Isaac Newton’s attempts to unlock secret code of pyramids

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/13/isaac-newtons-attempts-to-unlock-secret-code-of-pyramids.html

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Somehow I don’t believe Newton invented the cat flap, especially with notes like this on that site

It is said that all geniuses sometimes have a blind spot and when his cat had kittens, so anxious was he to please them, that he cut several smaller holes alongside the original one so that they could come and go whenever they wanted to. It didn’t occur to him they could use the existing one!

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Papers include a design for a sphinx flap that fits on sloping walls…

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Aztecs did it better. But they don’t have a major city with an airport and tourist destinations nearby.

Which is probably better for preservation.

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It’d be fascinating to know how a man so fastidious about measurement and precision hoped to learn anything about the pyramids when he didn’t have personal, or even second-hand experience of them - by which time of course, they were already in a ruinous state having been stripped of their casings and their baselines obscured by rubble. Of course, knowing Isaac he was probably tripping on mercury fumes at the time.

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Mayans beat them to it.

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He didn’t: Leibniz did it first!

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4000 years later (3000 for the Mayans)

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Did he find the grain?

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Thank you for that re: Mexico City - great minds, etc.

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ah, so file it under “Mozart wrote Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”

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Too right. that is so isaac!

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Interesting that speculating on how the pyramid inch (or whatever it was) could hold the answers to everything was a legitimate subject for speculation in Newton’s day. Now it’s more like a sign of batty religious lunacy.
Shows how far we’ve come, I s’pose.

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Here is an interesting short story about Newton from Omni magazine (one of my go to publications while it was active). The basic idea is a time traveler decides to go back and present Newton with a calculator so he could focus more on the big ideas. As you probably guess, it didn’t have the impact the time traveler had hoped for.

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Except the nearest significant pyramids near Mexico City were built by neither the Mayans nor Aztecs:

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Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that site.

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Yeah, but I haven’t been to it, while I have been to Teotihuacan, so I think that it’s safe to say that Teotihuacan is the more significant of the two. It’s quite an amazing place!

There was a huge pyramid in the center of Tenochtitlan, but sadly the Spanish invaded and weren’t fans of it.

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I’m curious, in what sense did “Aztecs do it better” when it comes to pyramids?

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