User:Egil/Sandbox/Livio Catullo Stecchini

Livio Catullo Stecchini (1913-10-06 – September, 1979) was a historian of science, a teaching professor, a scholar of ancient weights and measures (the science of metrology), and of the history of cartography in antiquity. He attended Harvard University, where he was awarded his PhD, and taught at the University of Chicago.

Stecchini's work included many controversial elements, and he complained he was ignored by fellow scientists. His defence of Immanuel Velikovsky in the September, 1963 issue of American Behavioral Scientist magazine (that issue was republished in 1966 as The Velikovsky Affair) also contributed to this.

His work on metrology, based on his work on ancient numismatics, ends in conclusions which are rejected by most academics today, and which some label as pseudoscience. His method consists of starting with an assumption, namely that all ancient measures are by definition related. An old and intriguing idea, but one for which no proof has been found. Based on pure numerical analysis, he reaches his conclusion in "A History of Measures":


 * In spite of the efforts of the most learned classical scholars and Orientalists and of the best mathematical minds, such as Kepler, Riccioli, Mersenne, Newton, Boscovich, and Laplace, It was thought that the result had been for a good part negative. In truth, they had obtained perfectly correct evaluations from the empirical data, but could not discover the principle that links them.


 * I have solved the inner rationale of ancient and medieval units of length, and by implication, of all units of measure, by discovering two facts:


 * a) that there were four fundamental types of foot related as 15:16:17:18,
 * b) that each of these types existed in two varieties related as the cube root of 24/the cube root of 25.

No regard is made to the fact that no historical record exists of this relationship. He does suggest some very intricate means by which this could have been executed in practical terms with, again, no evidence from archeology.

Stecchini's analysis of the geometry and methods for constructing the Great Pyramid were interpreted for a popular audience in Peter Tompkins' Secrets of the Great Pyramid with Stecchini's "Notes of the Relation of Ancient Measures to the Great Pyramid," in an appendix to the book.