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Authors: Christopher Knight,Alan Butler
Who Built the Moon? (25 page)
Using the Megalithic Pendulum
About Pendulums
A pendulum is one of the simplest devices imaginable. In its most basic form it is nothing more than a weight suspended on a piece of twine or sinew. Since the pendulum has another function, as a plumb line, it may well be one of the first devices used by humanity. If allowed to hang, the weight of a pendulum will pull its string into a perfectly vertical position. Certainly the Megalithic people could never have constructed any of the major sites to be found all over Britain, Ireland and Brittany without the use of this device. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that if they possessed a plumb line, they also possessed a pendulum.
Although the device had been around for a long time it was the sixteenth-century genius Galileo who seems to have been the first person to look seriously at the attributes of pendulums (or at least the first of whom we have a record.) He is reported to have been bored in Church one day when his attention was caught by a large incense burner suspended from above by a chain or a rope, gently swinging back and forth and forming a natural pendulum. Galileo realized that the swings of the pendulum were equal in terms of time and he counted them against the beat of his own pulse.
Only two factors are of importance in the case of a simple pendulum. These are the length of the string and the gravitation of the Earth, which constantly exerts a pressure that will eventually bring the pendulum back to a vertical and resting position. The height of the swing of a pendulum is, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant because its time period from one extremity to the other will always be the same. In other words if the pendulum is excited more vigorously it will swing higher but its time period will remain the same.
It was a recognition of this constant nature of a pendulum that made it useful in the creation of clocks. In modern timepieces the pendulum has been superseded, but for many centuries it ensured the smooth running of clocks all over the world. It can still be found in quality clocks. Clock pendulums were eventually fitted with devices to prevent them from swinging too high, and others to regulate the nature of their arc of swing, but they are still, essentially, only animated plumb lines.
The Megalithic Yard was discovered by Alexander Thom as part of the composition of Megalithic sites from the northernmost part of Scotland, right down to Brittany in the South. The main problem with its use, and the reason archaeologists still doubt its veracity, lies in the fact that it remained absolutely accurate across thousands of square miles and many centuries. This would appear to be impossible in the case of a culture that was, at least in its early stages, devoid of metals to make a reliable ‘standard’ against which others could be set. Alexander Thom himself could think of no reliable way of passing on the Megalithic Yard without some variation being inevitable across time.
We eventually reasoned that it would be possible to turn ‘time’ into ‘distance’ by way of the turning Earth. The speed of the Earth on its axis is as accurate a yard stick for the passing of time as anyone could reasonably require for most purposes. Of course we can’t see the Earth turning but we can see its effects. The Sun, Moon and stars appear to rise from below the horizon in the east, to pass over our heads and then set in the west. In fact, although the Moon and planets do have independent movement, the Sun and the stars are not really moving at all (actually they are moving slightly but we need not concern ourselves with this for our present purposes).
The apparent motion of the stars is caused by the Earth turning on its axis and it is this fact that offers us an accurate clock which, with a little ingenuity, we can turn into a replicable linear unit of measurement. In the case of the Megalithic Yard we eventually discovered that the pendulum upon which it is based was set not by viewing any star but the planet Venus. Venus is, like the Earth, orbiting the Sun. As a result, when seen from the Earth, it has a complex series of movements against the backdrop of the stars. Sometimes Venus rises before the Sun, at which times it is called a morning star, and at other times it rises after the Sun and is then known as an evening star. This is purely a line-of-sight situation, caused by the fact that both Venus and the Earth are orbiting the Sun. When Venus crosses the face of the Sun to become an evening star, it is moving ‘against’ the direction followed by the backdrop of stars. It is within this observable fact that setting the Megalithic pendulum becomes possible.
In order to create the Megalithic Yard one has to follow the simple rules below:
Venus must be observable as an evening star, setting after the Sun and during that period at which it is moving at its fastest counter to the backdrop of stars.
The sky is divided into 366 parts. This can be achieved by trial and error, as explained in
Uriel’s Machine
44
and also in
Civilization One
45
but is also achievable through a neat little mathematical trick demonstrated below.
- Stand in an unobstructed position on a wide open piece of ground with a good view of the western horizon.
- Place a stick in the ground (stick A) and stand facing west with one of your heels touching the stick.
- Now take 233 steps, heel to toe, towards the west. Upon completing the 233 steps, place a second stick in the ground (stick B) in front of your toe.
- Turn to the north and place your heel against stick B. Now take four heel-to-toe steps to the north and then place a third stick (stick C) in the ground in front of your toe.
- The distance between sticks B and C, when viewed from A will now be 1/366
th
of the horizon.
It is now necessary to make a braced wooden frame of the type shown in figures 14 and 15, which is as wide as the gap between B and C. This must be set on poles in such a way that it gains significant height and can be altered in its angle.
The purpose of this exercise is so that the angle of the braced frame can be identical to that of the planet Venus as it falls towards its setting position.
Standing at A it is now necessary to observe Venus passing through the gap in the braced frame whilst swinging a pendulum and noting the number of swings achieved as Venus passes through the gap. A pendulum that swings 366 times during this occurrence must be 1/2 of a Megalithic Yard in length (41.48cm). The cord of this length represents the full Megalithic Yard of 82.966cm in length.
Figure 14
Figure15
In this way the Megalithic Yard can be reproduced on any site where observation of Venus, when at the right part of its cycle, can be achieved. For the use of the braced frame we are grateful to the considerations of Professor Archie Roy, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University.
Although pendulums differ slightly with latitude and altitude, because gravity also alters slightly, we have shown that the Megalithic Yard achieved using this method will remain within the tolerances discovered by Alexander Thom from Orkney in the north to Brittany in the south, in other words across the whole area containing monuments surveyed by Alexander Thom.
Using the Sumerian Pendulum
The method used by the Sumerians to set their own basic unit of length, the double kush, followed the same general rules as those employed by the Megalithic peoples of the far west of Europe. The only difference lay in the numbers used.
Sumerians relied on a 360º geometry, of the type we still use today. Because of this their starting point was to divide the horizon into 360 equal units. The mathematical trick used to short-circuit this procedure that was itemised in Appendix One does not apply in this case. It is possible that the Sumerians devised their own method of making the initial procedure quicker, but in any case theirs was a metal-using culture and one that would therefore not have needed to repeat the procedure of defining the linear unit all that often. They could have created a fairly accurate standard rod. Establishing the necessary 1/360
th
of the horizon by trial and error would have taken time, but it is quite possible to achieve with a high degree of accuracy.
The procedures used in the preceding Appendix are now followed. The braced frame would be equal to a gap of 1/360
th
of the horizon but Venus would be tracked in exactly the same way. The desired number of swings in this case is 240, which is the same as 240 seconds, a period of time known to the Sumerians as a ‘gesh’. A pendulum that swung 240 times during the passage of Venus through the braced frame would be 99.88 cm in length, a linear length that conforms to that discovered on the statues of Gudea from Lagesh in Iraq. This unit of length was known to the Sumerians as the double kush.
It has to be noted that the pendulum in question is not strictly speaking a seconds pendulum of the sort that was popularly used from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Because the object being tracked is Venus, which is moving independently against the backdrop of stars, the time taken for each beat of the pendulum is slightly longer than a second (1.002 seconds). This stands as part of the proof that the Sumerians did use this system to define their linear unit. They fully understood that there were 43,200 seconds in a day (to us there are twice this number because we use a twenty-four-hour day instead of the Sumerian twelve-hour day) but there is no absolutely reliable way of defining the true second of time by observing the sky and swinging a pendulum. This could only be achieved by tracking the average movement of the Sun in the same way Venus is used in this exercise. However, because of the Earth’s own orbital characteristics, the Sun does appear to move at a constant speed across the sky. There are only a few days each year on which the experiment using the Sun would work perfectly and the Sumerians could not have known which days would have been appropriate. In addition, the Sun is very much more difficult, and potentially dangerous, to track in this way.
Similarly, if they had used a star instead of the planet Venus, the pendulum would still not have been a true seconds pendulum. The reason for this is that the sidereal day (a day that is measured by a star passing from one point in the sky back to that point again) is shorter than a solar day (a day that is measured by the Sun passing from one position in the sky back to that point again). A seconds pendulum created by tracking a star would actually give a time reading of 0.997 seconds and lead to a pendulum length close to 99.3cm.
We remain convinced that both the Megalithic culture and that of the Sumerians were simply following instructions that had been given to them by another agency. In the case of the Sumerians the use of Venus for setting their pendulum, and therefore their chosen unit of length, resulted in a series of measurements that were truly integrated with the Earth. As we have shown, the Sumerian double mana unit of mass divides into the mass of the Earth 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times, which would not have been the case with a shorter pendulum and therefore a lighter unit of mass. True, the achieved second of time was slightly at odds with the genuine second of time, but the Sumerians, lacking accurate clocks, could not have been aware of this fact. In fact the discrepancy is so small it couldn’t have been measured until the last century or so.
The Message in Detail
The message that we have detected is present in recurring number sequences that are, strangely, often round numbers. We started to realize that something highly unusual was happening when we discovered that the Megalithic system of geometry worked on the Moon and the Sun as well as the Earth.
Looking into issues concerning the Moon we were immediately reminded of the strange coincidence that the Moon and the Sun appear to be the same size in Earth’s skies, leading to the phenomenon we call a total eclipse. Still stranger is the fact that the relation is so numerically neat with the Moon being 400 times smaller than the Sun and 400 times closer to the Earth at the point of a total eclipse. On its own this could be a bizarre coincidence, but because of what follows we believe that it is the ‘headline’ to a message built into the Moon 4.6 billion years ago.