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Are they aligned because they are famous, or are they famous because they are aligned? Or are they aligned because if I pick 7 famous monuments aligned I can draw a line, look over my shoulder and say "ho look, if we draw a line it match!" From wikipedia, the list of St Michael churches: St. Michael's Church (disambiguation) Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel (es), San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato Mexico World Heritag…
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But only 7 of those are Cathedrals, and only those are aligned.
I think none of them are cathedrals. There's a couple islands, a mount, a shrine, a monastery, a temple...
It's far more interesting to me that Perkin Warbeck occupied it!
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But only 7 of those are Cathedrals, and only those are aligned.
I think none of them are cathedrals. There's a couple islands, a mount, a shrine, a monastery, a temple...
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I asked GPT-4. It did the following calculation (summarized): Let's consider Europe as roughly a 10 million square km area. The probability of a single point falling within a 50 km wide band (assuming the band runs the full length of Europe) is about 0.01581 (1.581%). The probability of seven points aligning within a 50 km wide band across Europe is approximately: 10^-14
Doesn't the first point have a probability of 1? It's the subsequent ones that become less and less likely.
When I was a kid (11/12 or so) I was fascinated by finding alignments between ancient things in the landscape (of which there are many here in Scotland!) - eventually I came to the realisation that given the scale of the maps I was looking at (1:25,000) that you can find loads of meaningless alignments if you look hard enough...
When I was a kid (11/12 or so) I was fascinated by finding alignments between ancient things in the landscape (of which there are many here in Scotland!) - eventually I came to the realisation that given the scale of the maps I was looking at (1:25,000) that you can find loads of meaningless alignments if you look hard enough...
When I was a kid (11/12 or so) I was fascinated by finding alignments between ancient things in the landscape (of which there are many here in Scotland!) - eventually I came to the realisation that given the scale of the maps I was looking at (1:25,000) that you can find loads of meaningless alignments if you look hard enough...
5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.
6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
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Exactly. I think I'm more annoyed at this point with the myth of the ignorant Medievals than I am with the myth of the flat earth itself. Even knowing the earth is round, if I were going to put things in a "straight line" geographically, I'd do it with the reference most people would actually use and see: a 2D map.
I'd say the bigger question is whether or not the projection used at the time of design was one that would show the straight line. The Mercator projection was first invented in 1569 [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
These places are old. Skellig Michael goes back past 823AD, Mont-Saint-Michel is about the same sort of age, and the Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo goes back to 490AD(ish). San Michele Arcangelo is on top of a pre-Christian pagan temple. Stella Maris is on an Old Testament Biblical site. None of them is less than a thousand years old.
The bar for finding a map that happens to align, and then explaining how it was made, is not a low one.
There is a projection that might fit, though: Plate Carrée is definitely old enough, and a brief visual sanity check doesn't make it look totally off.