PhiPi and the Great Pyramid of Egypt at Giza
erco
Posts: 20,259
Is there NOTHING that our formidable forumista friend can't solve?
http://www.goldennumber.net/phi-pi-great-pyramid-egypt/
He's the "Golden Ratio" boy.
http://www.goldennumber.net/phi-pi-great-pyramid-egypt/
He's the "Golden Ratio" boy.
Comments
-Phil
@
Hmmmm.... I do find it a bit suspicious that we never see PhiPi at work in his lab...
Well..I seem to remember a couple of shots last year, ( and I saw them real time). But that could have been Browser in makup.
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?129748-Spinneret-PropCAM-WebCam-(User-Pannable)/page2&highlight=Webcam
He was, after all, demonstrating his expertise in manipulating images. That apparent epidermis might just be an artifact of some heavy-duty image processing.
-Phil
With a bit of string, it is not difficult to get a square foundation to line up with the solar system's NS axis. Getting a perfect Golden Ratio isn't any more difficult. It is just a ratio that is extremely easy using geometry.
Many years ago while installing concrete forms on a 20 story office building of 500,000 square feet, my foreman asked me to help him layout the reference marks to make sure the next floor was absolutely level. But he had to go fetch the transit.
While he was fetching the transit, I laid out all the marks with a a chalk line and a 3 foot bubble level. He refused to accept that my work might be correct. So we checked it all and it was dead on.
Some people spend their whole lives watching TV, others spend their whole lives acquiring skills.
So I suspect the missing artifact is a large ball of string.
If one wants to calculate the ratio of a Golden Section it is based on 5ths of a circle and constructing a pentagram of 5 equal length lines will provide an accurate length without having to calculate in angles or decimal numbers. (Take a look at the Wikipedia explanation)
So, it is not very big job to layout a level square and then to take one side as a reference for the golden section. The information is transferred to a ball of string for measurement.
All four edges of the base are the same, and all for edges going to the apex are the same. No need for a calculator, no need for fancy trig functions, no need for fancy optics.
Alignment to north is found by a stick in the ground and marking the apex of the shadow over a series of days. Slow, but very accurate and used by Egyptians, Mayans, and other American natives - likely by Stonehenge and lots of similar stone circles in Europe.
Also, while the Great Pyramid of Giza is built this way, there were many leading up to it that were not conforming to this degree of accuracy -- including quite a few step pyramids.
The interesting thing about the Golden Section is how it fits into the geometry of the triangle, the circle, and the sphere.
If you take equilateral triangles and lay six of them flat, you get a perfect plane going to infinity in every direction.
If you take the same equilateral triangles and assemble 5 of them, you get the cap of a geodisic sphere. Since the base is divided into 5 segments, therein lies the Golden Section.
20 of the same equilateral triangles construct a sphere. 2 caps of 5 and a band of 10 between. This is what Buckminster Fuller was so interested in.
No sure what the Egyptians were thinking or up to - maybe exploring the relationship of squares and cubes to circles and spheres in some mystical way. But it certainly was predominately a geometry problem, not numerical.
You still gotta love his Dymaxion car, which would make a highly maneuverable robotic chassis. At least Heathkit's HERO thought so!