1. The Suggestions of a Deeper Physics
As has been seen, the
principle basis of the ancient units of measure was the conversion
of a regular measure of time into a unit of linear measure via a
simple “pendulum method.” Then by the process of cubing or
“sphering” that linear measure, that unit of linear measure was
converted into units of measure for volume and, when those cubes or
boxes were filled with a quantity of a known substance, such as
water, units of measure for mass, thus reproducing simply and
elegantly accurate units of measure based on known astronomical
phenomena invariant over the surface of the Earth.
But Knight and Butler
did not let things stand there, for the observation that time and
linear measure were deeply and intimately connected was, of course,
one of the profound insights of Albert Einstein and his special
theory of relativity. Sensing that the ancient measures possibly
pointed to knowledge of a much deeper physics, they decided to
subject the Sumerian measures to “the acid test” to determine if,
in fact, their knowledge might have come from a much more ancient,
and much more sophisticated, civilization:
Throughout our investigation we have tried not to prejudge what is, and is not, possible for an ancient culture to achieve. We have simply tried to let the data lead us to wherever it takes us. But at this point we were starting to get cold feet. We seemed to be uncovering complexities that surely must have come from a highly developed society with advanced scientific abilities. With this uncomfortable thought in our minds we decided to try the most obvious next experiment involving the most fundamental property of the universe — the speed of light.Could the Sumerians possibly have understood how fast light travels? According to current knowledge light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum, which translates to Sumerian units as 600,305,283 kush.....We decided to look at what is known of the speed of our own planet as it orbits the Sun and found that the near-perfect circle of the Earth’s path is 938,900,000,000 metres, which is covered in a year of 365.2596425 days. These numbers look remarkably unimpressive but the next calculation left us staring at the calculator in disbelief. We were stunned to find that we all travel on our yearly journey at speed of 60,000 kush per second. As a further level of strangeness this speed is a neat one-ten-thousandth of the speed of light.The standard response of mathematicians to numbers that look incredibly neat is to yawn, because they believe that all numbers are equally probable and the actual digits are dependent on the numerical base and the measurement convention employed. They are quite right. But they assume that all measurement units are merely a convention without any underlying physical reality. And that is not the case with either the Megalithic or the Mesopotamian systems.103
Their conclusion was
as inevitable as it was astonishing:
In this case the second and the kush appear to be very much more than a convenient abstraction because they have all of the characteristics of being fundamental to the realities of the earth’s environment. They have a value at a level never conceived by modern science. We have come to the conclusion that it is more than reasonable to believe that the Sumerians, or more probably their unknown teachers, understood both the mass of the Earth, its orbital speed and even the speed of light, and they designed units that had an integer relationship with them all.104
To say that this was
the case — that there was a pre-existent civilization seeding its knowledge into Sumerian civilization
and culture — is to say that there is a deep physics to its units
of measure and an elite that propagated them.
To see why, we need
but recall the fact that these units of measure were based on “the
mass and spin of the Earth,”105 and any time one
couples the idea of mass and
rotation, one is dealing perforce with
the concept of torsion. Torsion has
been a “physics theme” of many of my books,106 but for our
purposes here we may understand torsion as the spiraling, folding,
and pleating of the fabric of space-time around any rotating mass. If one wishes to draw a mental
picture of what torsion accomplishes, the analogy of wringing an
empty soda can like a dishrag is helpful. As one wrings the can,
the can spirals and folds and pleats, and the ends of the can draw
closer together. In this analogy, the can would represent
space-time.