The Great Pyramid of Giza and the Speed of Light(johndcook.com)
johndcook.com
The Great Pyramid of Giza and the Speed of Light
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/04/09/pyramid-speed-of-light/
16 comments
It's just that the French left the greastet Easter Egg of all time when creating the Metric System. They could've just made speed of light some round number, e.g. 1 million km/sec, but that sounded too bland, so they chose the Great Pyramid of Giza instead. The same for the charge of the electron
If you make that number round, others become not-round.
I read [0] that the meter was defined as 1 / 10,000,000th of the distance from the equator to the (north?) pole. The measurement on which that was based was wrong and the actual distance is 10,001,966 meters. If you make that distance round, then the speed of light will almost certainly not be round (now that would be a coincidence!).
But also 1 cm^3 = 1 ml. Perhaps the ml was based on the cm^3. That's practical.
Making a round number for the speed of light or for the distance from equator to pole is practical only for geographers or physicists. What would be most practical to ordinary people as the basis for a meter? A body part (is there a particularly standard body part, with minimal correlation with body size/mass)?
[0] I haven't seen an especially reliable source
I read [0] that the meter was defined as 1 / 10,000,000th of the distance from the equator to the (north?) pole. The measurement on which that was based was wrong and the actual distance is 10,001,966 meters. If you make that distance round, then the speed of light will almost certainly not be round (now that would be a coincidence!).
But also 1 cm^3 = 1 ml. Perhaps the ml was based on the cm^3. That's practical.
Making a round number for the speed of light or for the distance from equator to pole is practical only for geographers or physicists. What would be most practical to ordinary people as the basis for a meter? A body part (is there a particularly standard body part, with minimal correlation with body size/mass)?
[0] I haven't seen an especially reliable source
Volume is derived from distance yes. There are only 7 'base' SI units: meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela (luminous intensity), with everything else derived. If you consider that a mole is just an amount (barely a unit at all really) and candelas are extremely specific, it's a pretty tidy system.
the french chose the distance from the equator to the pole, as it passes through Paris, 1/10000000, but they then had to measure that distance, which they did, in order to get a divisible number to derive the meter from, which, given the time period, was epic.
earlier in there endevors to measure things they (the french) were making surface plates
in.the early 1600's, that only recently have been checked for flatness, which they maintain to +-1/4000000", hand made, still in there bureau of standards.
the given, is just that, arbitrary,always, so there is every reason to "brand" it
But if we choose some random mean body part X, then people i, whose Xi < Xm, won't be very happy.
"Of course it's a coincidence" doesn't leave me with good feels. See, we don't know what a "normal distribution" is for a correlation like this, it's not like we have a huge bag of samples to determine the variance from.
Something has to lie on that line of latitude. Has anyone checked what is on the southern speed of light latitude?
I wasn't thinking specifically of the speed of light, what other "significant" numbers are there and what "significant" physical artifacts correspond to them? I would expect the definition of "significant" is going to play a big part in it. In the back of my mind, some things I'm observing in how people explain what AI does make me feel like they're relying on normal distributions to carry a lot of water. If something is an "outlier / coincidence": is it? What distribution(s) does it belong to? Just a nagging feeling at this point.
The pyramid exists on every latitude between 29.9782000 and 29.9801000, it's not that precise.
Is it a coincidence that the diameter of Earth orbit is 1000 light seconds, or that our Moon perfectly eclipses Sun? The Pyramid is a comparatively modest example.
The conspiracy theorist inside me would say that the French might not be the first to define the metric this way /s.
You're reminding me of a miniminuteman video debunking this conspiracy theory, asking how it was that the aliens who built the pyramids were using the metric system.
I guess it's literally everyone in the galaxy except for Americans using the metric system.
I guess it's literally everyone in the galaxy except for Americans using the metric system.
> I guess it's literally everyone in the galaxy except for Americans using the metric system.
So the reason the aliens always start their invasion or encounter with humans from America in Hollywood movies is because they are angry/curious to see the only people in the galaxy not using the metric system?
So the reason the aliens always start their invasion or encounter with humans from America in Hollywood movies is because they are angry/curious to see the only people in the galaxy not using the metric system?
They hate us for our freedoms!