Robert Forrest, in Fortean Times 18, had the idea of checking up on Stuart Greenwood’s “Giza–Stonehenge” connexion. Taking the Earth to be a sphere, and the slope of the Great Pyramid as 51° 51′, Forrest, following Greenwood, draws a great circle through the Pyramid at an angle 51° 51′ N. of West. His own contribution to this research, or whatever, is to find where in England this great circle hits latitude 51° 51′ N. Answer: “The Oxfordshire village of Merton with its most prominent architectural feature – a sewage works!”
What cosmic significance is there here, we wonder? I thought at first that Bob might have forgotten the computer programmer’s age-old wisdom: sewage in, sewage out. For instance, what about his rather undigested assumption that the Earth is spherical? Once Plato has defined the sphere as the ideal or perfect solid, Forteans know that there can be nothing in intermediateness that is actually that shape. The Earth is an oblate spheroid – approximately! – so what difference does that make?
Technical details now … the eccentricity e is about 0.08, which looks an awful lot, but actually it’s e2 that matters. Students of numerical coincidence should note that e2/(1 − e2), a quantity that turns up quite naturally in the calculations, has a natural log of −4.9997. In round figures the longitude difference is 30° … e2 is about 1/150 … so the adjustment is of the order of 0.2° or 12′. Work it out and there’s a factor ½ and a cosine chopping it down to about 3½′, or 4 km in these latitudes. Not as much as one might expect.
I used the position of the Pyramid quoted by Saunders: 31° 08′ E, 22° 58¾′ N; slope of 51° 52.1′ from data of Petrie and Edwards. Now the Forrest point turns out to be 1° 00.88′ W, 51° 52.1′ N, or grid ref. SP 678 194. Nowhere near Merton Sewage Works, Bob, so maybe the cosmic joke is on you!
I’m ashamed to say that I can’t see any significance whatever in this new point – nor does the geodesic curve appear to go through any sites of mystic significance. It does go through London, though, skirting the SW edge of Hampstead Heath. The best I can do is to point out that Boadicea is/isn’t buried in the tumulus there, just as King Khufu is/isn’t buried in the Great Pyramid. Would anyone like to take it from there?