First in time

The Egyptians were the first culture to become interested in timekeeping, building giant obelisks in 3500BC to act as giant sundials.

Augustus

In 8BC the Roman senate gave ruling emperor August Caesar his own month (August, if that wasn’t obvious…) and added an extra day to match his great uncle Julius Caesar’s month (yep, July!) on 31 days.

Daylight

Throughout World War II citizens in the United States kept their clocks one hour ahead of standard time to allow for longer working hours during daylight.

Minuscule

The world’s smallest atomic clock, built by the National Institute for Standards and Technology, is the size of a grain of rice and accurate to one second in 3,000 years.

Samoa

In May 2011 Samoa decided to move its clocks forward by one day to allow easier trade with Australia and New Zealand, after spending 119 years almost a day behind.

1,500 BC

Egyptians refer to Mars as ‘Horus of the Hawk’, a god with the head of a hawk. They note its retrograde motion, when it moves backwards in its orbit relative to Earth

350 BC

Aristotle first proposes that Mars orbits at a further distance than the moon when he notes that the moon passes in front of Mars in his observations.

1609

Galileo Galilei uses a telescope to become the first person to directly observe Mars, but is later vilified by the Vatican for asserting that the planets orbit the Sun and not earth.

1666

Astronomer Giovanni Cassini calculates the length of a Martian day, notes the polar ice caps and even calculates its distance from Earth in his telescopic observations.

1840

Astronomers Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler study Mars through a 3.75-inch telescope and produce the first sketched Map of its surface.

While made famous by the ancient Egyptians, mummification is a process not just confined to their afterlife culture, as any corpse which has had its skin or organs preserved thanks to external chemicals, substances or extreme temperatures is classed as a mummy. Indeed, mummified corpses have been found all over the Earth, from Russia to the Americas, often preserved in desert or ice environments, with many of them showing evidence that the person had been sacrificed as a deity offering. The ancient Inca culture ritually sacrificed women and children to appease their god and many examples of this have been found at the peak of mountains and under the ground, two of the traditionally held entrances to the spirit world.

Nick Lerner: Nobody knows with any certainty how the Egyptians built the Great Pyramids. Many theories have been proposed, but none of them stood up to analysis. It was exactly this unresolved riddle that led several teams at Dassault Systèmes, the world leader in real-time 3D technology, to provide backing for an architect and author of a revolutionary theory about the Great Pyramid, Jean-Pierre Houdin.

History has often shown us that scientific theories stem initially from intuition. Jean-Pierre Houdin’s hunch changed the course of his life. For the last eight years, he has devoted himself to developing the first scientific theory capable of fully explaining the construction of the Pyramid of Khufu. Won over by Jean-Pierre Houdin’s passion and stimulated by the challenge, Dassault Systèmes used advanced scientific digital 3D tools to examine every detail of his theory.
Jean-Pierre, with the support of Dassault Systèmes’ solutions and teams, rebuilt the pyramid virtually using CATIA 3D software and simulated and examined its construction with SIMULIA and DELMIA software. Thus the theory was refined and confirmed, entirely in a virtual environment.

From beginning to end, this outstanding project demonstrates the power of Digital 3D technology and is a tribute to Jean-Pierre and Dassault Systèmes’ combined passion to explain one of the most impressive and mysterious of mankind’s achievement.

Images of the Great Pyramid in How It Works, issue 2, were created using advanced digital 3D from Dassault Systèmes. http://3ds.com/ukisa

See Dassault Systèmes dedicated 3D Great Pyramid web site at: http://www.3ds.com/introduction/