Hermione Wrote:
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> Thanks for the link, Jonny.
>
> Understanding how intelligent people such as
> Taylor and Smyth could come up with such
> cockamamie ideas really defeats me.

And a thank you from me, Jonny.

Just to add to your sense of defeat, Hermione, even Sir Isaac Newton got in on the act.
He presented his ideas in a paper titled 'A Dissertation upon the Sacred Cubit of the Jews and the Cubits of several Nations: in which, from the Dimensions of the Greatest Pyramid, as taken by Mr. John Greaves, the ancient Cubit of Memphis is determined.'

In fairness to Greaves, Newton and Smyth, they were very much men of their times, the measurements they drew on were incorrect, and and Egyptology proper was for them a thing of the future (enter Sir William Flinders Petrie, Father of Pots).

There is a problem with the Physics World article in so far as it (and others like it) is likely to put people off reading Piazzi Smyth's books, in particular his 3 volume 'Life and Work at the Great Pyramid' (First Edition 1864).
This work, along with Flinders Petrie's 'Pyramids and Temples of Giza' (First Edition 1883) and John and Morton Edgar's 3 volume 'Great Pyramid Passages and Chambers' (1923) contains considerable detail about the dimensions and appearance of the Pyramid's interior and consequently is invaluable to anybody with an interest in this magnificent structure - and the reader gets to 'see' the interior before Hawass and others decided to spruce it up a bit).
However, I do recommend that in the case of Smyth and the Edgar brothers, the reader skips their rather, how shall I say, fanciful interpretations of the evidence.

MJ