Stepped pyramids have better traction, reducing liability.
Of course, it’s still an ADA compliance nightmare, but this was before that was a consideration.
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Fun fact about Sotheby’s auctioning off three pages of Newton’s more, shall we say, ecumenical stuff, for what I’m sure will be a stupendous amount of money.
Back in 1936, Sotheby’s held the first—as in, first since he died—auction of Newton’s papers. His heirs had been selling off the goodies ever since, but now they decided to cash in the rest. It was a bust, probably because of the worldwide depression, but also because the physical majority of it was the “wrong” stuff. Namely, his work on alchemy, biblical history, and so forth. John Maynard Keynes, of all people, recognized a bit too late to participate in the auction that this was a historical goldmine, and went about re-buying them from the original auction buyers, who basically just wanted scraps of paper with Newton’s handwriting on them.
It’s safe to say that that act on Keynes’ part, which bore fruit about two scholarly generations later, did more than almost anything else to make possible the modern incarnation of the history of science. By which I mean an approach that says “people in history grope for an understanding of how the world works in lots of ways, including things that look nothing like present-day science,” rather than “Newton was 12% the greatest genius who ever lived and 88% wasting his time.”
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It really became big in the 19th Century after John Taylor formalised the Pyramid Inch which was taken up by the Astronomer Royal of Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth. At that point the Great Pyramid was linked to the size of the Earth and the Solar System as well as being a prophecy machine and ultimate proof that the Imperial system of measurement was far superior to the infernal metric system.
Hilariously, it all ended up with the people who saw the Great Pyramid as a great mystery funding perhaps the greatest egyptologist of all time, Flinders Petrie to survey the site in breathtaking detail in order to firm up their predictions. Unfortunately, for them, Petrie found the Great Pyramid was slightly smaller than they had been using. No wonder he called them ‘pyramidiots.’
The good that came out of it was that Petrie’s survey of the Giza Plateau was so extraordinarily that it has only very recently been surpassed by modern technologies. It is thanks to him that we know just how good the Egyptians were at measuring and aligning the Great Pyramid (the others, not so much) - and that’s before we consider his recreational nudity, pink underwear and exploding tin cans.
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That’s a very generous interpretation. 
. Another way to look at it is simply that great historical figures are still just people. We all hold lots of dumb ideas alongside good ones. Some of us have better good ideas than others. It’s also a lesson that mathematics, science and inquisitiveness are not the same thing as skepticism. Not all scientists are proper skeptics, and most people are never taught how to think that way (nor can anyone do it 100% of the time). That’s how you can describe gravity, invent calculus and believe in pyramid power all at once. Without skepticism, gravity and wacky bible numerology are equally worthy pursuits.
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True, but at the time, this was considered an important and serious field of study (as was alchemy, etc). It was all in service to understanding the world, which many people at the time, including Newton, saw as God’s creation. The goal, whether it was defining higher order mathematics, gravity, or numerology, was to better understand the world granted man by God.
For people like Newton, at the time, it was all of a thing (science and religion) and not at all contradictory to employ scientific methods to figuring out religious questions.
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…esp since the Aztecs “inherited” the buildings created by the cultures which preceded theirs.
Certainly! But part of my point was that this is because skepticism as we know it now really didn’t exist yet. We didn’t yet have a cognitive framework within which to decide which pursuits are worth one’s time. Something like alchemy doesn’t pass the sniff test today not because we know more about chemistry, but because we have the rhetorical tools to evaluate the claims made by it. This grew from the philosophy of science, which took a long time to get here.
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by standing on the shoulders of Giants
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Of course! I never said otherwise.
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I didn’t mean to imply otherwise it is just something that Newton is credited with saying.
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I’d like to think the history of science is more than Newton studies.
Actually, it’s not generous at all. It just treats SCIENCE!!1! as the historically contingent thing that it is. (This is kind of a thing with us.) There is no “proper” skepticism in the abstract; there’s what you or I might regard as that in 2020, and it’s a category error to impose that on different eras. I mean, you can definitely do it—was Hooke or Boyle closer to some bleeding-edge standard of correctness? Anaximander or Anaximenes?—but it’s kind of a sterile exercise. It’s like tracing your family tree exclusively through the male line, son to father—you might be able to go back ten generations, but your great-to-the-eighth grandfather is still only 1/1024th of the picture, and not by any means necessarily the most important or interesting part.
For example, Newton believed—for totally self-consistent reasons, based on everything his culture and education had to offer him—that there was a single, ancient, unitary truth (prisca sapientia) that encompassed everything from astronomy to mathematics to optics to religious revelation to history, plus half a dozen other things. It wasn’t a widely shared view; many of his contemporaries were drawing (different) rigid lines around what constituted TRVTH. It’s just that without that particular perspective, Newton likely wouldn’t have had any reason to (for instance) reject the dominant mechanical hypothesis, which in turn forced him to accept the (spooky, inexplicable) “forces” that any of his contemporaries would have said sounded like voodoo nonsense, which in turn led him to mathematize his work on falling bodies, and so forth. Sure, people would have gotten to those things (or similar things) in different ways, and then we’d be talking about the wacky idiosyncratic path they took towards it.
The nub of this sermon is that dividing Newton’s work into “proper” and “wacky” only tells us what you believe, and nothing about what he did or why he did it. Which is not a slander on your beliefs—just like him, you have good reasons for having them based on your experiences in the world you live in and the general epistemological boundaries of the culture you’re a part of.
Vastly more! Thank goodness. But Keynes’ act really did have ripple effects on how historians of science did their work. The field was much smaller in the early and mid-20th century, and tended to focus on the usual Great Man suspects. Being able to show that Newton’s intellectual process was deeply influenced by “mystical,” religious, antiquarian, and other “unscientific” modes of thought was a bombshell. And once that was done (c. 1970s), it was off to the races. Bringing the history of science along on the “cultural turn” is the reason that it’s more than just Newton and Aristotle and a few others today. And that step would have taken a lot longer if Keynes hadn’t brought those papers together and made them accessible.
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IIRC the context was that Newt was deriding a very short contemporary. So “standing on the shoulders of giants” was an insult to the dwarvish.
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Possibly Robert Hooke:
But that’s both a rather recent interpretation, and somewhat disputed:
Newton said (or rather wrote it), but he didn’t come up with this expression.
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In a letter to Hooke, Newton is describing himself, possibly with false humility, as the one standing on the shoulders.
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