Why Roman Concrete Has Endured

This was an open question that should have been answered a long time ago. It has been staring us in the face for two thousand years. We use stronger concrete, but certainly not concrete nearly as tough. Perhaps we want to retain the option of easily knocking it down.

 

 

At least we now know just what crystals work and perhaps we can improve our own recipes.  Yes we uses recipes to make cement.  

This is also a reminder just what a blessing cement has been to the building industry.  It has always been convenient and cheap and is one of the first things secured for all building today.  We would never put in a wooden post even without splashing cement in with it if convenient.

Here's Why Roman Concrete Has Endured for 2,000 Years

December 15, 2014

http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/roman-concrete-how-it-lasted-2000-years-17535354

Monuments of Imperial Rome have survived for more than a thousand years, despite repeated floods and earthquakes. Now researchers have a new clue as to why—the use of volcanic rock in their cement. 

Researchers looked at Trajan's Market and several other Imperial Roman structures to analyze the remarkable resilience of the concrete. They then reproduced a standard Imperial-age mortar—a simple mix of lime, water, and a specific kind of volcanic ash from an area now known as Pozzuoli. The recipe was taken from records of the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius. 

Scientists already knew that this particular Roman blend of concrete proved extremely tough; what they didn't know was exactly why. After letting the test concrete toughen up over 180 and then looking at it via X-rays, the scientists here noticed dense growths of plate-like crystals made of a durable mineral known as strätlingite. Those crystals prevented the spread of microscopic cracks in parts of the mortar, which usually breaks down in modern-day cements. 

They detailed their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Is String Theory About to Unravel?

 

Except that i do not need string theory to produce the entirety of creation.  I only needed guidance from my mathematica and a thought experiment that produced firstly the only fundamental particle that actually matters and can be described as the neutral neutrino.    From that it  becomes plausible to derive by natural self assembly the electron positron pair that just happens to be the basis of dark matter making up the bulk of the physical universe.  with these neutral constructs it becomes possible to self assemble neutron pairings that then can decay into neutron protn pairings as well as all the elements.

 

 

All this creative activity produces what i call unbounded curvature as decay products.  The physical particles themselves provide axis that hold such ribbons of unbounded curvature.  It is exotic but it certainly works and we can even tackle the theoretical structure of photonic energy as well with serious confidence

 

 

 

Yet the underlying metric nicely fits right into General Relativity.  

 

 

Our next theoretical problem is to figure out how to work with the generated local geometry successfully.  We can not properly start until we have seriously simulated both the neutral neutrino and the electron positron pair itself.  At least the technology now exists to begin well..

Is String Theory About to Unravel?

Evidence that the universe is made of strings has been elusive for 30 years, but the theory's mathematical insights continue to have an alluring pull


By Brian GreeneSmithsonian Magazine
January 2015

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/string-theory-about-unravel-180953637/?all


In October 1984 I arrived at Oxford University, trailing a large steamer trunk containing a couple of changes of clothing and about five dozen textbooks. I had a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard, and I was raring to launch into graduate study. But within a couple of weeks, the more advanced students had sucked the wind from my sails. Change fields now while you still can, many said. There’s nothing happening in fundamental physics.


Then, just a couple of months later, the prestigious (if tamely titled) journal Physics Letters B published an article that ignited the first superstring revolution, a sweeping movement that inspired thousands of physicists worldwide to drop their research in progress and chase Einstein’s long-sought dream of a unified theory. The field was young, the terrain fertile and the atmosphere electric. The only thing I needed to drop was a neophyte’s inhibition to run with the world’s leading physicists. I did. What followed proved to be the most exciting intellectual odyssey of my life.


That was 30 years ago this month, making the moment ripe for taking stock: Is string theory revealing reality’s deep laws? Or, as some detractors have claimed, is it a mathematical mirage that has sidetracked a generation of physicists?


***


Unification has become synonymous with Einstein, but the enterprise has been at the heart of modern physics for centuries. Isaac Newton united the heavens and Earth, revealing that the same laws governing the motion of the planets and the Moon described the trajectory of a spinning wheel and a rolling rock. About 200 years later, James Clerk Maxwell took the unification baton for the next leg, showing that electricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single force described by a single mathematical formalism.


The next two steps, big ones at that, were indeed vintage Einstein. In 1905, Einstein linked space and time, showing that motion through one affects passage through the other, the hallmark of his special theory of relativity. Ten years later, Einstein extended these insights with his general theory of relativity, providing the most refined description of gravity, the force governing the likes of stars and galaxies. With these achievements, Einstein envisioned that a grand synthesis of all of nature’s forces was within reach.

 

 

Will the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS proton-smasher detect signs of strings? (Rex Features via AP Images)



But by 1930, the landscape of physics had thoroughly shifted. Niels Bohr and a generation of intrepid explorers ventured deep into the microrealm, where they encountered quantum mechanics, an enigmatic theory formulated with radically new physical concepts and mathematical rules. While spectacularly successful at predicting the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, the quantum laws looked askance at Einstein’s formulation of gravity. This set the stage for more than a half-century of despair as physicists valiantly struggled, but repeatedly failed, to meld general relativity and quantum mechanics, the laws of the large and small, into a single all-encompassing description.


Such was the case until December 1984, when John Schwarz, of the California Institute of Technology, and Michael Green, then at Queen Mary College, published a once-in-a-generation paper showing that string theory could overcome the mathematical antagonism between general relativity and quantum mechanics, clearing a path that seemed destined to reach the unified theory.


The idea underlying string unification is as simple as it is seductive. Since the early 20th century, nature’s fundamental constituents have been modeled as indivisible particles—the most familiar being electrons, quarks and neutrinos—that can be pictured as infinitesimal dots devoid of internal machinery. String theory challenges this by proposing that at the heart of every particle is a tiny, vibrating string-like filament. And, according to the theory, the differences between one particle and another—their masses, electric charges and, more esoterically, their spin and nuclear properties—all arise from differences in how their internal strings vibrate.


Much as the sonorous tones of a cello arise from the vibrations of the instrument’s strings, the collection of nature’s particles would arise from the vibrations of the tiny filaments described by string theory. The long list of disparate particles that had been revealed over a century of experiments would be recast as harmonious “notes” comprising nature’s score.


Most gratifying, the mathematics revealed that one of these notes had properties precisely matching those of the “graviton,” a hypothetical particle that, according to quantum physics, should carry the force of gravity from one location to another. With this, the worldwide community of theoretical physicists looked up from their calculations. For the first time, gravity and quantum mechanics were playing by the same rules. At least in theory.


***


I began learning the mathematical underpinnings of string theory during an intense period in the spring and summer of 1985. I wasn’t alone. Graduate students and seasoned faculty alike got swept up in the potential of string theory to be what some were calling the “final theory” or the “theory of everything.” In crowded seminar rooms and flyby corridor conversations, physicists anticipated the crowning of a new order.


But the simplest and most important question loomed large. Is string theory right? Does the math explain our universe? The description I’ve given suggests an experimental strategy. Examine particles and if you see little vibrating strings, you’re done. It’s a fine idea in principle, but string theory’s pioneers realized it was useless in practice. The math set the size of strings to be about a million billion times smaller than even the minute realms probed by the world’s most powerful accelerators. Save for building a collider the size of the galaxy, strings, if they’re real, would elude brute force detection.


Making the situation seemingly more dire, researchers had come upon a remarkable but puzzling mathematical fact. String theory’s equations require that the universe has extra dimensions beyond the three of everyday experience—left/right, back/forth and up/down. Taking the math to heart, researchers realized that their backs were to the wall. Make sense of extra dimensions—a prediction that’s grossly at odds with what we perceive—or discard the theory.


String theorists pounced on an idea first developed in the early years of the 20th century. Back then, theorists realized that there might be two kinds of spatial dimensions: those that are large and extended, which we directly experience, and others that are tiny and tightly wound, too small for even our most refined equipment to reveal. Much as the spatial extent of an enormous carpet is manifest, but you have to get down on your hands and knees to see the circular loops making up its pile, the universe might have three big dimensions that we all navigate freely, but it might also have additional dimensions so minuscule that they’re beyond our observational reach.


In a paper submitted for publication a day after New Year’s 1985, a quartet of physicists—Philip Candelas, Gary Horowitz, Andrew Strominger and Edward Witten—pushed this proposal one step further, turning vice to virtue. Positing that the extra dimensions were minuscule, they argued, would not only explain why we haven’t seen them, but could also provide the missing bridge to experimental verification.


Strings are so small that when they vibrate they undulate not just in the three large dimensions, but also in the additional tiny ones. And much as the vibrational patterns of air streaming through a French horn are determined by the twists and turns of the instrument, the vibrational patterns of strings would be determined by the shape of the extra dimensions. Since these vibrational patterns determine particle properties like mass, electric charge and so on—properties that can be detected experimentally—the quartet had established that if you know the precise geometry of the extra dimensions, you can make predictions about the results that certain experiments would observe.


For me, deciphering the paper’s equations was one of those rare mathematical forays bordering on spiritual enlightenment. That the geometry of hidden spatial dimensions might be the universe’s Rosetta stone, embodying the secret code of nature’s fundamental constituents—well, it was one of the most beautiful ideas I’d ever encountered. It also played to my strength. As a mathematically oriented physics student, I’d already expended great effort studying topology and differential geometry, the very tools needed to analyze the mathematical form of extra-dimensional spaces.


And so, in the mid-1980s, with a small group of researchers at Oxford, we set our sights on extracting string theory’s predictions. The quartet’s paper had delineated the category of extra-dimensional spaces allowed by the mathematics of string theory and, remarkably, only a handful of candidate shapes were known. We selected one that seemed most promising, and embarked on grueling days and sleepless nights, filled with arduous calculations in higher dimensional geometry and fueled by grandiose thoughts of revealing nature’s deepest workings.


The final results that we found successfully incorporated various established features of particle physics and so were worthy of attention (and, for me, a doctoral dissertation), but were far from providing evidence for string theory. Naturally, our group and many others turned back to the list of allowed shapes to consider other possibilities. But the list was no longer short. Over the months and years, researchers had discovered ever larger collections of shapes that passed mathematical muster, driving the number of candidates into the thousands, millions, billions and then, with insights spearheaded in the mid-1990s by Joe Polchinski, into numbers so large that they’ve never been named.


Against this embarrassment of riches, string theory offered no directive regarding which shape to pick. And as each shape would affect string vibrations in different ways, each would yield different observable consequences. The dream of extracting unique predictions from string theory rapidly faded.


From a public relations standpoint, string theorists had not prepared for this development. Like the Olympic athlete who promises eight gold medals but wins “only” five, theorists had consistently set the bar as high as it could go. That string theory unites general relativity and quantum mechanics is a profound success. That it does so in a framework with the capacity to embrace the known particles and forces makes the success more than theoretically relevant. Seeking to go even further and uniquely explain the detailed properties of the particles and forces is surely a noble goal, but one that lies well beyond the line dividing success from failure.


Nevertheless, critics who had bristled at string theory’s meteoric rise to dominance used the opportunity to trumpet the theory’s demise, blurring researchers’ honest disappointment of not reaching hallowed ground with an unfounded assertion that the approach had crashed. The cacophony grew louder still with a controversial turn articulated most forcefully by one of the founding fathers of string theory, the Stanford University theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind.


***


In August 2003, I was sitting with Susskind at a conference in Sigtuna, Sweden, discussing whether he really believed the new perspective he’d been expounding or was just trying to shake things up. “I do like to stir the pot,” he told me in hushed tones, feigning confidence, “but I do think this is what string theory’s been telling us.”


Susskind was arguing that if the mathematics does not identify one particular shape as the right one for the extra dimensions, perhaps there isn’t a single right shape. That is, maybe all of the shapes are right shapes in the sense that there are many universes, each with a different shape for the extra dimensions.


Our universe would then be just one of a vast collection, each with detailed features determined by the shape of their extra dimensions. Why, then, are we in this universe instead of any other? Because the shape of the hidden dimensions yields the spectrum of physical features that allow us to exist. In another universe, for example, the different shape might make the electron a little heavier or the nuclear force a little weaker, shifts that would cause the quantum processes that power stars, including our sun, to halt, interrupting the relentless march toward life on Earth.


Radical though this proposal may be, it was supported by parallel developments in cosmological thinking that suggested that the Big Bang may not have been a unique event, but was instead one of innumerable bangs spawning innumerable expanding universes, called the multiverse. Susskind was suggesting that string theory augments this grand cosmological unfolding by adorning each of the universes in the multiverse with a different shape for the extra dimensions.


With or without string theory, the multiverse is a highly controversial schema, and deservedly so. It not only recasts the landscape of reality, but shifts the scientific goal posts. Questions once deemed profoundly puzzling—why do nature’s numbers, from particle masses to force strengths to the energy suffusing space, have the particular values they do?—would be answered with a shrug. The detailed features we observe would no longer be universal truths; instead, they’d be local bylaws dictated by the particular shape of the extra dimensions in our corner of the multiverse.


Most physicists, string theorists among them, agree that the multiverse is an option of last resort. Yet, the history of science has also convinced us to not dismiss ideas merely because they run counter to expectation. If we had, our most successful theory, quantum mechanics, which describes a reality governed by wholly peculiar waves of probability, would be buried in the trash bin of physics. As Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has said, the universe doesn’t care about what makes theoretical physicists happy.


***


This spring, after nearly two years of upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider will crackle back to life, smashing protons together with almost twice the energy achieved in its previous runs. Sifting through the debris with the most complex detectors ever built, researchers will be looking for evidence of anything that doesn’t fit within the battle-tested “Standard Model of particle physics,” whose final prediction, the Higgs boson, was confirmed just before the machine went on hiatus. While it is likely that the revamped machine is still far too weak to see strings themselves, it could provide clues pointing in the direction of string theory.


Many researchers have pinned their hopes on finding a new class of so-called “supersymmetric” particles that emerge from string theory’s highly ordered mathematical equations. Other collider signals could show hints of extra-spatial dimensions, or even evidence of microscopic black holes, a possibility that arises from string theory’s exotic treatment of gravity on tiny distance scales.


While none of these predictions can properly be called a smoking gun—various non-stringy theories have incorporated them too—a positive identification would be on par with the discovery of the Higgs particle, and would, to put it mildly, set the world of physics on fire. The scales would tilt toward string theory.


But what happens in the event—likely, according to some—that the collider yields no remotely stringy signatures?


Experimental evidence is the final arbiter of right and wrong, but a theory’s value is also assessed by the depth of influence it has on allied fields. By this measure, string theory is off the charts. Decades of analysis filling thousands of articles have had a dramatic impact on a broad swath of research cutting across physics and mathematics. Take black holes, for example. String theory has resolved a vexing puzzle by identifying the microscopic carriers of their internal disorder, a feature discovered in the 1970s by Stephen Hawking.


Looking back, I’m gratified at how far we’ve come but disappointed that a connection to experiment continues to elude us. While my own research has migrated from highly mathematical forays into extra-dimensional arcana to more applied studies of string theory’s cosmological insights, I now hold only modest hope that the theory will confront data during my lifetime.


Even so, string theory’s pull remains strong. Its ability to seamlessly meld general relativity and quantum mechanics remains a primary achievement, but the allure goes deeper still. Within its majestic mathematical structure, a diligent researcher would find all of the best ideas physicists have carefully developed over the past few hundred years. It’s hard to believe such depth of insight is accidental.


I like to think that Einstein would look at string theory’s journey and smile, enjoying the theory’s remarkable geometrical features while feeling kinship with fellow travelers on the long and winding road toward unification. All the same, science is powerfully self-correcting. Should decades drift by without experimental support, I imagine that string theory will be absorbed by other areas of science and mathematics, and slowly shed a unique identity. In the interim, vigorous research and a large dose of patience are surely warranted. If experimental confirmation of string theory is in the offing, future generations will look back on our era as transformative, a time when science had the fortitude to nurture a remarkable and challenging theory, resulting in one of the most profound steps toward understanding reality.




Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/string-theory-about-unravel-180953637/#DT1gWEykyRugx3QR.99

The First People

Some of what is said here is simple nonsense but a lot of the rest conforms somewhat to the much more detailed effort here to piece together time lines going back 200,000 years.


What i find interesting is the recognition of a recent human bottleneck which is completely understandable in terms of the Pleistocene Nonconformity but not for instance the Atlantean Subsidence in 1159 BC.   The former event suggests few survivors at all.  It is more astounding that we have actual records at all from the Indian subcontinent.  At least survivors did make it through.


 At the same time i reasonably think that the Earth was evacuated then to avoid serious losses.  Re-population took place with colony arks.  That is a more reasonable scenario simply because the event itself was deliberately set up by the then extant modern civilization.


Thus such colonization would be careful and selective and there seems good evidence of that..  The result is that we jumped to present modernization inside of several thousands of years after an initial seeding around 10,000 years ago.  Post Atlantis required about 2500 years of recovery.  That means we are around 2500 years behind schedule.


.

The First People

Zakaria Bziker, Contributor

Waking Times

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/12/15/first-people/

“Why should we be so arrogant as to assume that we’re the first homo-sapiens to walk the earth?” – J.J. Abrams

No one remembers one’s moment of birth and neither does humanity. The beginning of man on earth is a complete mystery. The present article, however, is not about how man came to be, but about shortly after that. It is about the dawn of humanity, a missing chapter in the human history. This chapter is of a forgotten people that mapped the earth and the sky long before there were ancient Egyptians or Jews. These mysterious first people are not to be confused with Australopithecus, Homo Habilis, or Homo Ergaster. They are, instead, the people remembered by ancients as ‘gods’; the people that first engineered societies leaving baffling traces on earth.

The idea of progress is new. Before the enlightenment, human civilizations throughout history viewed the past as being glorious and did not expect the future to be better than the present but to resemble and repeat the past. Man did not think highly of themselves until after Kant declared the motto “Sapere aude” – dare to think for yourself. Since then, our attitudes towards the past changed. But the question remains: what is in our distant past that made the ancients behold it with such impressiveness?

Scientific and technological progress does not have to take thousands of years. The pace of progress could be exponential, slow, or even regressive; exponential through accidental breakthroughs and inventions, e.g. the 20th century, slow when it is impeded by a force majeure such as the Roman church, or the Black Death that prolonged the dark ages for a century, and regressive when undergoing a massive loss of knowledge, e.g. the burning of the Alexandria library in 391 A.D. The idea that scientific and technological development takes millennia is a baseless fact. This idea, if not just an impression, is just our assessment of the known history. Technological progress is inevitable and desirable for any civilization. It could take a couple of centuries to millennia depending on circumstances.

Science and technology change not only the way we live presently but also the way we view both the past and the future. As we go on progressing, our expectations of the future change depending on the breakthroughs we come across and the pace of the scientific development. Similarly, our vision of the past changes too as we gain new ways and means of investigating facts. The current worldview of the past is that things were primitive, and that mankind emerged from a state of barbarism to become smarter and more capable. However, new emerging evidence suggests otherwise.

What started it all was originally Plato’s account of Atlantis. Yet, across the two millennia, his account was considered fictional if not misunderstood. Not until 1882 that the U.S. Congressman Ignatius Loyola Donnelly published his book ‘Atlantis: The Antediluvian World’ in which he gathers all sort of the then-available evidence in favor of an early mighty civilization that was far more advanced than it had any right to be. He mainly studied ancient myths and believed Plato’s account to be historically accurate. Forty-seven years later, a medieval map called Piri Reis was found at the Imperial Palace library in Constantinople (Istanbul) in1929. This map inexplicably depicts the cost of South America and Antarctica with unprecedented fine details corresponding to nowadays longitude and latitude albeit the map dates back to 1513. It was until after the Piri Reis map had made its appearance that other maps of high precision started emerging in the following years, eg: The Ribero maps 1520-30, the Ortelius map 1570, and the Wright-Molyneux map 1599 (McIntosh, 2000:59). Upon its discovery, it was thought that the map had been based on Columbus explorations without regard to the fact that Columbus never surveyed South America. Later on, Charles Hapgood studied the map intensively to come up with the conclusion that an advanced civilization in the remote past had existed and had mapped the earth beforehand (Hapgood, 1966). Hapgood’s unorthodox theory of earth crustal displacement also accounts for a preexistent civilized culture in Antarctica. Albert Einstein remarked that Hapgood’s ideas had scientific worth (Einstein, 1953). Years later in 1978, Brad Steiger’s book ‘Worlds Before Our Own’ rekindled the issue. Steiger studied the OPA (Out-of-place artifacts). The underlying counter-assumption to his findings says that: if humans were primitive in the past, common sense then says that the deeper one digs down into the earth, the more un-advanced artifacts one finds. Steiger found that some advanced human artifacts are located in the lowest primordial geologic strata whereas primitive ones are located in upper strata and thus labeled Out-of-Place Artifacts. He also presented evidence that strongly suggests the cohabitation of dinosaurs and humans. Steiger’s unconventional book fueled other subsequent works such as Dead Men’s Secrets (1986), Forbidden Archaeology (1993), The Orion Mystery (1993), Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), and Technology of the Gods (1999). The book was also met with a great deal of criticism. Nowadays these emerging ideas along with supporting evidence call into question the current worldview of the first people.

Let us now move to the implications of this view. When one subscribes to the current eccentric theory of history, one is then driven to speculate two possible past events that put an end to these people. Either these ancients were so advanced that they destroyed themselves, or they were destroyed by a global cataclysm from which a few survived. The first case seems less probable than the second although there might be some clues that imply ancient warfare.

“When the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico, the desert sand turned to fused green glass. This fact, according to the magazine Free World, has given certain archaeologists a turn. They have been digging in the ancient Euphrates Valley and have uncovered a layer of agrarian culture 8,000 years old, and a layer of herdsman culture much older, and a still older caveman culture. Recently, they reached another layer, a layer of fused green glass” (New York Herald Tribune, 1947)

 

The assumption of uniformitarianism makes scientists attribute the current features of the earth surface to a slow process that took millions of years. The alternative view however suggests that these features are actually the result of a worldwide cataclysm that took place mere thousands years ago. In this article, 3 pieces of evidence in favor of the cataclysm will be provided.

We have first the problem of carbon dating method. Most geologists use carbon dating to determine the age of fossils and geologic strata. The reliability of this dating method requires a balance between the forming and decaying of radioactive carbon that has been maintaining its equilibrium for millions of years in earth’s atmosphere. However, its forming and decaying has not even yet reached equilibrium on earth for the amount of C14 that is being produced is greater than that which is being decayed. As a result, we cannot use today’s C14 ratio (0.0000765%) in the atmosphere as a benchmark to measure the presence of C14 in ancient fossils. Plus, it is hopeless to correlate earth’s epochs with the geologic column since the latter is based on fiction (Huse, 1983:15; Smith, 2012:242). Vertical petrified trees are the whistleblower that exposes the invalidity of the geologic column. Many petrified trees running across multiple geological strata have been observed in nature which could only suggest that these strata formed in a short period of time, a result of a rapid cataclysmal sedimentation for example, but not a process of millions of years (Harold 1969;1971, Rupke, N.A, 1970).

Second, there is scientific evidence of a past near-extinction event, also known as population bottleneck event. The two researchers William Amos and J.I. Hoffman from University of Cambridge found genetic evidence for a sudden and drastic decline of the world population to a very small number of people just thousands of years ago (Amos & Hoffman, 2010:131-7). This is speculated to be caused by a worldwide cataclysm.

Third, there are stunning similarities among several ancient myths and legends of different people across the globe on the event of a past global catastrophe, more specifically a global flood similar to the one mentioned in both Biblical and Qur’anic accounts. Some of these myths are Sumerian creation myth (ca. 1600 B.C.), Ancient Greek flood myths, ancient myths of Kwaya, Mbuti, Maasai, Mandin, and Yoruba people in Africa, Yu the Great (ca. 2200 B.C.) and Nüwa in China, Tiddalik in Australia, Hopi mythology in North America, Unu Pachakuti myth of the Incas in South America and this is not the end of the list for there are more than 500 ancient deluge legends (Cox, 1997:198; Dey, 2012: 112; Wohl, 2000:273; LaViolette, 2005: 235). These myths are traces of a global collective memory referring to an actual occurrence in the distant past.

Myths are the fossils of history (Gray, 2004:15). They preserve history in ways that would not make sense to us. The dialogues of Plato regarding Atlantis are but the most vivid memory of antediluvian societies we have nowadays. Some myths do still recall some faint memories of the golden age but these memories are depicted in the guise of magic and supernatural powers. Take the example of the Sanskrit epic of vimanas about a mythological flying machine. Recently, some researchers have immersed themselves into studying ancient myths from this perspective, e.g. Max Igan, 2005, and they have found rather curious results.

Now comes the famous question: where is the concrete evidence to this bold claim of ancient advanced societies? The chemist and Nobel Prize medalist Dr. Melvin Cook concludes that the earth underground oil deposits were formed as a result of a sudden and rapid burial of organic materials just a few thousands years ago (Cook, 1966; 1967). It could be the case that the oil deposits are ancient buried cities that turned into oil due to the sudden sedimentation and high pressure since the deluge would have had wrecked everything. In that sense, we might be burning the evidence every time one goes in their car to run an errand. The matter of concrete evidence is clearly a weak spot to this line of enquiry; however, how much do we really know about earth? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence to begin with. The evidence could be staring us in the face but we are just blind to it considering the way we perceive and interpret facts. Plus, we are not even looking for the evidence because we lack perspective. We thus remain quite heedless to any emerging evidence if not we willingly cover it. There are though some tantalizing hints that ought to be considered seriously.

How about acknowledging first that the biggest manmade edifices on earth are concrete and unnoticed evidence? For thousands of years, the Great Pyramid of Khufu had been the tallest structure on earth until the Empire State Building skyscraper was completed in 1931, and still is “the most colossal single building ever erected on the planet” (britannica.com). It is aligned to true geodetic North and its location is found to be the center of the earth landmass. This sort of precision entails a comprehensive knowledge of earth geography, e.g. Mercator projection, which is something very unexpected of ancient Egypt (Bauer, 2007:86). In addition to that, engineers and scientists conclude that it is impossible to replicate the great pyramid despite the sophisticated technology we have nowadays given the structure’s immensity and staggering precision (Fix, 1984; West, 1993; Hancock, 1995; Rux, 1996: 265; Dunn, 1998; Amato, 2007:4; Atiya & Lamis, 2007:3; Beaudoin & Joseph, 2007:54; Sheldon, 2009:146-147; Cadose, 2012:75).

“Scientists have conceded that modern man cannot build a great pyramid that would retain its shape for thousands of years without sagging under its own weight.” (Gray, 2004:172)

The engineer Markus Schulte, however, speculates that if it were possible to replicate the Great Pyramid alone, it would nowadays cost us some $35 billion (Malkowski, 2010:117). Investing such money in such colossal structure, that is not even habitable, and without any expected profit, is something we certainly do not do today. So the question of ‘how was it built?’ is of less importance to ‘why was it built?’

One of the latest theories that seems to make sense as to why the Giza pyramids were built is the Orion Correlation theory (1993) advanced by Robert Bauval. The theory suggests that the three pyramids at Giza mirror the three stars in the Orion constellation, also known as Orion’s belt, and the position of the Nile River in relation to the pyramids mirrors the position of the Milky Way galaxy in relation to the Orion constellation. Further, Bauval observes that the shaft within the Great Pyramid was, in the past, oriented towards the middle star of Orion’s belt which is the start representing the same pyramid.

However, that is not all there is to the theory. Bauval’s theory does not make much sense without taking into consideration the astronomical phenomenon called precession of the equinoxes, also called the Great Year or the Platonic Year. This phenomenon is plainly earth’s third cycle after the daily and annual ones. The cycle is either caused by the slow wobbling of the earth due to the moon gravitational pull or by the whole solar system moving in a helical orbit. Its implication is that the night sky stars move backward across the eons. As a result, the position of constellations in the night sky for the ancient is not the same as of their position nowadays. Every time the sun rises in the morning of the vernal equinoxes (March 20th and September 22nd), the background constellation on the horizon of that morning is one of the Zodiac constellations. One cycle is completed when the entire zodiac constellations come to pass. The NASA estimates the cycle to last 25,800 years making each constellation last 2,125 years in the morning of the vernal equinoxes.

How is that information relevant to the Giza plateau? Well, in the immediate vicinity of the pyramids we have the Sphinx which faces East. The Sphinx shape seems to resemble a lion, and thus Bauval suggests that it symbolizes the Zodiac constellation of Leo. In the morning of the equinoxes, the Sphinx in the present era faces the constellation of Pieces and is slightly shifting towards the constellation of Aquarius, but by running a computer backward simulation of earth’s precession, we find that the Sphinx at some point in the remote past used to face the constellation of Leo from 10,970 to 8810 B.C. Now the eureka moment is when we line up the shaft inside the Great pyramid with the middle star of Orion’s belt in that epoch and at last we have an exact date of around 10,450 B.C. So all of a sudden the pyramids are no longer tombs but a gigantic clock that has a date frozen into its structure.

The first scientific recognition of the precession cycle took place in ancient Greece (129 B.C.) by the astronomer Hipparchus. However, long before that ancient Mesopotamia, Maya and Egypt somehow knew about the cycle and we do not know whether this knowledge was handed down from earlier times or they scientifically discovered it. This cycle tracks time on a large span and it is “extremely difficult to observe, and even harder to measure accurately, without sophisticated instrumentation” (Hancock, 1995:231). Using the cycle as an astronomical clock with the help of an eternal structure that defeats the eons of time and all of that with staggering precision is something very remarkable that presupposes a thorough knowledge of astronomy and engineering.

At this point it is even doubtful to think that ancient Egyptians designed and built the Giza Necropolis. We know many aspects of ancient Egyptian daily life with the minutest details. However, there is no single mention of: “Oh, by the way, we also built the pyramids” in their hieroglyphs records or even the existence of any hieroglyph inscription inside the three main pyramids. Some evidence even suggests that the site predates the legendary flood. Incrustations of natural salt were found inside the great pyramid when it was opened for the first time (Dinwiddie, 2001:164). Furthermore, in the 1750’s, the naval captain and explorer Frederic Norden reported the existence of a great number of oysters and seashells in the vicinity of the pyramids and the Sphinx. In his Histories, Herodotus also reports that he observed in the surrounding area of the pyramids seashells and signs of salt water calcification back then (Herodotus, ca. 450 B.C., Book II:12). All that seems to suggest that maybe the Giza plateau was once underwater. Then what about the strong tie between ancient Egyptians and the Giza plateau? Aside from ancient Egypt, most ancient civilizations exhibit a sort of obsession and admiration for pyramid-like structures which could originally be ascribed to the three pyramids at Giza. Further, the failed attempts to reproduce the pyramids on a small scale, like the case of the three Queen’s Pyramids, explain how impressed ancient Egyptians were with the colossal three edifices. It is not so crazy after all to assume that ancient Egyptians founded their entire civilization in the vicinity of the Giza plateau only to be identified with the immensity of the structures.

If one assumes that the correlation theory is valid, then one has to ask the question: why is the 10th century B.C. an important date for the pyramid builders? Why would these ancients go to such trouble to build huge monuments that hint at a specific date? What was happening back then? In general, 10,000 B.C. is a very significant date in our conventional wisdom. It is the date when the late ice age ended. It marks the first appearance of wooden buildings, human settlements in the Americas and the domestication of animals. Remains of humans in caves and a remarkable transformation marked with the introduction of farming all date back to the same era. All these sudden developments could signify two possible scenarios. The first suggests that humans were witnessing the most significant step in their long chain of evolution. The second suggests humans were actually recovering from a worldwide cataclysm.

Following the line of the second, and less known, scenario, one cannot of course expect survivors of a cataclysm to build cities right from the start. They would have to spread out over the earth which would eventually result in linguistic deviation. Keeping track of one another would not be possible due to the absence of means of communication. The latter may explain the absence of historical accounts before the city of Uruk made its appearance ca. 4500 B.C. So, instead of progressing forward, humans would have to go through a phase of silence characterized by the struggle with nature and the use of archaic tools before they start coming together to build urban centers. The book ‘Noah to Abram‬: The Turbulent Years: New Light on Ice Age, Cave Man, Stone Age, the Old Kingdoms‬’ by Erich A. Von Fange highlights the striking similarities between the knowledge we have about early archaic human cultures of the Lower Paleolithic period (Oldowan, Acheulean and Mousterian tool cultures) and the case of a post-cataclysm man trying to survive upon the ruins of their ancestors. Given the growing body of evidence, the second view is now becoming more recognized in outer circles. The Roland Emmerich movie 10,000 BC (2008), for example, opted for the cataclysm scenario for which it received sharp criticism from the academic circle and was dubbed archaeologically and historically inaccurate. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬So, going back to the pyramids, do they mark the date of the past global catastrophe?‬‬

Just a little while after 10,000 B.C., all cultures seem to have started emerging simultaneously with no substantial signs of preliminary phases. They went from being hunter-gatherers to becoming citizens with rights and responsibilities.

“How does a complex civilization spring full-blown into being? Look at a 1905 automobile and compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the process of ‘development’. But in Egypt there are no parallels. Everything is right there at the start. The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a ‘development’, it was a legacy.” (West, 1979:13)

The sudden appearance of cities was probably backed up by solid knowledge of sophisticated social structure. The presence of a high culture the like of ancient Egypt in such epoch is in itself enigmatic. Furthermore, the superiority of ancient Egypt over ancient Greece is indisputable although Egypt is older. Herodotus and many other modern historians have pointed out this contradiction (McCants 1975:62). Even earlier than Herodotus, Solon’s account embodies a small talk between the two cultures. Solon (d. ca. 559 B.C.) was an Athenian statesman and a distant ancestor to Plato. He had a conversation with an ancient Egyptian priest in which he was told:

“ ‘O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you.’ Solon in return asked him what he meant. ‘I mean to say,’ he replied, ‘that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes’ ” (Plato’s Timaeus, ca. 360 B.C.)

The key to this mystery is that it is highly probable that some people may have kept valuable knowledge originating form the first people which allowed them to prosper faster and earlier than others. For example some Egyptologists came to the conclusion that ancient Egyptian high priests possessed some powerful secret knowledge to which the triumph of ancient Egypt was attributed (Nuttall, 1839:668; West, 1979 :24; Linke, 2012:28; Hancock, 1995:361; Marks, 2001), like the knowledge of electricity (Childress, 1996:18).

The first people certainly left some remnants of their advanced science that still linger even up to the present day. In astronomy for instance, the artificial division of the celestial longitude zones into 12 Zodiac constellations of 30 degrees each along with the awareness of the celestial precession seem to be descending from a higher culture. In addition to that, the heliocentric view of the world is not new. Its earliest traces date back to ancient Sanskrit texts (e.g. Yajnavalkya, ca. 900 B.C. and Aryabhata ca. 550 B.C.) and later to Aristarchus of Samos (ca. 230 B.C.). In that sense, the Copernican revolution is rather a revival of lost knowledge.

“Contrary to history as we know it, in that remote period we call ‘prehistory’, there subsisted an embarrassing wealth of astronomical knowledge. And may I suggest that the more one looks into it, the more one feels that a race of scientific giants has preceded us.” (Gray, 2004:105)

In medicine, alternative medicine with its unknown origin entails deep knowledge of human anatomy that made its way to modern day and has been acknowledged by the World Health Organization despite being still not understood. In physics, knowledge of electricity may also have existed in prehistory. The German archaeologist Wilhelm König found a 2000-year-old ancient battery, also know as the Parthian Battery, in the National Museum of Iraq in 1938 (Handorf, 2002:84–7). The battery is reported to have been unearthed near Baghdad (the area of Khujut Rabu) during a 1936 excavation. Later on in 1940, König produced a scientific paper on the battery based on which “Willard F. M. Gray, of the General Electric High Voltage Laboratory in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, built and tested several reproductions of the Khujut Rabu finds, all of which produced equivalent electrical input” (Kenyon, 2008:42). Moreover, aluminum is a metal that cannot be generated without electricity and we were not able to make it until 1854. However, many items made of aluminum have been found in archaeological sites, e.g. in the burial site of general Zhou Chu (265-420 A.D.). As a matter of fact, electricity is the very first thing one stumbles upon once one starts studying matter, and it is not a difficult thing to rediscover especially if one has foreknowledge of its existence. All roads lead to electricity. In geography, ancient maps undoubtedly fueled the age of maritime exploration. The Piri Reis map continues to amaze modern man not only for its accuracy but also for its depiction of Antarctica before it was supposedly discovered in 1819. The continent is depicted being ‘free of ice’ with geological details, such as mountains and rivers, that irrefutably correspond with the seismic echo sounding profile run by the Swedish-British-Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in 1949 (Ohlmeyer, the USAF Commander, in a letter to Charles Hapgood, 1960). Meanwhile, the Antarctica landmass is thought to have been under the ice cap long before our species even evolved according to Academia. So what are we seriously missing here?

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”— Tom Clancy

Some of the facts presented may seem contradictory but that is the nature of mysteries. They never cease to be mysteries until they start making sense. The Giza Pyramids, for example, preach for lost science and technology but their astronomical alignment preaches for a post-cataclysm construction which somehow does not make sense. This article is not trying to provide a systematic view of the past. It is rather an invitation to dig deeper into it. Knowing our past is of great value and has huge implications on the present and future. The past, the present and the future are all a one chain of events. The more we know about the past, the more we know ourselves and where we are going.

The evidence is all around us. Some recognize it, some reject it, and some go to extreme views such as associating these perplexing legacies with ancient alien visit. The manner in which most people react to any sort of evidence or anomaly is already conditioned by our attitudes towards the past and under the influence of the rampant contemporary philosophies of presentism and scientism, or practices like obscurantism. Any anomaly in science could be a twinkling of a new discovery or paradigm shift that may be left unnoticed or even denied for fear of misoneism. A true scientific and intellectual honesty will never be achieved unless we take into consideration the anomalous by trying to adjust or even reconstruct our theoretical assumptions accordingly until the anomalous, as Kuhn puts it, becomes expected (Kuhn, 1970:52). At a minimum, we show effort of reconciliation instead of burring our heads in sand and keep building up new scientific studies on top of fashionable but yet unfit theories. It is only a matter of time before man will face the greatest disappointment in science and its grand theories due to the snobbishness of present science. We are in a desperate need not only for a paradigm shift but, most importantly, for a scientific renaissance.

About the Author

Zakaria Bziker is a student at Ibn-Tofail University (Kenitra, Morocco), currently pursuing a master’s degree in Education. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in General Linguistics.

**This article was originally published at Morocco World News.**

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