Jean-Pierre Houdin - Calculating The Theory

Calculating The Theory

In 2005, Mehdi Tayoubi and Richard Breitner from Dassault Systèmes invited him to join a new sponsorship programme “Passion For Innovation”. Together, they decided to examine the theory in the light of Dassault Systèmes’ industrial and scientific 3D solutions. Using software applications such as CATIA to reconstitute the site of this gigantic construction in three dimensions allowed them to test in real-time whether such an approach was plausible. In order to explain and communicate it, Tayoubi and his team used 3D technology as a teaching medium and proposed an interactive voyage through time in three dimensions, both on the giant screen of La Géode (a famous hemispheric theater in Paris), and on the Internet. They transformed this theater into the biggest Virtual Reality center of the world.

The same year Houdin, the Egyptologist Bob Brier, Tayoubi and Breitner with a team of engineers of Dassault Systèmes decided to analyse the King’s Chamber cracks with software normally used by industrial corporations to simulate the behaviour of their products in operation and to detect any structural weaknesses in order to solve problems as early as the design phase (SIMULIA). The team concluded that the pyramid’s architect, Hemiunu, concerned that the cracks imperiled the whole structure, cut a tunnel into a sealed space above the burial chamber to assess the damage, and filled the cracks with plaster as a “tell-tale” that would indicate if they were widening. The beams held and the pyramid was completed. The existence of the cracks in the burial chamber beams has been known since the 1880s, but the team is the first to put forward a hypothesis about what caused them and when and to use such a methodology with 3D industrial software in Egyptology.