I was watching a video a little earlier that explores some of the characteristics of science vs characteristics of pseudoscience. That’s kind of a tender spot for me, because it’s quite often that work I cite gets that stereotypical label lobbed at it, including Thom’s and Munck’s. I can say I think my own work technically cleared the criteria for not being pseudoscience with generally good marks, although there’s one characteristic of pseudoscience that’s tricky, concerning specialized or evasive jargon, where it might be easier for the casual observer to get the wrong idea.
It must seem from reading some of these posts that I have an endless collection of strangely (and often unimaginatively) named mathematical constants and a bottomless hat full of metrological units with which to disorient my audience and achieve my conjuring tricks, but that isn’t really how it works at all, and hopefully an overview like this can help clarify that.
Here are most of the numbers that currently have nicknames, and I’ve already padded out the list with several key astronomical values that don’t necessarily belong filed there. The main metrological units I work with are also represented even in this limited table, which I like to think is far less specialized knowledge than exists in many branches of science. It is absolutely astonishing what can be accomplished even with the humble collection of numbers seen here.
I think that’s most of them, I can’t be missing too many?
Anyway, I thought something like this might be in order for readers’ reference since I am sometimes lapsing into referring to these numbers by their “nicknames” for convenience rather than to their numerical values.
These would also make an interesting starting palette of numbers for anyone wanting to begin experimenting with the remarkable relationships between many of these numbers, but for the sake of that I should have included the proposed Sacred Cubit of 2.091411007 ft among the metrological units.
Observant readers may catch a glimpse of why I work with such a restricted spectrum of Royal Cubits – I sanction 1.720116607 ft as a value for the Royal Cubit because I’m forced to by geometry because I try to honor the geometric relationships between units (as much as humanly possible) that involve squares or rectangles, and this sort of geometry gives a Remen of 1.216733603 a Royal Cubit of about 1.216733603 x sqrt 2 = 1.720721163 ft, while the standard Royal Cubit of 1.7188733385 is more realistically related by diagonals to the short Remen.
Mathematics, geometry, accuracy, and the observance of square/rectangular relationships between units demand this, yet because 1.720116607 is a value in Megalithic Feet, that’s what it registers as rightfully being is Megalithic Feet and NOT a Royal Cubit. In the same way, most if not all of the potential alternate values for the Royal Cubit may end up claimed by other metrological units as their own, which will mean they are something other than Royal Cubits. We’ve learned some of that along the way although there is still more to explore.
Anyway, an important point here is that not just me trying to keep the number of Royal Cubits down to a minimum, it’s the very system itself, and hopefully the another point is that this is probably really nowhere as difficult as its been trying to look.
Looking back on years of experience, the most difficult thing has often been just trying to take it seriously, but a great number of shaky observations have been lavishly explained in the fullness of time. The right number often arrives well before any definitive understanding of why it is the right number – we are even now learning more of the secrets of the Aztec Sun Stone and why it literally must be an astronomical dictionary and calculator.
The work I’m attempting at the moment is particularly exciting even though its time consuming and often unrewarding. It means fewer site studies and fewer blog posts for the moment, but it’s something any of us might dream of to be able to check the mathematics of the celestial objects that even orthodox archaeologists or astronomers can agree are being referenced by the architecture or artifacts, against the mathematical and metrological values in the objects themselves.
As far back as my collaborations with Michael Morton we though both should show us the same thing, but this is still so much a matter of pulling ones self up by their own bootstraps sometimes that we still may not have the best tools to explore this. Recent work has nonetheless been tremendously encouraging in this respect.
Regarding clearing the air about pseudoscience, there’s already a lot of material out there attempting the subject of pseudoscience that merits correction, starting with sources that have tried to stick this label to Thom. I have a meager paper on Academia.edu that even such as it is, I hope does an adequate job demonstrating how several sources often credited with successfully dismissing Thom and his Megalithic Yard actually tendered data that supported his arguments.
Perhaps one of the worst perils waiting for all us to fall into when attempting to sort science from pseudoscience, is that fact that in a number of cases, scientific protocols may be inadequate or lacking altogether to address what the alleged pseudoscience is contenting.
The worst case scenario would be that the scientific community may have no scientific protocols whatsoever for evaluation of certain alternative theories. Nobody in science is likely to draw up protocols for what stone-age rocket scientists should look like if they already don’t believe in them, correct? Why would anyone draw up protocols for evaluating something they don’t even believe in?
While I think persons on either side of the fence, orthodox or alt, should be entitled to set up a model and see what it takes to knock it down, that business of having made up your mind in advance about a matter may well be one of the most important distinctions of what makes up a pseudoscience. Go figure.
For now, someone probably still has some explaining to do as to why the Coyolxauhqui Stone seems to get itself described as having such a lunar character to it, unless some attributes of Venus in the mix are perhaps being overlooked.
–Luke Piwalker
Luke Piwalker 