The other talks at NAM, aside from the Michelangelo Code were the Lunar Month and Node Cycles in Stonehenge by Nicholas Kollerstrom and the Mediterranean Adventures of Francois Arago.

I thought the talk on Stonehenge was interesting. The idea here was that Stonehenge represented the earliest arithmetic in the British Isles. This was driven by a desire to understand lunar cycles and so you end up with twenty-nine and a half uprights in the sarsen circle. I’m really not convinced. It’s not that the Neolithic Britons couldn’t do arithmetic. On the contrary I think they had an interest in numbers, but I can’t see that Mesolithic Britons would have been any more primitive. Their use of numbers may have been different as their society would have had different needs, but I’m not convinced that their mathematics or astronomy would have been any less sophisticated than those of settled peoples, though that’s not certain. My own ideas on mathematics are highly speculative so I could well be wrong.

I have mixed opinions on Kollerstrom’s ideas. I think some may be accurate and some aren’t but I can’t see a way of being able to test between the two. Some of his ideas rely on More >