Thursday, September 4, 2014

The mystery of the Pyramids may be solved

For a long time scientists have struggled on how the Egyptians built the pyramids, even with massive slave labor, moving such large and heavy stones, fitting them together and finish the construction on a relative short time was a big problem. It was even demonstrated that with modern machinery it would still be a huge engineering problem.

A lot of theories from mystical super powers, advanced technology and the intervention of advanced alien civilizations, all of this theories are very popular, but now a study from the University of Indiana, by the physicist Joseph West and some colleagues came with a much simple solution for this mind struggling millennia-old problem on how they moved such heavy stones. And it is very simple. They rolled them.



This new theory suggests that by rolling instead of dragging the stones considerably reduces the ground pressure and at the same time allows the blocks of stone to be moved with much less effort, making it very much plausible explanation.

Here is the link of the paper that was published: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3603v1.pdf

There is a problem in this theory, it is a good theory and a good way of how the Pyramids “should have” been built, the paper doesn’t say that they built them that way, but that they should have.

The mystery of the pyramids have already been solved at this same year (2014), there is even artwork found within the tomb of Djehutihotep, which was discovered in the Victorian Era, that shows how they moved them. They simply poured water in the sand.


As a UvA press release explains:

“The physicists placed a laboratory version of the Egyptian sledge in a tray of sand. They determined both the required pulling force and the stiffness of the sand as a function of the quantity of water in the sand. To determine the stiffness they used a rheometer, which shows how much force is needed to deform a certain volume of sand.
Experiments revealed that the required pulling force decreased proportional to the stiffness of the sand...A sledge glides far more easily over firm desert sand simply because the sand does not pile up in front of the sledge as it does in the case of dry sand.”

So the mystery of the pyramids is solved, at least how they were built. But a lot of other mysteries about Egypt still exist and still remain unexplained. Per example:

Why were the pyramids built at all?
Most scientists say they were simply tombs, burial places, for Egyptian pharaohs or kings, making them “immortal” (and in fact, most of the 138 pyramids discovered in Egypt as of 2008, where in fact just tombs) but some of the pyramids have complex inner structures to be simple tombs.

How old is the Sphinx?
The orthodox view put the Sphinx with an age of around 4,500 years old (around 2,500BC) however recent scientific studies show that it may be much, pretty much older.
Let’s hope that these, and other mysteries finally get broken.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Protocol For Talking To Extraterrestrials

Since the first binary code sent from Puerto Rico in 1974, our messages to aliens have been increasingly complicated and cryptic, possibly so much that extraterrestrials won’t get what we’re saying.

A trio of astrophysicists from the US and France hope to change that by building an extraterrestrial messaging protocol, so any spacebound communiqué could be easily understood.

A METI protocol — messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence — would include several factors, including signal encoding, message length and message content, according to Dimitra Atri, an astronomer at the University of Kansas, and his colleagues. They suggest using two specific wavelengths for transmission: 1.42 GHz or 4.46 GHz, which are commonly observed in nature and relatively easy to capture, in case the ETs only have “modest technical capabilities.” They also recommend establishing a dedicated transmission beacon to conduct regular broadcasts.

More information here.