CHAPTER TWO
THE SCIENCE OF THE ANCIENTS
 

'The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.'
Albert Einstein
 

In the early 1930s a young Scottish engineer noticed that several of the widely ignored, prehistoric Megalithic sites near his home appeared to have lunar alignments.

He decided to study some of the sites and he began a process of careful surveying that was eventually to lead him to make a discovery of staggering importance.

As a young engineer at Glasgow University, Alexander Thom visited a number of prehistoric stone structures near to his home in Scotland during the early 1930s.

He marveled at the grandeur and admired the way so many of the giant stones had survived the weathering of more than 5,000 years, as well as proving resistant to the thieving tendencies of croft and road builders across dozens of centuries. As he contemplated the various sites he mused over their purpose and as he looked to the horizon he could imagine how the stones might have been used as sighting stones for astronomical purposes.

When he checked out the rising and setting points of the Sun and the Moon across the year his hunch appeared to be born out.

His first survey was at a site known as Callanish, on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. This complex of standing stones revealed many astronomical alignments and is today often referred to as a 'Moon temple'.

Thom went on to spend nearly half a century carefully surveying the so-called Megalithic (the word means giant stones) structures that lay scattered across the countryside from the islands off northern Scotland down to the French region of Brittany. Along the way he became a highly respected professor of Engineering at Oxford University until his retirement in 1961.

Thom had quickly realized that these prehistoric builders were engineers like himself and that they had a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of geometry and astronomy. The approach taken by this talented engineer was to assess what he believed the site had been intended to do - and then redesign it himself.

He quickly gained an empathy with the Stone-Age builders that gave him a real insight into the purpose of each site that would possibly be lost on a conventional archaeologist. Once he had a picture in his mind of what he thought their plan had been, he went away to create his own solution to the assumed problem.

Having drawn up his own design he then returned to compare the site layout to his own blueprint. Through this process he could predict the location of missing stones and, on further inspection, he would usually reveal the socket hole that confirmed his theory.

Thom developed a new statistical technique to establish the relative positions of the stones and, over time, something spectacularly unusual emerged from the amassed data. These prehistoric builders had not been lugging huge stones willy-nilly; they had manufactured these structures working with a standard unit of measurement across a huge area of thousands of square miles of what was then dense forest and barren moorland.

It was amazing that these supposedly primitive people could have had an 'international' convention for a unit of length, but the mystery deepens because Thom was eventually able to describe the supreme accuracy of a unit he called the Megalithic Yard.

This was no approximate measure taken from paces or body parts; it was equal to 2.722 feet +/- 0.002 feet (82.96656cm +/- 0.061cm).

Thom was also able to demonstrate that the unit was frequently used in its double and half form as well as being broken down into forty sub-units for use in design work that he designated as 'Megalithic Inches'.

Most archaeologists refuted the finding on the basis that the idea that a unit of measurement that was more accurate than a modern measuring tape was absurd. Thom admitted that he could not suggest how it could have been achieved but he stood by his evidence that simply said it 'had' been done.

In our previous book, Civilization One, we described how we set out to investigate the concept of the Megalithic Yard.

Our initial hypothesis was that if the unit was not an error of Thom's data analysis it logically should have two properties:

1. It should have an origin in something meaningful, rather than just being an abstraction that was adopted by everyone.

2. It should have a means of reproduction that could be used by anyone without reference to any sort of standard measuring rod, that would have been difficult to manufacture and impossible to keep accurate across centuries.

We realized that our assumption could be wrong on either or both counts but as it turned out, we were correct on both. Thom had not made an error.

As we describe in Civilization One, the Megalithic Yard is a geodetic unit, in that it is integral (has a whole number relationship) to the polar circumference of the Earth.

We found that these early Megalithic builders viewed a circle as having 366 degrees rather than the 360 degrees that we use today. We realized that there really should be 366 degrees in a circle for the very good reason that there are 366 rotations of the Earth in one orbit of the Sun - the most fundamental of all circles in human existence.

One solar orbit is, of course, a year but there is a very slight difference between the number of rotations of the planet and the 365 days in a year. This is because the mean solar day is based on the time between the Sun being at its zenith on two consecutive days (86,400 seconds) but an actual rotation or 'sidereal day' takes 236 seconds less.

All of those 'saved' seconds add up to exactly one more day over the year. A sidereal day can be easily appreciated by observing a star returning to the same point in the heavens on two consecutive nights.

This is one spin of our planet because it is unaffected by the secondary motion of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
 

Wheels within wheels

Early cultures frequently took their lead from nature and they were fond of 'wheels within wheels'.

If the circle of the heavens had 366 parts, why should every circle not follow the same rule? We were able to confirm this hypothesis by a variety of means including evidence from later cultures that appear to have adopted the 366-degree principle.

The approach our Megalithic ancestors took, we argue, was to hypothetically divide the circle of the Earth into 366 degrees with sixty minutes per degree and six seconds per minute. It was reasonable to assume that these ancient builders used the polar circumference of the Earth that passed through the area around the British Isles.

Our planet is nearly spherical but it does have a bulge in the centre between the poles, so the equatorial circumference is a little longer that the polar.

There are varying estimations of the Earth's polar circumference, with NASA, for example, quoting an average figure of 39,941km, whilst other sources regularly quote 40,006 km or 40,010 km but the most frequently used figure appears to be 40,008km. Undoubtedly much depends on where the measurement is taken or if an average of them all is calculated.

Interestingly, the shortest polar circumference (one that has least landmass) is the one that passes through the British Isles and is now considered as the zero line of longitude.

But there is also another possibility.

Just for interest, we looked at the flattest possible circumference achievable on the globe, i.e. a line that equally bisects the planet that has most sea and least land. We were amazed to discover that a person standing in the middle of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England (where Stonehenge and the Megalithic circle at Avebury were built) is in the absolute centre of such a line.

This means that if we consider Stonehenge to be the 'top' of the world, the imaginary equator from that point is almost 98per cent sea - more than any other point on Earth.

This line passes across the South Atlantic, skims just below Africa, moves up across the Indian Ocean, clips small pieces of land at Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Thailand and Vietnam, over the South China Sea and then more than 20,000 kilometres across the Pacific to pass over a section of South America.

As far as we know such a line has not been measured, and we cannot imagine how it could have been measured without the aid of modern satellite technology. However, just because we do not know how it could have been done does not mean that it was not done. Without further evidence we have to assume that it is pure coincidence that Stonehenge stands on the only place on Earth to be equidistant from the optimum and near perfect sea-level circumference of the globe.

We can only assume that a polar circumference was used and taking the 40,008km figure it translates to 48,221,838 Megalithic Yards using Thom's central value for the unit.

It was then subdivided as follows:

Polar circumference

= 48,221,838 MY 1 Degree (1/366^th)
= 131,754 MY 1 Minute (1/60^th)
= 2,196 MY 1 Second (1/6^th) = 366 MY

So, this brilliant system of geometry starts with 366 degrees and finishes with seconds of arc that are 366 Megalithic Yards long.

Self- evidently, an amazing set of 'wheels within wheels'!

We knew that the system must work this way because we found that the later Minoan culture, which developed on the Mediterranean island of Crete around 2000 BC, also used the Megalithic second of arc.

However, the Minoans sub-divided it into 1,000 parts to become their standard unit of measure that was equal to 30.36cm. This unit was dubbed the 'Minoan Foot' by the Canadian archaeologist, Professor Joseph Graham who first detected its use in the palaces of ancient Crete.⁶

We went on to demonstrate how any person could generate a highly accurate Megalithic Yard by measuring the movement of Venus in the evening sky using a rope, some twine, a blob of clay, and a few sticks.

The secret was to take one 366th part of the horizon and time the passage of Venus across it, and then to cause a piece of twine with a blob of clay on the end to swing like a pendulum 366 times during that period. From fulcrum to the centre of the blob was a mathematically perfect 12 Megalithic Yard or twenty Megalithic Inches.

The process was simple to carry out and works on the fact that a pendulum is responsive to only two factors: the length of the pendulum and the mass of the Earth. If the pendulum beat 366 times during the transit of Venus across a 366th part of the sky - you had your measure! (See Appendix 1 for a more detailed explanation of the pendulum method.)

It is doubtful that these ancient stonemasons realized the fact but the period of time that they watched Venus and elected to subdivide into 366 beats, is equal to the difference between a mean solar day and a sidereal day.

Our starting point had been to search for all possible sources of reliable measurement available from nature.

And we found that there was only one: the turning of the Earth on its axis as seen by watching the movement of the heavens. It was possible to time the passage of a star, or in this case the planet Venus, with reliable accuracy using a pendulum. The pendulum then turned a unit of time into a unit of length because the timed beat will always produce a fixed length - with tiny variations due to latitude and altitude.

It was then a simple matter to turn a unit of length into a measure of volume and capacity by creating cubes and filling them with liquid or dry goods such as barley or wheat. However, we were not prepared for the shock we received when we created a cube with sides of four Megalithic Inches and found that it held a pint that was accurate to a staggering one part in 5,0 against the standard laid down in the year 1601.

Doubling the sides to eight Megalithic Inches produced an accurate gallon and doubling again produced the old dry measure known as a bushel. The mystery was compounded when we filled the 'pint' cube with barley and found that it weighed exactly one pound!

Things turned from the sublime to the ridiculous when further experimentation showed that a sphere with a diameter of six Megalithic Inches held virtually one liter and one ten times the size weighed a metric tonne when filled with water; all to an accuracy of better than 99 per cent.

The fact that Thom's apparently meaningless Megalithic Yard, extracted from surveying hundreds of prehistoric ruins, produces these cubic and spherical feats is not debatable.

No one, no matter how skeptical they might be, can deny the simple maths. Neither can they deny that the odds of such compounded apparent connections being coincidence are very high. Yet, the pound and the pint are thought to be Medieval and the liter and the tonne were invented at the end of the eighteenth century.

A connection seemed impossible.

Then we looked at the Sumerian people who lived in the region we now call Iraq some 5,000 years ago. They are attributed with inventing writing, glass, the wheel, the hour, m inute and second of time as well as the 360-degree circle with its subdivisions of 60 minutes and 60 seconds of arc. Quite amazing people.

As we probed the achievements of this civilization we found that the unit of length the Sumerians had used was virtually a meter at 99.88cm and that they had also used weights and capacities that were as equally matched to the kilo and liter of the French metric system created thousands of years later.

Quite a coincidence we thought - but it was nothing of the kind, for when we applied the principles of the pendulum to the Sumerian unit of length called the 'double kush' we found that a pendulum of this length beat at the rate of one per second.

This meant that the Sumerian's key unit of length and their key unit of time were two sides of the same coin when used as a pendulum. A double-kush pendulum would always beat out a second and a pendulum that beat at the rate of a second would always be a double kush in length.

This demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt that the Sumerians used pendulums to define their measurements. The question was, had they used the same Venus-watching principle as the Megalithic builders of the British Isles to reproduce their units?

Sumerian written records tell us that the planet Venus was considered to be the goddess Inanna, who was of central importance to their culture, so it seemed entirely plausible.

If they had used the same principle it seemed logical that they would have employed their own values; essentially keeping the same 'software' but inputting their own data. Instead of the 366 degrees of the Megalithic system we would have to use the more familiar 360 degrees first used by the Sumerians. And when we checked out the results for such a process - it worked perfectly.

When the horizon was divided into 360 parts and Venus was timed across that part of the sky at the appropriate time of year the double-kush pendulum meters out exactly 240 seconds. And the period of 240 seconds is recorded as being so important to the Sumerians it had its own name - a 'gesh'.

It therefore seems certain that these people followed the Megalithic idea of creating a unit of length from timing the movement of Venus across the evening sky.
 

The American connection

Later in our research we came across a letter written by the great American statesman, Thomas Jefferson and sent to the House of Representatives on July 4^th 1776.

In this letter Jefferson laid out a recommendation for a new system of weights and measures for the new United States that he had helped to establish. He gave his reasoning and described some unusual facts he had uncovered whilst developing his intended units.

He explained how he had realized that there was only one aspect of nature that gave rise to any reliable unit of measure - which he named as the turning of the Earth. So, like ourselves and the Megalithic builders of five and six millennia before him, he used the heavens to provide a basis for all measurement.

In his letter he stated that he had come to realize that the imperial system of measurement used in Britain was not an accumulation of unrelated units as generally imagined. On the contrary, he said that their harmony indicated to him that they were members of a group of measurement units 'from very high antiquity'.

He gave a number of reasons for this belief including his astonishment that the foot, made up of twelve inches, was directly related to the ounce weight through the use of cubes. He said: 'It has been found by accurate experiments that a cubic foot of rain water weighs 1000 ounces avoirdupois (Imperial).'

It could be coincidence that a cubic foot holds 1,000 ounces of rainwater, not 999 or 1,001, but exactly 1,000 - or that the cube has sides that are a perfect 10 x10 x10 one-tenths of a foot.

But Jefferson did not think so. And nor do we. However, it was Jefferson's proposed units that fascinated us. They were never adopted but their properties are amazing.

Jefferson's logical mind also caused him to use a pendulum to convert time into a linear unit. He decided that he should use a pendulum that had a beat of one second as the basis for his measuring system.

Of course, Jefferson had no idea that the second had come from the Sumerian culture or that it had been created by the use of a pendulum in the first place. Jefferson added one improvement suggested to him by a certain Mr Graham of Philadelphia - that he use a rigid pendulum of very thin metal without a weight on the end because it is more accurate than a conventional type of pendulum.

The rules change with such a pendulum (known as a rod). A rod has to be exactly 50 per cent longer than a pendulum to produce the same time period. Jefferson's timing piece, that beat once per second, is known as a 'seconds rod', and is 149.158145 cm in length.

The world knew nothing of the Sumerian culture in Jefferson's time and he could not possibly have been aware that his rod that beat once per second was essentially three kush in length - just a whisker less than one and a half meters (remembering that the meter had not been invented at that time).

The three-kush rod behaves exactly like a double-kush pendulum and therefore it beats 240 times during one 360^th part of a day; observable by watching Venus move across a 360th part of the sky. Jefferson was therefore accidentally re-enacting the ritual used by Sumerian astronomer priests nearly 5,000 years earlier and connecting with the principles of prehistoric measurements.

The units that Jefferson identified from this ancient process were all based on the length of this 'seconds rod'.

He wrote: 'Let the second rod, then, as before described, be the standard of measure; and let it be divided into five equal parts, each of which shall be called a foot; for, perhaps, it may be better generally to retain the name of the nearest present measure, where one is tolerably near. It will be about one quarter of an inch shorter than the present foot.

Let the foot be divided into 10 inches;

The inch into 10 lines;

The line into 10 points; Let 10 feet make a decad; 10 decads one rood;

10 roods a furlong; 10 furlongs a mile.'

We can see that his proposed 'decad' was based on a double-seconds rod. It was equivalent to six

Sumerian kush, and his furlong was equal to 600 kush. This brings about an even deeper connection with the people of ancient Iraq because they used a system of counting that was sexagesimal; which means it used a combination of base ten and base sixty.

They had a system of notation that worked as follows:
 

It can be seen that the figure of 600 is indeed a Sumerian value for a Sumerian unit of length.

But not only is the Jefferson furlong equal to 600 kush - it is also an almost perfect 360 Megalithic Yards. Strangely, Jefferson had connected well with both the Megalithic and the Sumerian system.

But something even stranger happened when we took Jefferson's furlong and multiplied it by 366 and 366 again:

3662 furlongs = 39,961.257km

As we have already mentioned, the range of assumed lengths of the Earth circumference varies by a few kilometers depending on what source one consults, probably because each cross section will differ and tides and plate tectonics

involving mountains leave room for some debate. At the higher end 40,008 kilometers is widely used, however if we take NASA preferred figures they quote a polar radius of 6,356.8 kilometers which equates to a polar circumference of 39,941.0 kilometers.

That means that 3662 Jefferson furlongs match NASA's estimate of the Earth's size to an accuracy of 99.95 per cent - which is as perfect as it gets!
 

Problems with Foucault's pendulum

We became more and more fascinated by everything to do with pendulums.

During one particular telephone conversation, which had gone on for over an hour, we had, yet again, discussed at length the idea that there might be some unknown law of astrophysics - that was revealed by pendulums - at work here.

We considered some highly speculative thoughts that ranged from standing electromagnetic sine waves due to a gyroscopic effect of the Earth's spin through to gravitons containing packets of information about 'geometrical shape'. But we agreed that we just did not know enough to even start to investigate such ideas.

Chris wrote the following paragraph into a draft of this chapter as a summary of our mutual frustration and finished work for the day.

'We have to admit that we still do not understand why it is so, but the use of pendulum s in association with these ancient values appears to be elemental to the planet Earth - some physical reality seem s to be at work here.

 

Every pendulum reacts to the mass of the Earth but there seems to be some kind of 'harmonic' response at certain rhythms: points where the mass and the spin of the planet resonate in some way.'

But at that very point in time everything changed.

At five o' clock the following morning Chris was unable to sleep and decided to get up and make a cup of tea. It was then that a 'library angel' turned up.⁷

Looking for something to read he pulled the delivery sleeve of a magazine that had arrived in the post the previous day and flicked it open. The main feature article in this edition o f New Scientist was entitled: 'Shadow over gravity'.

It sounded interesting even early on a dark November morning.

But he quickly realized it was far more important than merely 'interesting'. The opening paragraph was incredibly similar to that which opens this book, carrying a description of how it feels to witness a total eclipse - and then it transpired that the thrust of the article was that solar eclipses have a profound effect on pendulums!

A debate is presently raging as to why this should be the case, because the suggestion has been made that pendulums may well be the key to a significant hole in Einstein's theory of relativity.

The starting point concerns the work of Jean Bernard Leon Foucault who demonstrated a special quality of pendulums at the Great Exhibition, held in London in 1851.

His pendulum, now always referred to as 'Foucault's pendulum', is simply a very heavy weight fastened to a very long wire attached to a ceiling inside a very tall building, with a universal joint allowing it to rotate freely around a fixed point so that it will swing in a slow arc in any direction. Giant pendulums of this kind are now routine exhibits at some of the major museums around the world including the Smithsonian in Washington and the Science Museum in London.

Once set in motion its direction of swing will appear to rotate at a rate of about twelve degrees an hour.

But this is actually an illusion because it is the observer and the rest of the world that is moving whilst the pendulum is maintaining a fixed swing back and forth in relation to the Universe. This happens because the pendulum is independent of the movement of the Earth, which is rotating underneath the pendulum, making it appear that the pendulum is changing direction.

The reason a pendulum swings is because the Earth's gravity continually tugs down on it. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity this relentless tugging is due to the fact that every mass bends the fabric of space-time around it causing other masses to slide down into the dimple it creates in space-time.

The amount of rotation of a Foucault pendulum is dependent on latitude.

At the North or South Pole the pendulum appears to rotate through an entire 360 degrees once every turn of the Earth (each sidereal day) because the planet rotates all the way round underneath it. In the northern hemisphere at the latitude of the British Isles the rate of rotation is reduced to around 280 degrees per day and the rate of rotation continues to fall the closer one gets to the equator, where a Foucault pendulum does not rotate at all.

For over a hundred years everyone knew that a Foucault's pendulum would swing in an entirely predictable manner at any specific location. Then in 1954 a French engineer, economist and would-be physicist by the name of Maurice Allais found that this was not always the case.

He was conducting an experiment at the School of Mining in Paris to investigate a possible link between magnetism and gravitation, in which he released a Foucault pendulum every fourteen minutes for thirty days and nights, recording the direction of rotation in degrees. By chance, a total solar eclipse occurred on one of those days.

Each day the pendulum moved with mechanical precision but on June 30^th 1954, when a partial eclipse occurred, one of Allais' assistants realized that the pendulum had gone haywire. As the eclipse began, the swing plane of the pendulum suddenly started to rotate backwards.

It veered furthest off course twenty minutes before maximum eclipse, when the Moon covered a large portion of the Sun's surface before returning to its normal swing once the eclipse was over. It seemed that the pendulum had somehow been influenced by the alignment of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun.

This was totally unexpected and utterly startling. Allais' experiment was being conducted indoors, out of the sunlight so there was no apparent way the eclipse could have affected it. Allais was at a loss to explain what had taken place but when he conducted an improved version of his experiment in June and July 1958 with two pendulums six kilometers apart he found the same effect.

Then during the partial solar eclipse of October 22^nd 1959, Allais once again witnessed the same erratic rotation - but this time similar effects were reported by three Romanian scientists who knew nothing of Allais' work.

Many people have questioned his results, mainly because science does not like that which it cannot explain. Many others have now repeated the experiment with mixed results: some found no measurable effect, but most have confirmed the result at different locations - including one conducted in an underground laboratory! ⁸

It is interesting to note that in 1988 Allais was awarded a Nobel Prize for economics.

Like Alexander Thom (and many other paradigm busters) a major discovery had come from someone working outside their own field. These are bright people who are driven by curiosity and who are not the products of conventional training.

Allais despairs at the standards of those that oppose without logic or reasoning:

'In the history of science, every revolutionary result meets with very strong opposition... Relativists say I'm wrong without providing any demonstration. Most of them haven't even read what I wrote.'

In 1970 Erwin Saxl and Mildred Allen of Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, studied the behavior of a pendulum before, during and after a total eclipse.

The pair took a slightly different approach to Allais as they used a torsion pendulum, which is a massive disc suspended from a wire attached to its centre.

Rotating the disc slightly causes the wire to twist. When it is released, the disc continues to twirl first clockwise, then anticlockwise, with a fixed period. But during an eclipse, their pendulum sped up significantly. They concluded that gravitational theory needs to be modified.

In India in 1995, D.C. Mishra and M.B.S. Rao of the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad observed a small but sudden drop in the strength of gravity when using an extremely accurate gravimeter during a solar eclipse.

But results have been mixed. When the eclipsed Sun rose above Helsinki on July 22nd 1990, Finnish geophysicists found no disturbance to the usual swing, yet in March 1997 scientists observed gravimeter anomalies during an eclipse in a very remote area of north-east China.

The mystery continues and yet no academic institution appears willing to invest time and money to study this phenomenon in depth.

However, Thomas Goodey, a self-funding independent researcher from Brentford in England, has decided that he will investigate the Allais effect by using several pendulums during an eclipse. Because modern equipment is much m ore accurate and sensitive than that available in 1954 - giving twenty to one hundred times better resolution, he is confident of a clear result.

Goodey plans to travel the world over the next few years with twelve specially constructed pendulum s. In May 2004, he presented his strategy at a meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration in Las Vegas and invited physicists to join him. As New Scientist reported, several leapt at the chance.

Goodey suspects that the anomalies occur when an observer is near the line that connects the centers of masses of the Sun and the Moon.

During a total solar eclipse, the Sun- Moon line intersects the surface of the Earth at two points on roughly opposite sides of the globe. This theory would explain why the sunrise eclipse in Helsinki did not produce a result. Goodey is quoted as saying that observations at this 'anti-eclipse' point where no eclipse is visible might carry m uch greater weight.

We wait with interest to hear the final results of Thomas Goodey's experiments. At this point it seems as though we might well have been right to suspect that pendulums reveal a great deal about the nature of our planet's gravity and its gravitational relationship with the Moon and the Sun.

Could it be that because the Moon blocks out the disc of the Sun so perfectly it is acting as a shield to an ongoing interaction between the Earth and the Sun? Or perhaps it is because all three centers of mass are lined up and something physical occurs at this time?

We also wonder whether the unknown individuals who devised the Megalithic Yard and its inherent geometry understood much more about this pendulum effect than we do. Our previous findings strongly suggest that they knew a great deal more about the Earth -Moon-Sun relationship.
 

A special relationship

Our initial findings about Megalithic geometry, described in Civilization One, had caused us to examine all kinds of unexpected relationships between the Earth and ancient measures.

This had further prompted us to wonder whether the 366 geometry, that produced the Megalithic Yard, was in some way planet specific. Was there some connection between the m ass, spin and solar orbit that made it special to the Earth?

First we applied the principles of Megalithic geometry to all of the planets of the solar system. No discernable pattern emerged - they appeared to be completely random results. For example Mars produced 19.78 Megalithic Yards per second of arc and Venus an unimpressive 347.8. We also checked out the major moons of other planets to no avail.

A good friend of Chris, Dr Hilary Newbigen, suggested that, for thoroughness, we try using the number of days per orbit for each planet to see if there was a relationship to the individual dimensions, but again the results were negative.

Then we looked at Earth's Moon.

The result here was anything but meaningless. We took the Moon's radius, defined by NASA as being 1,738,100 kilometers, to calculate a circumference of a meaningless sounding 10,920,800 meters. We then converted this distance into Megalithic Yards, which gave us the equally apparently arbitrary value of 13,162,900.

We then applied the rules of Megalithic geometry by dividing this circumference into 366 degrees, sixty minutes and six seconds of arc. To our total amazement there were 100 Megalithic Yards per lunar Megalithic second of arc. The accuracy of the result was 99.9 per cent which is well within the range of error of this kind of calculation.

How strange that the Megalithic Yard is so elegantly 'lunardetic' as well as geodetic!

Our next thought was the Sun. Because we know that the Sun is 400 times the size of the Moon it should logically have a perfect 40,000 Megalithic Yards per second of arc. For thoroughness we checked out the sums and it did indeed work as perfectly as we expected.

This all seemed very odd. The Megalithic structures that were built across western Europe were frequently used to observe the movements of the Sun and the Moon, but how could the unit of measure upon which these structures were based be so beautifully integer to the circumference of these bodies as well as of the Earth?

Is it coincidence? On top of all the other strange facts regarding the Moon it becomes rather unrealistic to keep putting everything down to a random fluke of nature. Of course, we were well aware that the numbers we were looking at were only integer when one uses base ten - and we will deal with that issue later.

If it is not coincidence then there are only two other options. The first is that there is some unknown law of astrophysics at work, causing relationships to emerge that were spotted in some way by our Stone-Age forebears. The other is conscious design.

The idea of deliberate design seemed plum crazy - common sense tells us it's wrong.

Then we, once again, considered m ore wise words from Albert Einstein:

'Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.'

At the age of eighteen we, like everyone else, 'knew' that everything in the world was natural. But when we put our prejudices of what can and cannot be, to one side and thought laterally about it, the more reasonable it seemed.

It was not unreasonable to believe that the stonemasons of the Neolithic period were smart enough to measure the polar circumference of the Earth and that they devised a unit of measure that was integer to the planet. Such a feat can be achieved with very simple tools as demonstrated by the Ancient Greeks.

But could they really have measured the circumference of the Moon and the Sun? Or was this mysterious property of pendulums something to do with it?

Most of all we marveled at the fact that, yet again, it was the size and position of the Moon that revealed that there is an issue to resolve.

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