Hi Hermione

Thanks for the links

Many have supposed that Isaac Newton (1647 – 1731) became interested in the Great Pyramid hoping to find a connection to the size of Earth. This may be so but Newton was much more interested in the French survey of the globe because the instruments available in the Scientific Revolution meant that a modern survey would be far more reliable than any ancient determination.

The claim that Newton thought there were two units of length in the Great Pyramid is not supported by his dissertation on cubits. In fact the theoretical connection spotted by Taylor was for the Jewish temple cubit which Newton calculated based on the assumption that it would prove to be 6/5 x length of Egyptian cubit, and absolutely nothing to do with dimensions of pyramids. It was simply a hypothetical extension of the Egyptian cubit by the Israelites after they had left Egypt, so potentially the length of Solomon's temple cubit.

In reality Newton's theory depends on the division of the Egyptian into 6 palms, which was based on an incorrect drawing of the Grand Gallery showing a division into 6 palms. In reality the Grand Gallery has 7 corbels of a palm on either side of the gallery which reduce the width from 4 cubits to 2 cubits.

The review in the BBC book Pyramid Beyond Imagination makes the claim that Newton regarded the Great Pyramid as having been designed in two complementary units of length, but there is no evidence that this theory was anything other than the mystical theory of Piazzi Smyth as far as I know, or the historical theory of John Taylor.

John Taylor had attempted to find a lost leaf from the pages of history whereas Piazzi Smyth promoted a mystical theory in which the Great Pyramid had been divinely inspired in so-called Sacred Cubits of 25 pyramid inches of 1.001 British inches underlying the regular dimensions of the Great Pyramid in profane Egyptian cubits. Taylor had little survey data, and thought the pyramid had been designed in inches with the British inch traceable back to Egypt.

The BBC book pointed out that Newton needed to know the circumference of the Earth for his theory of gravitation.

Newton's geophysical model of the globe predicted an ellipticity of 230 whereas in reality it is now known to be 292.

A ratio of 101/100 for the ellipticity is 101 as the ratio of the major axis of a spheroid to the minor axis of a spheroid, and a ratio of 1001/1000 would be 1001, so Earth is closer to a sphere than predicted by Newton's model.

Newton supposed that the record of the re-calibration of a pendulum clock at three latitudes may not be reliable because the observations indicated that Earth was less spherical than the shape he had predicted, but if record was correct then he predicted that this would be due to the fact Earth is not a homogenous sphere and that its density must increase towards the centre.

In reality, geophysicists now know that Earth's higher density at the core should improve the sphericity of Earth, which it appears to do because the observed ratio of 292 is greater than Newton's theoretical ratio of 230, but nobody has published a reconciliation of these figures. I have done some calculations using my geometric model.

Newton needed to know the ratio of the surface gravity at the equator to the equatorial centripetal acceleration with the former calculated from an estimate of gravity at another latitude based on his geometric model of how the change in the shape of Earth would affect gravity, and also the circumference of Earth to calculate the centripetal acceleration from the equatorial radius which reduces the pull force of gravity.

It was an ingenious model which proved his theory of gravitation as proportional to the inverse square of the distance between two objects, and independent of the elements composing the mass of the objects, so a universal theory of gravitation, but I don't think it is likely that Newton gained any insight from the Great Pyramid of Egypt, or a fortuitous connection between the length of the Egyptian cubit and the size of Earth, but my conjecture is, I think, tenable based on the work of John Taylor.

Mark



Edited 9 time(s). Last edit at 09/30/2023 03:35PM by Mark Heaton.