Summary
In the picture above [1] the inner profile of the thick-walled Iron-Age broch of Dun Torceill is the only elliptical example, almost every other broch having a circular inner court. Torceill’s essential data was reported by Euan MacKie in 1977 [2]: The inner chamber of the broch is an ellipse with axes nearly 23:25 (and not 14:15). The actual ratio directly generates a metrological difference, between the major and minor axis lengths, of 63/20 feet. When multiplied by the broch’s 40-foot major axis, this π-like yard creates a length of 126 feet which, multiplied again by π as 22/7, generates 396 feet. If each of these feet represented ten miles, this number is an accurate approximation to the mean radius of the Earth, were it a sphere.
The two ratios involved, 22/7 and 63/20, each an approximation to π, become 9.9 (99/100) when they are multiplied together, as an approximation to π squared. Figure 1 shows that these two ratios, if 22/7 differently used as its reciprocal 7/22, also generates the ratio between the mean and polar radii of the Earth, since 63/20 x 7/22 = 441/440. The ancient Meridian length could be calculated from 396 when multiplied by using the most accurate rational π noted by Fibonacci as 864/275. The 396 units, of 10 miles per foot, was a practical distance to have realized in the megalithic without arithmetic, to store the 3960 mile mean radius of the earth, since the mile of 5280 feet is 4/3 of 3960; that is, 396 x 4/3 equals 528, implying that this model was conceived of within a decimal framework but without the base-10 positional notation of arithmetic. We show that the methods of calculation used can only have seen numbers-as-lengths as being composed of factors of just the first five prime numbers {2 3 5 7 11} and that this limitation upon numbers created a metrology in which fractional units of measure could manipulate lengths to multiply and divide them through addition and subtraction of the powers of these primes.
Contents
- Summary
- Introduction.
- Main Thesis.
- Pre-arithmetic Calculation using Powers of {2 3 5 7 11}
- Combining Prime Number Composites.
- Appendix 1 Extract from Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain.
- Appendix 2: Preface: The Metrology of the Brochs.
- Metrological Bibliography.