Who Built the Moon? by Christopher Knight, Alan Butler Read Free Book Online

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 much 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 centres 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 mass, 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 kilometres, to calculate a circumference of a meaningless sounding 10,920,800 metres. 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