to be an excellent approximation to the number 4/&pi, and if the architect chooses that slope, then the pyramid would exhibit the famous &pi relationship. From this point of view, the probability that the architect might choose that particular slope for at least one of the pyramids is actually rather high. It then becomes quite reasonable to believe that the relationship between &pi and the Great Pyramid is just an accidental consequence of their Mathematics.
External Quote:
How can one calculate the probability that an architect building a pyramid would choose a slope which is so close to 4/&pi? This is actually a very tricky question. It is impossible to do such a calculation without making some assumptions. The answer will depend crucially on those assumptions. I will discuss a number of hypothetical sets of assumptions to illustrate this important point.

Suppose that an architect is designing a pyramidal structure and has decided that the base should be a perfect square and that the apex should be directly above the center of the square base. This would mean that the pyramid would be very symmetrical. All of the faces would be isosceles triangles and slanted at the same angle. The architect would then have to choose that angle. For this discussion, I will assume that the builders will be able to carry out the architect's design with perfect precision. The architect would have to somehow specify his choice of angle to those builders. One could imagine many different ways in which this could be done, but I will consider five illustrative examples.
 
Jason said:
It seems the Egyptians favored certain slopes in the design of their pyramids which was also a good approximation to 'pi', which leads mathematicians to believe it's an accidental coincidence.
Click to expand...

Trial and error, as well. When I went to Egypt in 1994 on holiday (and a packaged tour...ugh) we were shown the famous "bent" pyramid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid

External Quote:
Archaeologists now believe that the Bent Pyramid represents a transitional form between step-sided and smooth-sided pyramids (see Step pyramid). It has been suggested that due to the steepness of the original angle of inclination the structure may have begun to show signs of instability during construction, forcing the builders to adopt a shallower angle to avert the structure's collapse.
 
David Fox said:
When there are so many 'coincidences', as contemporary science would say, at what point do we just hold our hands up and submit to the fact that ancient civilizations were highly advanced? The sheer pride of modern science is holding back almost as much as religion!
Click to expand...
Of course, part of science's job is to avoid creating 'coincidences' just to advance narratives.

Also can you please define "sheer pride of modern science" for me...?
I'm not sure what you're referring to. Thanx. :)
 
Hevach said:
Ignoring that you're using modern units which the Egyptians did not use, you're also using longitude, and... Well, that's just bunk.

Latitude is always the same (and the Egyptians eventually had a pretty good way of measuring latitude due to contact with the Greeks - it was through contact between the cultures that they estimated the Earth's diameter to a pretty respectable margin. This was long after the Pyramids were built, but let's ignore that),

But longitude is a weird coordinate. It's actually really hard to measure without a precision timepiece. The Egyptians and Greeks were learned enough in navigation and cartography to know how useful it would be, and to know how limited their abilities with it were.

And, even if they could measure it precisely, longitude has an arbitrary 0. There's no particular reason that the prime meridian has to go through the Royal Observatory other than England said so and eventually the rest of the world got on board with that. That happened thousands of years after the Pyramids - Greenwich was not there yet.

The first longitude system to use coordinates (coming long after the Pyramids, but again, let's ignore that), had as its prime meridian a place called the Fortunate Isles, which was probably either the Canary or Cape Verde Islands. This is actually a more logical place to put the prime meridian than we did, particularly if you don't know America is there, since it doesn't create direction changes in the middle of land (the main reason the isles were chosen, as they were the farthest thing west on maps and negative numbers weren't invented yet). Logical or not, it means you have to add something between 13 and 25 degrees to the longitude coordinate to match the most contemporary system available, and that erases two of the coincidences.


A hypothetically advanced Egyptial civilization could have determined c, and even developed c-based metric measuring systems. It woulds be a major coincidence for them to develop an exact meter (our c-based meter is the product of a series of adjustment of an arbitrary and fairly modern unit of measure, the same process in Egypt would probably have developed something like a c-based metric cubit instead). However, they would not have put longitude 0 at the same place we did unless they were also time travelers from England, and I'm pretty sure in a society with such prolific artwork, eventually one of them would have drawn the police box.

Logically, without mathematical use of negative numbers, their prime meridian would also be something west of the tip of Africa, out in the Atlantic Ocean, for the same reason as Ptolemy's. With the use of negative numbers (which we know they didn't use, but let's assume they did), an origin through their capital or a significant monument would also be logical. But our Prime Meridian, at the time was a line through an empty part of a sparsely inhabited and largely uncontacted island hopelessly distant from the contemporary civilizations.
Click to expand...
You make an excellent point Hevach, in that long/lat lines are based on current technologies. I often hear from proponents of ancient advanced tech or ancient aliens that these pyramids were built "exactly" at the center of earth, forgetting the fact that each intersection of each equidistant long/lat lines would produce a center of earth in any east/west direction around the globe.
 
Hevach said:
However, they would not have put longitude 0 at the same place we did unless they were also time travelers from England, and I'm pretty sure in a society with such prolific artwork, eventually one of them would have drawn the police box.
Click to expand...
I was about to make a facetious comment about Iron Maiden Album covers but I remembered that the police box is on "Somewhere in Time" and not on the pyramid of "powerslave". Powerslave DOES however have Mickey Mouse and Indiana Jones was ere graffiti.

Modern science is so prideful with insistence on proof over rhetoric and random unsubstantiated claims!!
 
Thats all dandy n all.. but try using the square root of 2 + 2 and the golden ratio + 1 for your calculations. It matches within 0.1 % accuracy of the kings chamber dimensions. Coincidence? I don't think so.. the golden ratio and the square root of 2 are closely related.. the ratio is the important factor here. They wouldn't have needed to use the same measurements as us and the time the meter was invented was suspiciously close to the time the french went to Egypt. Not to mention that Napoleon himself... just before that time spent a night in the kings chamber.. I don't know about you but I don't believe so many different things can just be a coincidence. For all you or I know the measurement could have actually come from Giza! It was over 200 years ago after all.
 
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The things to remember are...
1) The Egyptians used The Cubit, originally the distance between the tip of the elbow and the tip of the middle finger. At some point in the era of pyramid builders this was standardised at around 525mm - just over half a metre, and many cubit, double cubit and half cubit measuring sticks have been found in tombs and other archaeological sites. The double cubit is the most interesting, it is a handy unit of length, and I don't think its unusual that the double cubit other and units of length such as the metre, the imperial yard, the Inca thatki etc all fall with in a few inches of each other.
2) The Egyptians were good at maths. Again no suprise there. Ancient Egypt was a complex society which not only under took large building and engineering projects, but had a complex trade and tax system, needed advanced logistics to supply its large army feed a large population etc. You can't do that with out knowing a bit of maths and mathematics is something all civilisations develop fairly early on in their development.
3) Things like the golden ratio, trigonometry etc are mathematical constants, work them out at any point in time, using any numerical system and your gonna get the same sort of results. After all Pi and a 2:1 ratio are going to be Pi and a 2:1 ratio in modern Britain, ancient Egypt, medieval Japan or the planet Riga 7.

The result is that many measurements of many structures across the world are going to co-inside, fall into similar ratios and show other similarities. This isn't exactly coincidence, its a sort of convergent development of mathematical understanding and technological development, and is no way proof of alien visitation, coded occult messages or any other kind of new age woo you care to mention.
 
Hypnoticdesign said:
Thats all dandy n all.. but try using the square root of 2 + 2 and the golden ratio + 1 for your calculations. It matches within 0.1 % accuracy of the kings chamber dimensions. Coincidence? I don't think so.. the golden ratio and the square root of 2 are closely related.. the ratio is the important factor here. They wouldn't have needed to use the same measurements as us and the time the meter was invented was suspiciously close to the time the french went to Egypt. Not to mention that Napoleon himself... just before that time spent a night in the kings chamber.. I don't know about you but I don't believe so many different things can just be a coincidence. For all you or I know the measurement could have actually come from Giza! It was over 200 years ago after all.
Click to expand...
Why adding 2 to the square root of 2 and adding 1 to the golden ratio? Why? If I were an Egyptian architect designing the kings chamber and I wanted to put these special numbers in it I would not conceal them by adding anything, I would just use the plain numbers. If you want to find coïncidences, you can always create them by trying all kind of special numbers or ratio's (pi, e, delta,golden ratio, square root of 2; or 3); adding, subtracting, dividing etc. And sooner or later: BINGO. When you take into consideration the infinite amount of possible comparisons you are most likely to find "coïncidences".
By the way, as far as my information goes the dimensions of the kings chamber are: width 10 cubits, length 20 cubits, height 11.18 or 11.43 cubits (depending on whether you take the granite floor into account). Please show me where the square root of 2 and the golden ratio come in. And perhaps you could explain what the relation between the two is.
Finally: the meter is defined by the French Academy of Sciences in 1791 and the first brass meter (accurate to within 0,5 mm of what we now consider to be a meter) dates from 1795. Three years before the french army went to Egypt. I would say unsuspiciously well before.
 
Henk001 said:
Why adding 2 to the square root of 2 and adding 1 to the golden ratio? Why?
Click to expand...
One thing I've noted about this kind of numerology is that it's always so arbitrary. Take this measurement in these units and multiply it by some random combination of mathematical constants and divide it by some other measurements in some other unit, etc. etc. and eventually something resembling something falls out the other end. Sometimes using arbitrary modern units not used by the builders, and sometimes the measurements are to a suspicious level of accuracy or different to published figures, no doubt chosen to make the end result

What gets me however is that it's never explained the process they went through to get the result. What chain of logic lead them to take this measurement and not that measurement. Why divide them instead of adding them. Why add or subtract this other measurement at some point in the process. Etc. Because it's never explained, it's obvious that someone just ran various measurements related to something (e.g. the pyramids) arbitrarily through a numerical grinder until something interesting pops out the other end. The measurements are then fudged so that the end result is "accurate" to some amazing number of significant digits.

Keep adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing enough random factoids, tweaking them to suit your purpose as you go, and of course you'll eventually find something that looks like pi or e or the golden ratio or whatever.
 
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