PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT IS NOW ZOOM-ONLY
Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819–1900), the Second Astronomer Royal for Scotland and Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, enjoyed a long and productive career, making important contributions to astronomy and other fields. His most enduring contribution to astronomy was demonstrating the superiority of high-altitude, mountain-top sites for making astronomical observations. However, he is most often remembered for his eccentric ideas about the Great Pyramid of Giza. In the early 1860s he became convinced that the dimensions of the Great Pyramid demonstrated that it had been built using a unit of measurement almost equal to the British inch, that it encoded the dimensions of the earth and the solar system, and that consequently its construction was divinely inspired. In order to verify these ideas he travelled to Egypt and carried out a thorough survey of the Pyramid, more accurate than any previous ones, and also photographed the interior, the first successful application of flash photography in the field. Piazzi Smyth’s ideas attracted an enthusiastic group of followers who extended them, maintaining that the interior features of the pyramid encoded predictions of events subsequent to its construction, again by divine inspiration. In his own survey of 1880-82 Flinders Petrie showed that Smyth’s pyramid-inch was erroneous and based on a misunderstanding of the dimensions of the Pyramid. Nonetheless Piazzi Smyth’s ideas continued to attract a committed following for many years. This talk will describe his work on the Great Pyramid and discuss its reception and criticism during the nineteenth century and continuing afterlife through the twentieth century and to the present.
Following retirement Clive Davenhall is now a visitor at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, where he was previously a Project Manager and Software Developer in the Wide Field Astronomy Unit, working on star catalogues and astronomical databases. He has a long-standing interest in the history of astronomy and has written and presented talks on this subject. Particular interests include the history of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh and the reception and influence of astronomy on wider society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has degrees from the universities of London and St Andrews, is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Founder Member of the Society for the History of Astronomy and recently became a member of Egyptology Scotland.
Entry: £5 members, £7 non-members