Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men Joseph P Farrell

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3. Celestial Geometries and the Pendulum Method

The question of why such a primitive people would have need for such an accurate unit of measure spread over such a wide area is, however, crucial for understanding how they reproduced it. Knight and Butler state this methodological problem in the following fashion: “We saw that the only hope of resolving the issue, once and for all, was to attempt to find a reason why this length of unit would have had meaning for Neolithic builders, and then to identify a methodology for reproducing such a length at different locations.”⁵⁸ Optimally, this meant that “what our Megalithic mathematicians needed was a method of reproducing the Megalithic Yard that was simple to use, very accurate and available to people dispersed over a large distance and across a huge span of time.”⁵⁹ It was the classic engineer’s optimalization problem, for whatever this method was, it had to be a method that also “ensured that the unit of length would not change across time or physical distance,”⁶⁰ and this meant of course that in all likelihood, the unit was founded on something with a fairly constant base “in the natural world”⁶¹ that would not change over time or physical location.

That, of course, implied that the answer lay in the stars, and in the Earth, themselves. And if this be the case, then the most obvious unit immediately known to such “primitive” observers would be a “day,” and this is where the ultimate basis of the method of reproducing an accurate unit of measure begins:

There are various ways of defining a day and the two principal types are what we now call a ‘solar’ day and a ‘sidereal’ day. A solar day is that measured from the zenith (the highest point) of the Sun on two consecutive days. The average time of the Sun’s daily passage across the year is called a ‘mean solar day’ — it is this type of day that we use for our timekeeping today. A sidereal day is the time it takes for one revolution of the planet, measured by observing a star returning to the same point in the heavens on two consecutive nights. This is a real revolution because it is unaffected by the secondary motion of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This sidereal day, or rotation period, is 236 seconds shorter than a mean solar day, and over the year these lost seconds add up to exactly one extra day, giving a year of just over 366 sidereal days in terms of the Earth’s rotation about its axis.

In short, anyone who gauged the turning of the Earth by watching the stars would know full well that the planet turns a little over 366 times in a year, so it follows that this number would have great significance for such star watchers. If they considered each complete turn of the Earth to be one degree of the great circle of heaven, within which the Sun, Moon and planets move, then they would also logically accept that there are 366 degrees in a circle.

There really are 366 degrees in the most important circle of them all — the Earth’s yearly orbit of the Sun. Anything else is an arbitrary convention. It seemed to us that this was so logical that the 360-degree circle may have been a later adjustment to make arithmetic easier, as it is divisible by far more numbers than the ‘real’ number of degrees in a year. In other words, the circle of geometry has become somehow detached from the circle of heaven.⁶²

Note carefully the implication of these remarks, for the natural system of a celestial and geodetic measure would involve some system of a circle of 366 degrees, while at some later point — largely for the sake of simplified arithmetical calculation — a modified or tempered system was put into place by “someone.” This is a significant point and it will be taken up again later in this chapter.

But how was this “original” 366-degree system derived by such primitive peoples? Seeking to reconstruct the thought processes of the Megalithic builders, Knight and Butler came to some very practical conclusions:

[It] is highly likely that they would also realize that sunrises across the year move exactly like a pendulum. At the spring equinox (currently around 21 March) the Sun will rise due east and then rise a little further north each day until the summer solstice (21 June) at which point it stops and reverses its direction back to the autumn equinox and on to the winter solstice, by which time it will rise well into the south. The Sun’s behaviour across a year, as viewed from the Earth, creates exactly the same frequency model as a pendulum. It displays a faster rate of change in the centre and slows gradually to the solstice extremes, where it stops and reverses direction.⁶³

So the first problem was “to puzzle over the issue of how any unit of time could possibly be converted into a linear unit.”⁶⁴ The answer lay in the motion of the Sun during a year: the pendulum. In a certain way, the same of course could be said of the motion of nearby planets, such as Venus, for by using the very primitive “machine” of a pendulum and choosing a fixed reference point in the heavens, and counting the beats or swings of the pendulum as a chosen star moved between fixed observation points on the horizon.

The pendulum was a ready-made, simple machine, easily within the technological capacities of Megalithic builders, and moreover, so closely tied to the “invariable” properties of the Earth itself that it formed the perfect basis for the accuracy of Megalithic measures over so wide an area. The reason for this is simple, for the pendulum directly links the gravitational field of the Earth, the notion of time as a beat frequency, and the conversion of both to a linear measure:

The time it takes a pendulum to swing is governed by just two factors: the mass of the Earth and the length of the pendulum from the fulcrum... to the centre of gravity of the weight. Nothing else is of significant importance. The amount of effort that the person holding the pendulum puts into the swing has no bearing on the time per swing because a more powerful motion will produce a wide arc and a higher speed of travel, whereas a low power swing will cause the weight to travel less distance at a reduced speed. Equally, the heaviness of the weight of the object on the end of the line is immaterial — a heavier or lighter weight will simply change the speed/distance ratio without having any effect on the time of the swing.

The mass of the Earth is a constant factor...

and thus

in an area the size of the British Isles anyone swinging a pendulum for a known number of swings in a fixed period of time will have almost exactly the same pendulum length. ⁶⁵

So the method was simple: if one erected two markers on the circle of the horizon, spaced ⅓66^th of a degree apart, and then watching a selected star pass between them and, through trial and error with pendulum lengths, eventually a length would be found that would produce a half Megalithic Yard when swung 366 times as the star passed between the poles. And this would be the case regardless of where one was, and it would produce that length with unerring accuracy.⁶⁶ There was absolutely no need for an “ancient Bureau of Standards” whatsoever.

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