Sacred Number

Charles Piazzi Smyth was the largely self-taught Astronomer son of a British admiral who, by the age of 27 had become Professor at Edinburgh and Astronomer Royal for Scotland. He was an extremely accurate and innovative practical astronomer and a pioneer in photography. Visitors to Edinburgh will experience his work every time they hear the One O'Clock Gun, fired from the castle using an electrical connection from Carlton Hill, the original Royal Observatory. He also advised, after visiting the volanic peaks of the Canary Islands, the building of mountain observatories (an idea of Isaac Newton) and though Britain failed to heed this advice until 1967, the French at Pic du Midi, and Russians successfully took it. [see The Story of Astronomy at Edinburgh by Hermann A Bruck]

 

However in the 1860s, Piazzi Smyth's career entered a mystical period which has ever since caused his remarkable scientific achievements to be ignored - as he wanted to take up the speculation that the Great Pyramid at Giza was a metrological and astronomical puzzle.  He and his wife, who was his assistant and constant travelling companion are buried beneath a small pyramid in Sharow near Ripon, N Yorkshire (above) which I visited again when passing yesterday and also over 20 years ago.

 From the perspective of Sacred Number, many of the initial assertions that the Great Pyramid was metrological were correct but these then led to a range of wild theories influenced by religious ideas of the day. It was not until Flinders Petrie increased the accuracy of measurements at Giza that many of the starting points for these theories were completely undermined. At this point, metrology itself was tarnished: before this it had been a living subject of study for antiquarians and scholars. Then it became largely banished from science including archaeological work as a medium of interpretation.

Perhaps the most influential of all the metrological starting points, for what became a farce, was the observation by Sir John Herschel that the pole of the Earth was "500,500,000 British inches long or exactly 500 million inches if the inch were to be lengthened by a thousandth part, the thickness of a human hair" [Bruck, p33], the so called (by Robert Menzies) Pyramid Inch that was used to decode the Great Pyramid as a Chronology of world or at least Biblical history.

The Pyramid Inch is (weirdly) a metrological reality even though, in the Ancient Model, it does not divide perfectly into the pole. John Neal reveals that this Inch is best seen as a numerical effect within metrology in his Freaks section (p218) of All Done With Mirrors.  The best descriptions of the ancient system do not require it, the polar radius being commensurate with all measures having 11/7 in their formulae in feet as is the case with the Jewish sacred cubit, the astronomical megalithic yard (AMY) and the royal mile, to name but a few.

The ancient figure for the pole to pole DIAMETER would be 500 million British inches plus 500,000 plus 7794.26 - and this latter figure is extra to that required by the pyramid inch polar theory. Thus there are three "things" here: