Robot To Probe Pyramid's Mystery

"... The existing access shafts provide sufficient ventilation for small numbers of people to walk around the chambers. I know, 'cos I'm still alive."

Please tell us more about your trip inside the pyramid.

I've never met anyone who's been inside, and I've always wanted to go.

First, do not even think about going inside the pyramid if you're claustrophobic.

Secondly, it's not so uncomfortable, thanks to electric lighting, wooden planks, rope lines and so on. But that - and the fact you're one of a couple of hundred or so visitors being processed like an assembly line - rather makes it feel like Disneyland.

Negotiating the passages is a little tedious, because of their steep slope and small size - you are bent over quite a bit. But standing in those chambers is really, really worth the hassle. There you are, in the middle of six million tons of stone, imagining what it would be like to lie there for ever.

Not quite as numinous as, say, Glastonbury Tor or Hagia Sophia. But please do it if you can.

On a personal note - it reinforced my wish to be cremated.

Thank you for pointing out the amazing Upuaut site!

Speaking of shafts, that German robotics engineer who did the work in 1992/93 and discovered the slab (door?) with the bronze handles... really got the shaft by the Egyptian authorities. They froze him out just so they could hog all the credit for themselves.

That's the problem with engineers... hardworking, honest and terminally naive.

I especially enjoyed reading through his conference paper reproduced on the site, where he explains straightforwardly, drawing on his personal training and experience as a builder, how the architect of the Cheops pyramid planned the project (i.e. based on grids and whole-number ratios just as we do today).

Too bad for all the mystical believers in esoteric lore: the pyramid was not an astronomic observatory, it does not contain any "amazingly accurate representation of the number Pi", it was not built by space aliens, nor was it a power plant, and the Egyptian builders possessed no scientific or technological knowledge that has us stumped today.

In fact, as Gantenbrink shows, the Egyptian architect did a great job with his limited mathematical and geometrical repertoire, but extremely limited it was (e.g., no awareness of Pythagoras' theorem).

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