The Puzzle of the Pyramids

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It's yet another episode of The Curious Case of Rutherford and Faraee.

This week's one,

quite a few people asked me this question recently, you know.

And I think it might be because there was a certain show that

on Netflix.

Yes, this is a question about ancient civilizations.

It's bit slightly outside of our normal comfort zones, but it is evidence-based.

It is.

It certainly is.

Yes, we did have a number of questions about the pyramids and how they were built.

Including from your mate, Murray Russell.

Look, it's an important subject.

It is.

Here we go.

To Egypt for today's Curious Case and the Mystery of the Pyramids.

Yes, Russell, aged 41, wrote two Curious Cases at BBC.co.uk.

He wants to know how did ancient Egyptians line the pyramids up to face exactly north?

I read this question and thought,

pyramids are square.

How are they facing north?

I mean, aren't they facing all directions?

I think it's like the triangle, the corner, you know.

Anyway, let's all reveal that later.

Dave Greasley also wrote to us wanting to know more after watching a YouTube, and I'm doing air quotes here, documentary, which he also puts in inverted comments, because he felt that some of the claims were a little bit too bold and wants us to help fact-check some ideas about measurements and precision used by ancient Egyptian builders.

Well this is great because we can we can finally debunk some of the more YouTube-y type ideas, notably the enduring question that another listener, Rich, also asked us, which is, was it aliens?

Rich, it's never aliens.

It's never aliens.

But I tell you what, I am super excited about this because this is a real passion of mine, actually.

Is it?

Yeah, I've written several books about pyramidology and ancient Egypt.

No, you haven't?

Here, have a look at these.

Okay, so we've got The Great Pyramid, a scientific revelation by Dr.

Adam Rutherford.

Right.

And there's a two-volume classic, Pyramidology, also by Dr.

Adam Rutherford.

Four volumes, actually.

Yep.

Okay, well, hang on, though.

The glory of Christ as revealed by the Great Pyramid.

This one was published in 1939.

Yeah, okay, it's not me.

Yeah.

It's not me at all.

My namesake, Dr.

Adam Rutherford, was a pyramidologist in the 20th century.

And I only found this out when I was was filming at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

I turned up, and the curator there was a super old guy, I think he was in his 90s.

And when I arrived, he said, You're Dr.

Adam Rutherford.

I went, Yeah, I am.

He went,

Your work on pyramidology is very well regarded in the field.

I went, Is it?

And he said, You're much younger than I thought you'd be.

And I looked this guy up, and well, yeah, he did a lot of his work in the 1930s and died in the 80s and was a create a biblical creationist.

Not how I describe you.

It's not me at all in terms of having those publications do wonders for your new job as an academic.

Anyway, Dr.

Rather Rutherford, you are many things, but not an expert on pyramids.

This is correct.

And so, what I thought we'd do, we'd get some real Egyptologists in to tell us that it's not aliens.

We've got Dr.

Chris Norton, an Egyptologist, broadcaster, and author of Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt.

I'm Professor Sarah Parkak, an Egyptologist from the University of Alabama.

Let's start with the basics.

Sarah, first, were the pyramids built by aliens?

They were built by Egyptians who were not aliens.

Chris, do you concur?

I do.

Okay, well, that's the end of that case.

Short program this.

You know what, though, Chris?

We're going to focus on the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Of course, other pyramids are available, but I mean, these are sort of the most famous.

Give us some basics.

How many are there?

How big are they?

What can you tell us about them?

At Giza, there are three main pyramids.

These were built as the tombs of three pharaohs.

There are subsidiary pyramids attached to all three of them.

Some of them built for the burial of female members of the royal family.

The three main ones are the really famous ones, and the biggest of those, which is the oldest of the three, belonging to a pharaoh called Khufu, is known as the Great Pyramid.

And that is the most famous, the largest, the biggest, the most sophisticated.

That's really the one.

How big is it, though?

I mean, I've never had the luxury of going to see them.

I mean, do they sort of of dwarf everything in the landscape?

They really do, yes.

So the Great Pyramid is just short of 150 meters in height,

around about 230 meters at the base.

It's more or less a perfect square.

They're built very deliberately on an area of naturally high ground.

It helps of course that they're at the desert edge, at the edge of the city.

city so up until very recently they were more or less on their own in the desert but they they tend to appear these days, if you're approaching from the city, you're approaching probably via a very busy motorway with high-rise buildings lining the sides, but with gaps in between.

You tend to get these sort of momentary glimpses.

And I've been with lots of people who are in Egypt for the first time, seeing these things for the first time.

And there's always a kind of, oh, oh my God.

And then they disappear again, but they are enormous.

And Sarah, it's not just about size.

There are lots of other impressive aspects to them.

What we see is

what has survived over several thousand years, but the precision of the building is something that people have been impressed with.

So, when you get close to the pyramids, right, you're staring, you're in awe at the size, and you get closer and closer and closer.

And then you have what our colleague calls the hidden hand of man.

You see the chisel marks of the thousands of people who worked on building the pyramids.

So, they were able to put together millions of blocks that were the same size with a very high degree of accuracy.

And we can get into measurements, how they were oriented

to true north.

But actually, the ancient Egyptians were brilliant engineers and architects.

And you can

sort of see over time, too, when you look back at the pyramids that came before the Great Pyramids, how they changed.

They were incredibly innovative.

You mentioned something there that actually relates directly to the question that Russa asked us about the direction that these pyramids point in.

Can you just help Adam understand how a square can possibly face north?

Surely a square faces every direction with equal measure.

The pyramids were the Agea were oriented quite beautifully north-south.

And this is a theory that was put forth and published in Nature about 20 years ago by our colleague, Dr.

Kate Spence.

And she proved, I think, rather conclusively that around 2500 or so BC, ancient Egyptians would have aligned the pyramids with two stars, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, aka the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.

They would have formed an alignment that existed during that time.

And you can actually track the drift of pyramid orientation later on as the stars shift.

So the ancient Egyptians measured true north using those two stars during that time.

Let me just make sure I understand this then.

So are we talking about the corners of the pyramids?

One points to one star, and the opposite, the diagonally opposite corner points to another star.

Is it that way around, or is it the straight lines?

It's a straight line.

So, you've got the straight lines of one side of the pyramid is aligned to a star, and as those stars drift over the centuries and millennia, you can see how

the different pyramids that were built change slightly in angle.

Yeah, I mean, so what's amazing is that these pyramids were aligned with an accuracy of 0.05 degrees.

I mean, it's extraordinary.

And the wobble in the Earth's axis of rotation, so the precession, you know, that means that as the stars change or the position of the stars changed, so did the alignment of other pyramids.

Chris, I seem to remember reading that pyramids that you find over in South America have this similar feature of north and south.

And that may be one of the reasons why it is aliens.

You can't see on radio

both mine and Chris's eyebrows raised

as I said that.

That this is conclusive proof because these are two civilizations that didn't communicate with one another.

So why would they possibly have had the same idea?

Well, yes, you can see how people would make those associations and conclude that the only explanation for that is that

they had architects and designers and builders in common.

Actually, though, what the Egyptians are doing, I think, in observing the night sky, developing processes for observing the movement of the stars and their position in the sky very accurately over a period of time, and then transposing what they see onto the ground in order to align pyramids,

is perhaps something that's fundamentally human.

Pyramids are all bound up in beliefs that the Egyptians had about what happens to you in death and where you go.

They're bound up at this particular point in Egyptian history in the idea of the king making a journey to the stars, which were envisioned as a kind of place where the gods dwelt.

And that is something which seems to recur in ancient societies around the world.

I think it's actually just that there is something fundamentally human about looking to the heavens, about envisioning the passage to the next life, and to dwell with the gods as being a journey that you make towards the sky.

The Egyptians wanted to reach up to the sky with their monuments, and it wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility to think that other people in other places around the world just had similar ideas.

Sarah?

You know, to follow up what Chris just said,

when you think about giving a toddler, right, square blocks, right?

Every kid around the world gets blocks at some point or plays with rocks.

What do they do?

They stack them, right?

So people overthink this pyramid shape when, in fact, if you give kids blocks in China or Peru or Egypt or England, wherever you have them, you know, they just make this fundamental shape.

So

it's just a basic shape that we make.

So if a toddler can do it, so can cultures around the world.

It doesn't mean that they're related to one another.

Next, I want to ask the question,

why?

Well, why?

What was the purpose of these pyramids?

We're talking about Giza specifically, but why build a pyramid?

Were they all tombs?

Were they they all just in praise of the pharaohs?

Yes, they do seem to have been tombs.

And by the time the Great Pyramid is constructed, the Egyptians had for several centuries been making a big deal of the burials of high-ranking individuals.

The person at the top of society, of course, is the king.

There are bodies inside the pyramids, are there?

Well, one of the reasons why sometimes people like to suggest that actually, no, they weren't tombs.

They were something else, something, you know, very mysterious, something that the Egyptologists and archaeologists haven't realised.

Like a portal to an alien dimension.

Like something like that, exactly.

That's one of the best ideas we've had.

It's because actually we haven't found very much by way of human remains

inside pyramids.

But there's not nothing.

And of course, tombs frequently, far more often than not, were robbed in ancient times.

Most probably where we have the evidence for it, not very long after the burials were made.

People were buried with lots of wealthy, nice little rich

bits and pieces, which were great for robbing.

And much as the sort of conventional line is that the Egyptians are terribly pious and terribly religious, it seems that there was enough people in society who weren't religious and pious enough not to want to rob the blingy stuff out of tombs.

So that really explains why we don't have bodies inside, but even though the evidence is fairly meagre,

we do have lots of other things, sarcophagi, other kinds of objects, which from elsewhere in Egyptian archaeology we know very clearly are for the burial of individuals, if not to receive the body itself, then mummified human organs or other things which are associated with well-established funerary rituals.

So altogether it's pretty clear that the best explanation for what these things are in all cases is tombs.

Do we know the individuals that they were made for?

Yes, more or less we do.

So, you know, again, I think for the conspiracy theorists, what they'd really like to see is an enormous sign saying this was constructed as the tomb of this Pharaoh.

We don't tend to have very, very clear inscriptions like that, but we've got enough.

So, in the case of the Great Pyramid, we have numerous graffiti of the men who worked in the construction of the Great Pyramid who belonged to groups of workmen whose, and those groups had names, and those names were things like the really great gang gang of workmen working on the building of the pyramid of Kufu.

Yeah, need to work on the names though.

Well, it's not a good gang name.

In the English translation, it's terrible, but the Egyptian's beautiful.

Okay, Chris, you're painting quite the picture here of

the Egyptian person of the day, graffitiing, robbing graves.

Sarah, what would these pyramids have actually meant to the people who were living at the time that they were built?

For the ancient Egyptians in the old kingdom,

the king was a living god on earth, and these pyramids were representative of the king's ultimate power and his promise to the people of Egypt.

Ultimately, his job was to be the guarantor of this concept called Ma'at.

And Ma'at was the ancient Egyptian goddess of justice and of balance.

And every year, if the Nile didn't flood in this sort of goldilock zone, not too much, not too little,

Egypt could, the people of Egypt could starve or their crops could be ruined.

And the Pharaoh promised essentially the ancient Egyptian people that he would be the one that would ensure that the floods would come every year and ensure prosperity for their people.

And today, even though they're amazing to look at, you have to think about what they would have looked like shortly after they were constructed.

They would have been encased in very fine limestone from Torah, fine, fine white limestone and this golden pyramidian on top.

So when the sun rose or the sun set,

it would have been, I think, quite magical and reinforcing this idea that the king was a god.

Chris, could we build a pyramid on that scale now if we wanted to?

No, I don't think we could.

I mean, they're all, we tend to focus on the construction and the precision architecture and this kind of thing and how, you know, how did they move those great big blocks?

And people get hung up on the idea that the Egyptians can't possibly have had the right tools.

And actually, one of the most important aspects of the construction of a pyramid is the vast maneuvering of huge quantities of resource.

That's natural resources, obviously, and we tend to focus on these enormous stone blocks, and how on earth could anybody have moved them?

Also, huge numbers of people.

And all of that requires, it's very sort of boring to think about it, really, but all of that requires a very sophisticated system of administration.

And at the kind of heart of that is a sophisticated and high-functioning system of writing.

And actually, you know, if pyramids are kind of emblematic of the achievement of the Egyptians of a relatively early period in the history of the old kingdom,

in some ways it's that administration and the system of writing that enables it.

But I think Sarah's absolutely right also to point to the fact that for the Egyptians, Pharaoh is a god.

And I quite often find myself having conversations with people who are wondering how on earth people could have been persuaded to buy into this massive project.

You know, why would you do this?

Because it was a state project.

It wasn't, you know, it wasn't as though, you know, a few people over here were working on this.

A huge number of people were working on this.

It was the great national project.

But if you really believe that this is the tomb or this is the monument to a god, a god on earth, then that's all the motivation you need.

And that's very, very difficult for us to get our heads into, I think, that, you know, that idea that you believe that this is what you have to do and you're quite happy about that.

very that's very difficult for us to come to terms with we've naturally started talking about some of the questions that that are that people have asked us about how we've done the why now we're on to the how the pyramids were actually built sarah i want to ask you the question that chris just alluded to which is well okay like you say people fixate on the how we lifted those massive blocks what is the answer to that question

So it is something that I think is more difficult to get our heads around today, given incompetent government bureaucracy, but it is

boringly really, really good administration.

And I've seen groups of sort of seven to 10 men move blocks that are several tons.

So if you imagine that

in ancient Egypt, you have these multi-ton blocks and they're moved along a ground, along a ramp with wet ground and ropes, and they're moved in unison,

then it's not difficult at all to imagine how these massive blocks could have been moved into place it's just force and and and time and we actually have images from a period of time a little bit later in the middle kingdom showing hundreds of men moving an absolutely massive um seated statue so that's really that's how the pyramids were built just just large numbers of men moving blocks over wet sand was it just that they exploited the use of slaves so this is one of the common misconceptions and they absolutely were not slaves at all.

You have a professional workforce.

So the trained masons, the scribes, the architects, the people who are really organizing everything.

It wasn't slaves, it was Corvée labor.

It was people who came to be part of this extraordinary group, right?

They were inspired by the fact that the king was a god.

They would have had access to all this wonderful food.

It would have been a party.

We have to think about the daily lives of the people who built pyramids and what could have convinced people to stay and do what was really, really hard work and the bureaucracy in place to allow that to happen.

You know, there was massive calorie consumption.

If you're moving blocks every day, it would be like going to the gym for four or five hours a day or more.

And so they would have consumed large amounts of beef.

They would have had to have had lots of carbohydrates, so lots of bread and beer.

And the thing that I always-

Yeah, also, so to Chris's point of like, what convinced people, okay, the king is a god, but also

yeah, beer and all the burgers you can eat

and lots of beer.

And I sort of, I always wonder, because I always think, what, what would it have really been like at Giza?

Like imagine the life of the people who live there.

And if it's not going to be fun, and what's the point?

Actually, we have an inscription in the pyramid of Menkara.

menkara and so the the ancient egyptians when they were building the pyramids would have been organized into distinct workforces and one of the groups called themselves and i'm not making this up the drunkards of menkara

i mean these are not builders that you want doing your your kitchen so so so you you imagine i mean people are going to be competing each other sort of like extra ration of beer who who who can move 20 blocks today not just 15.

um so they would have needed to motivate the people so yeah so there's this huge administrative capacity that we just see for the first time that allows them to construct these things.

Just give us a sense of the time scale for, for example,

the pyramid at Giza.

I mean, did they have like a working schedule?

Did they have a payment schedule?

I imagine that there was some sort of Gantt chart involved.

A few years ago, a papyrus was discovered on the Red Sea, which is essentially a kind of like a diary, a journal of a guy called Mera who was involved in the construction of the Great Pyramid.

And it makes

reference to stone blocks being transported from Tura up onto the Giza Plateau for construction in the pyramid.

It's kind of been a revelation in Egyptology because we just don't have these records.

We've had to infer that they must have been doing this kind of thing.

You know, they must have had these great records.

They must have had a track of numbers of people and who they were, you know, how they were organized, you know, whose shift it was on that particular day, which bit of the pyramid they were going to be working on, etc.

etc.

But we didn't until a few years ago with this discovery in the Waddy El Jaf on the Red Sea, Papyrus of Mera, we didn't have any evidence of that.

But that's why this discovery is so massive.

It's clearly just one tiny fragment of what then what must have been an enormous and complicated bureaucracy.

But to go back to a question you asked before, you know, how long did it take?

We can't know this for sure,

but

we can sort of hypothesize based on how long we think it probably took to do everything from cutting a single stone block to maneuvering it from the quarry up onto the plateau, lifting it to position, that it probably took at least a couple of decades of more or less continuous work.

There's been a theme that's been running through this whole conversation, which is that pyramids attract such bonkers, conspiracy theories.

So why have there been so many theories suggesting aliens or supernatural events or lost civilizations?

Well, we spoke to Dr.

Heba Abdel Gawad, an Egyptian heritage and museum specialist, and she's interested in the colonial practices and legacies surrounding how Egypt is presented to the world today.

This is what she said.

I think at the heart of why there are so many far-fetched theories surrounding the pyramids and their origins is racism.

The fact that it couldn't be that non-white civilizations are capable of creating something of such complex technology.

The very beginning of these theories started from the late 18th and 19th century at the peak of colonial expansion within Egypt and wider Africa.

And this came at the very same moment where there were the signs of, or the racist signs of identifying race, etc., and defining superior races, which again came to be ironically exclusively white.

Chris, Sarah, what is your take on

that idea that racism and colonialism

is part of the reason this has become such a hotbed of conspiracy?

Chris, why don't you go first?

Well, I think there's no question that in the early days of modern Egyptology in the 19th century and into the early 20th, practitioners of Egyptology and archaeology who generally were not Egyptian at that time brought with them a lot of preconceived ideas and baggage, which clearly is racist.

And they brought that to bear in their interpretations.

And we see in lots of ways that there are assumptions made that the Egyptians couldn't possibly have done this, or they couldn't possibly have done that.

So, you know, because they weren't sophisticated enough because they weren't white Europeans.

Yeah, I think exactly.

I think ultimately, because there's this idea that all sort of, you know, all of the most sophisticated aspects of civilization and culture can't possibly come from this part of the world.

They have to come from somewhere else, like ancient Greece.

There's an irony in there, though, isn't there?

Because, you know, I'm not dissing Stonehenge, but it's a noticeably less sophisticated

piece of ancient architecture than the pyramid at Giza.

I think you are dissing Stonehenge.

Yeah, please don't write in.

I know Stonehenge people are going to be extremely cross.

I love Stonehenge.

It's just not as

sophisticated.

Sorry.

Which is older?

The earliest aspects of Stonehenge are as early as the Pyramids, but then I find it difficult to disagree with Adam that, you know, the Great Pyramid, say, is a far more sophisticated, larger, but frankly just bigger, greater achievement than stonehenge story than a stone crossed up on its side

oh we're gonna get in so much trouble from this sarah what's your take on on on on this idea

so when you stand in front of um the pyramids today it's it's hard to understand

what you're seeing in front of you um didn't just show up it would be like the iphone 14 popping in your pocket it seems magical and otherworldly but you have to go back to alexander graham bell and the 13 iterations of iPhone that came before it.

The pyramids represent the end stage of hundreds of years of innovation and experimentation.

I try to always understand why people would think it's aliens and why they wouldn't be inspired by this great sense of wonder.

And it's just a lack of understanding.

So yes, it is incredibly racist, I think, to think that these amazing people didn't have the skills and capacity to construct the pyramids.

I do also wonder, though, just hearing both of you describe what it feels like to stand in front of them, what it feels like to have the sun rise over the top of them, and what they might have looked like when they were first built.

I do wonder whether there's something so awe-inspiring about these pyramids, that sort of perfect balance between absolute precision and simplicity that really makes them the kind of objects that were always going to attract conspiracies.

Yeah, I think there there is something in that too.

I think they are

almost impossible for people.

You know, they're too big and too sophisticated.

And this idea that,

you know, if you if you sat there in the quarry banging the stone with your stone pounder for long enough, with your mates for long enough, then eventually you can free up these huge blocks of stone.

We kind of can't imagine that because, you know, it'd be so boring, wouldn't it, after a while?

And, you know, and then you've got to haul it to Giza, and that would take ages and it'd be so boring.

And, you know, somebody somebody like me who's a lazy person who just sits at a desk all day would obviously walk off the job after about 15 minutes because i can't imagine people wanting to do that even with the the incentive of of infinite burgers and and beers as sarah said yeah infinite burgers and beers i think that that would help that would definitely help maybe that would get you know extra kind of half an hour three quarters of an hour out i mean maybe but if i but again you know if i could believe in the the the godliness of the king that would help too actually

having spent you know 25 years thinking about the ancient egyptians there's lots of ways in which I'm kind of completely wowed by them.

And there are ways in which their humanity manifests itself.

We've already talked about things like graffiti,

I don't know, little kind of satirical drawings that you see, which gives us a sense of the Egyptians away from the formal stuff and towards the informal.

But also, you know, when it comes to their accomplishments in, say, arts, some of the Egyptian sculpture is just absolutely the best sculpture human beings have ever produced.

And the likenesses that they produce of individual human beings with all of the emotion that they can convey, these are just people, they are people.

Ancient Egypt is an incredible organization of ordinary people, and that's what allows the creation of the pyramids.

It's those ordinary people, but organized in this phenomenal way that we, a lot of us, have a hard time believing in, but it really happened.

Well, I think when you present it like that, I mean, it really is just all sorted.

So, thank you to our real Egyptologists, Dr.

Chris Norton and Professor Sarah Parkak.

So Dr.

Rutherford, when it comes to the case of the pyramids of Giza, can we say it was aliens?

No, Professor Fry, we cannot, because it's never aliens.

Instead, the pyramids were built in honor of the pharaohs as colossal monuments to their godlike status.

By an evolving civilization with incredible admin.

Their square-based triangle structure is just a fancier form of the shape made by toddlers if you give them some blocks to play with.

And they were made through unimaginable effort.

Workers chiseling away determinedly at slabs of rock and using water and oil to scoot them across the desert.

But not by slaves.

By gangs of men propelled on by beer and burgers.

You know that Netflix series that we were talking about at the top?

Yes, the Graham Hancock.

Yeah.

Have you watched it?

Yeah, I mean, one episode.

It's terrible.

It's just unwatchable nonsense.

Give me one word that would sum it up for you.

Absolute balder dash.

Balder dash.

Balder dash.

Sort of a bit, it's a bit conspiracy-y, isn't it?

Massively.

I mean, he sets himself up not as an archaeologist.

In fact, he sets himself up in opposition to archaeologists.

He says something like, I'm not an archaeologist, I'm a journalist who investigates things from a long, long time ago.

But it's got some crazy theories which are so obviously not true.

Like,

you know, chambers inside volcanoes were constructed by people.

Well, actually, all volcanoes have chambers inside them, which weren't constructed by people.

They were constructed by very, very hot lava.

Yes, yes.

And we know how that works.

So all of a sudden on Netflix, you've got this guy saying, well, maybe...

He doesn't say it was aliens.

He says maybe it was these people from the past.

You know what, though?

I hear what you're saying.

I mean,

I do hear what you're saying.

But I think what you'll find, Adam, is that science doesn't want to know the truth.

Because famously, science has never changed its mind about anything, including the Big Bang, general relativity, gravity.

I mean, it just doesn't, science, it comes up with an idea and then it sticks to it.

That's right.

That's why...

There are no working scientists anymore.

It's just a massive conspiracy.

We're done.

Now, we've had a lovely message in from Vince who said, I find myself in a similar position to Dr.

Diaz.

Now, Dr.

Diaz was the person who put an acknowledgement to us in their scientific paper.

Yes.

Now, Vince says that he's a mature student, very mature, 67, while doing his PhD on honeycomb construction.

Honeycomb, so he's talking about like sweets or bees?

Sure, it's just, he's a, he's sponsored by the Crunchy Factory, I think.

Anyway, accordingly, the thesis contains not only an acknowledgement of your good selves.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for thanking us.

But also, I found an opportunity to include an Interabang within the document.

document.

Nice.

Yeah.

I just hope it says the front page just says crunchy interabang.

Yeah, yeah.

Massive bees.

Now, how do you pronounce an interabang?

It's like a

bees?

Bees?

Anyway, thank you, Vince.

That's very kind of you.

And we hope, I mean, he's definitely paid for by big bees.

I've got a bit of news and a request, which is something strange happened to me the other day, which was I was giving a talk at a school and a young curio came up to me afterwards and said, how much you like the show?

Thank you very much.

And I said, what's your name?

And she said, her name was Laird, I think.

Laird.

Yes, which is an unusual name.

And I said, where does that come from?

And she was there with her mum, who said she's named after a ghost.

Right.

Yes.

Okay.

Now, I forget the details.

It was something to do with an actress who was also a ghost, but basically, this is, and I may have got the name a little bit wrong because it was a bit of a frantic moment at the end of talks.

Okay, so someone who you can't remember.

Yeah.

A name that you you can't remember.

Yes, but she was definitely named after a ghost.

Although I can't remember the date.

She's a person who

didn't really exist.

So

this is my request.

Could you, if anyone is out there who's named after a ghost that I met recently, could you email curious cases at bbc.co.innu?

You're going to be inundated with all of the ghost-named people.

Of which there are...

Have you ever met anyone named after a ghost?

I mean, look, I don't check.

the naming of everyone I meet.

Maybe, you know, are you sure you're not named after a ghost?

Are there any significant Adam ghosts?

Probably.

Probably.

Probably.

Okay, let's do Curie of the Week.

Curie of the Week this week is Mike Jackson, who sent us in a lovely message saying that he works for Tokamak Energy.

Previously did an MSc in fusion energy and loved a bit of the plasma donut from old Rutherford and Fry.

However, while he was doing his MSc he had to produce a poster for a scientific conference and alongside his actual poster he took the opportunity to do a second poster for a bit of a laugh

on the issue that you raised that lots of fusion things are food related.

And we have that poster.

We haven't seen it yet.

So the title is Fusion slash Foodstuffs nomenclature overlap and icf stroke mcf symmetries a study i can't remember what ic oh no it's on the poster inertial confinement fusion and magnetic confinement fusion excellent the first comparison oh these are the two types look you've got sausages for inertial confinement

inertial confinement fusion and pancakes oh yeah Sausage versus pancake, yes.

For magnetic confinement confusion, you've got the doughnut, as we've already mentioned, but also an apple and, oh, it's not just a donut.

it's a donut with sprinkles on it, too.

A donut with sprinkles, and you've got the banana orbit.

Yes.

You know what?

This, I wasn't convinced before, but now I'm

wholeheartedly convinced.

You can see there's an excellent graphic at the bottom as well, which includes, it's a proposal for future work.

It is clear that much of fusion physics is based on food analogies.

This has served us well in the past.

I mean, I'm just going to.

Fusion stars is not yet possible, but

I'm not 100% sure about that.

Therefore, the clear conclusion is that we must reverse engineer the processes and innovate new physics based on unusually shaped foods that are not yet included in fusion physics to make new discoveries in the field.

Suggesting the following, the hash-browned holram.

I don't know what a holram is, but I like hash-browns.

The pepperoni pizza multiple fast ionization ignition.

And the butternut squash magnetic confinement system.

Yeah, I think he's on to something.

He's on to something.

I think he's on to something.

And when you collect your Nobel Prize, I want there to be an Interabang in your acceptance speech.

That's our ultimate goal, isn't it?

A Nobel Interabang.

That is all for this week's Curious Cases.

As ever, send in your questions to curiouscases at bbc.kuk.

Say you bye.

Is Batman actually a baddie?

Wayne Enterprises have a huge carbon footprint.

What's really going on with Marvin Gaye?

The moment you play it, everyone's raising eyebrows.

Was Cleopatra a snake or a saviour?

She's manipulated Roman leaders.

Maybe she had a great personality.

I'm Russell Kane, and this is Evil Genius.

It's where I join a panel of comedians to reveal surprising things about historical icons.

Not even the hobbits are safe.

I'm on board.

Have you dated any?

Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane.

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