Bogus Science: Or, Some People Really Believe These Things (Facts Figures & Fun) by Grant John

Author:Grant, John [Grant, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781904332879
Publisher: Facts, Figures & Fun
Published: 2012-09-16T22:00:00+00:00

It seems Pravda is upholding the grand tradition of scientific integrity it maintained throughout the Lysenko years. What next? Batboy?

Of all the writers who’ve pronounced on the Pyramids, perhaps none has spouted so much or such egregious nonsense as Erich von Däniken. Intent on demonstrating that the Pyramids must have been built using technology borrowed from visiting extraterrestrials, von Däniken seems to have drawn out of thin air such assertions as that the ancient Egyptians didn’t have rope and that wood was rare because trees were scarce along the Nile. In reality, the Pyramid builders had plentiful rope – they often left the stuff lying around for archaeologists to find – and they used wood habitually in engineering and otherwise, trading with neighbouring countries to make up any shortfalls in domestic production.

Another of von Däniken’s contentions is that the Egyptians mummified their dead so the remains could be reanimated when the extraterrestrials returned. A major hiccup for this hypothesis is that part of the process of mummification involves extracting the brain. This is not conducive to a successful resurrection. It might be countered that the Egyptians didn’t realize the damage they were doing, because they believed the heart was the home of the soul and the brain of lesser significance. But wouldn’t the highly sophisticated extraterrestrials have corrected their protégés’ little anatomical misunderstanding?*

A sad irony is that, quite often, bodies buried by the Egyptians in the sand have been preserved better than those subjected to mummification. The dry sand effectively desiccated the corpses. It’s not quite that returning extraterrestrials would merely have had to add boiling water and stir, but . . .

Another set of “mysteries” fulminated upon by von Däniken and his ilk concerns the ability of the Egyptians, using only the technology they had, to construct such mighty edifices to the astonishing levels of exactitude evident: the north–south, east–west alignments of the faces of the pyramids are precise to within a matter of a very few minutes of arc; the greatest difference between the lengths of the different sides of the Great Pyramid is a mere 20cm; the individual blocks may not always fit together quite so tightly that you’d be unable to put a piece of paper into the crack but the precision is nevertheless highly impressive. And how would the ancient Egyptians have been able to carve those stone blocks without the use of steel chisels?

Although in some cases we don’t know exactly how the Egyptians performed specific tasks involved in the construction, that knowledge isn’t needed in order to rebut the von Däniken-style arguments that only through reliance on the expertise of visiting extraterrestrials or Atlantean survivors could the Egyptians have coped. The fallacy in such propositions is an endemic and perhaps wilful failure to recognize that, while the Egyptians were more ignorant than we are and lacked much we take for granted, they were every bit as smart as we are. If we can work out how to build pyramids using solely the technology

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