Herodotus in "The Persian Wars" Controversy Stecchini's work included many controversial elements, and he complained he was ignored by fellow scholars. His defence of Immanuel Velikovsky in the September 1963 issue of American Behavioral Scientist (republished in 1966 as The Velikovsky Affair) undoubtedly also contributed to this. Most scholars consider his unpublished work on metrology, based on his work on ancient numismatics, as numerology or pseudoscientific metrology. His method consists of starting with an assumption, namely that all ancient measures are by definition related. It is an old and intriguing idea, but one for which no proof has been found. Based on numerical analysis of data, he reaches his conclusion (in "A History of Measures"): 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. He does suggest a very intricate theoretical means by which this could have been calculated in practical terms, but presents no evidence from archeology or otherwise. 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. Bibliography Alfred de Grazia, Ralph E. Juergens, Stecchini L.C. (Eds.) (1978). The Velikovsky Affair - Scientism versus Science. 2ed., Metron Publications, Princeton, New Jersey. Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars. Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, 2012 References External links preserves some scattered material, his essay "The Deluge as Metaphor," an essay on the origin of money in Greece, on the relation between Greece and Anatolia in "Gyges and Homer", "A History of Measures", and in "The Key to Ancient Architecture," Stecchini's analytic measurements of the Parthenon, etc. THE INCONSTANT HEAVENS Historians of science Harvard University alumni 1913 births 1979 deaths 20th-century Italian historians Italian expatriates in Germany Italian emigrants to the United States William Paterson University faculty