Byrd Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> molder Wrote:
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> > Yes 68.7 miles is 1 degree of latitude at the
> > equator
> >
> > 687 is the number of days in 1 year on mars.
>
> Except... the Egyptians couldn't write 68.7 It
> would have been 68+1/2 + 1/5
>
> > Now think about 6.87 and take its square root
> the
> > Egyptians knew square roots.
>
> They could only do square roots of whole numbers.
> 6.87 is 6+1/2+1/3+1/28+1/1050 and they had no way
> of finding the square root of 1/1050 (or 1/3, for
> that matter)
>
> >
> > 2.621 or twice phi
>
> And here we get into a representation that moves
> to the purely absurd in Egyptian:
> 2+1/3+1/16+1/18+1/35+1/51+1/86+1/306+1/1000+1/1190+1/2550+1/7310
>
> > Take its square root
>
> YOU try it, using the Egyptian method. Go ahead.
> Demonstrate using their numbers (show your work)
> (here's how they did it:
> [
www.mathnstuff.com]
> )
>
> > 1.6189 close to phi take its square root. Its
> > approximate but still close. Take the square
> root
>
> Square root of
> 1+1/2+1/16+1/32+1/64+1/128+1/1024+1/2048+1/4096+1/320000+1/2560000
>
> (skeptical look) In ancient Egyptian numbers
> you're going to need quite a bit of papyrus.
>
> > 1.272388 the slant angle of the pyramid
>
> Let's see... that would be...
> 1+1/4+1/64+1/256+1/512+1/2048+1/4096+1/8192+1/32768+1/65536+1/500000+1/1000000+1/4000000+1/16000000+1/32000000+1/128000000+1/256000000+1/1024000000
>
> You're gonna need a boatload of papyrus for that
> one. There's well over 200 symbols in that one
> number.
>
> Please explain why they would waste their time
> doing this instead of using the experimentally
> derived (via Sneferu's mistakes) metric of "five
> palms and 2 digits up, one cubit over"?
Somewhat not related. The science folks in Europe in the 1830s when they got their first parallax measurement to Alpha Centauri. Doing the mathematics to determine the distance require extraordinary efforts (on paper) until they invented the light year to make it manageable as.Proxima Centauri was 40,000 billion kilometers away (well that is what they determined) - that was a lot of zeroes. The British did it in miles of course so that had to be converted too.
To avoid manipulating such long numbers on a regular basis, a unit of distance better adapted to the scale of the Universe quickly became a necessity. One unit of distance commonly used in astronomy is the light-year. A light-year is the distance travelled by light in one year, which is 9 trillion, 460 billion, 730 million, 472 thousand and 581 kilometres. In other words, almost 10,000 billion kilometres. So, the light year was invented in 1838.
The AE didn't have a zero either did they?