<HTML>Don -
First, the opinions of one university professor hardly represent those of the whole university professorship. If that professor said that to you, he was wrong. I have NEVER met a professor in any other 6 or more universities I have studied or taught at that insisted his students merely vomit back his opinions to him/her as a form of educating them. Without exception, each one has preferred it when students disagree with them, but their grounds for disagreement must be sound (see third point below).
Second, in the last post to which I replied, you called university graduates "clones of their teachers." Do you contest that intellectuall "clones" have NOT been indoctrinated by the teachers?
Third, you confuse acquisition of factual knowledge (a part of any educational process) with modes of interpretation (also a part, but more fluid than factual acquisition). If you went back to university to do a degree in Egyptology and proposed a thesis that "proved" mathematics in the Pyramids "proved encoded knowledge" from an LC, you'd be rightly turned down. If the mathematics was all you had to go on and you ignored all the other evidence (or lack of it), it would be right your proposal was turned down. Numbers can very easily be placed into an ancient monument by the imaginations of modern researchers. Numbers that are supposed to have been "found" can just as easily be have been inserted there by the modern mind. (This is why Anthony's contention that "the stones speak for themselves" is completely wrong: stones don't speak until they are interpreted by modern scholars. It is the methods used for those processes of interpretation that distinguish real from alternative history.)
This fact has been unequivocally proven my mathematicians (like Martin Gardner). Take the Bible Code. Huge claims were made about (a) the Code was mathematically very sophisticated (b) it was too sophisticated to have been put there by chance (c) it was intentionally put into the Hebrew text of the Old Testament by God to warn us of the future (though the "future" events could only recognized AFTER THE FACT of their occurrence). Unfortunately, when the Bible Code "method" was applied to almost any long text in any language (e.g. "War and Peace" in English translation), "significant" predictions could also be "discovered." By these means it could be argued that Tolstoy created the universe. Numbers, unfortunately, can be manipulated as easily as they can be used as a heuristic device. There is a long history of 150 years duration of such numerological "interpretations" of the pyramids and other Egyptian monuments. Not once in that time has it produced a reliable result. Egyptology (which relies on on the hard evidence of archaeology) is hardly a dogmatic and orthodox inquisition for rejecting methods that have a proven record of uselessness.
Finally, it is not true that mathematics has been ingored by Egyptologists. I know of one chap (working under my colleauge Don Redford) who is examining the proportions employed by Egyptians in their architecture.
Best,
Garrett</HTML>
