Stonehenge Solved: Moving Big Rocks | Hacker News Reader

Stonehenge Solved: Moving Big Rocks

j-walkblog.com

48 pointsgibsonf116 comments

I find this amazing... I've been interested in Stonehenge for as far back as I can remember but I'm no expert on the subject- I'm just in awe of it.

What I find interesting about this video is the claim that he "is not a scientist" - I beg to differ. I do not know his formal education background, but that should not diminish his ability to apply the scientific method which he has clearly shown. After all, he is an expert in the field of moving large objects, if there is such a field.

From wiki: "A scientist, in the broadest sense, refers to any person that engages in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge or an individual that engages in such practices and traditions that are linked to schools of thought or philosophy."

From the video, it's quite apparent that he applies a systematic activity to achieve his goal, that being knowledge in our case, and it's linked to a school of thought - construction, and not to mention mathematics and physics (it's obvious there's math involved here whether he knows it or not) for the application of the scientific method.

Thus, without formal education, I feel his demonstrations clearly prove he a scientist in the broadest sense- I'd welcome opinions for or to the contrary if you're interested.

Wally is a scientist, and has proven that exercising your brain can help you move rocks far heavier than exercising your muscles. Not that you don't need some baseline muscles, but nothing beyond what a healthy human being has.

Dude is drawing something like free body diagrams here -

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/newpage2

- so he's doing alright sans formal education.

his demonstrations clearly prove he a scientist in the broadest sense

Absolutely. And it's possible that the news just called him a "non-scientist" to play up the "random Michigan guy in his backyard" angle.

Or, he may be a person who takes pride in the non-scientist label. It's a class thing. Not every practitioner of the Useful Arts thinks that it's a particularly great honor to be deemed a scientist. Some of them would rather take the opportunity to point out that construction workers, machinists, and technicians are pretty smart and have been doing this sort of thing, quietly but relentlessly, since the time of Stonehenge.

This guy reminds me of one of my favorite engineers, Tim Hunkin:

http://www.timhunkin.com/90_useful_arts.htm

Technically, he is applying the science, he doesn't advance it. So he's not a scientist, he is one heck of an engineer.

Here's the main website from the guy behind it:

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/

If you click through you all the pages you get some decent details on what's going on, despite the ancient technology theme extending to the design of the website :)

Ha. Makes you wonder if in 2000 years some guy will be digging up html table layouts and exposing the virtues of "the forgotten technology."

The 2000-year old language?

A Victorian Arc!

The bit at the start, with him rolling square blocks reminded me of this video of a bike with square wheels:

http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DLgbWu8zJubo

More important than moving the stones were the accuracy of their placement: http://www.solvingstonehenge.com

The little rocks work if you're moving nicely symmetrical boulders across a hard, flat surface, but I can't see them working on a grassy hill quite as well...

That's the cool thing about science and technology, it only needs one person to see that something can be done to show everyone else.

Pretty cool, but I would think setting up the vertical stone is the easy part. How do you get the 3rd stone on top?

Maybe raising a horizontal stone just the way he did raise the one on the video, by inserting wood underneath, a little at a time. Then, having raised it 3 meters high (Yeah I know this is a lot) he could use his technique to roll it on the side to get on top of the two others. Just a guess.

He does it in seconds.

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/newpage3

Scroll down to the "Egyptian Hoist" video.

Bigger blocks just need longer ramps.

Well that is very impressive, and now I am puzzled - if Wall Street had such people, would be economy be better or worse?

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