I came across a video today with a guy experimenting with making a 42 pound flywheel seem relatively light...light enough to hold it over his head easily. The technique involves spinning the wheel up to a few thousand RPMs which makes the wheel seem lighter than it really is. Check out the video below.
What really fascinates me about this is the simplicity of it. Because it is so simple, it makes me wonder if the ancients could have utilized a simple method like this in their megalith building. Not necessarily what was portrayed specifically in this video since, you know, being able to spin a wheel over your head doesn't exactly get a pyramid built, but what other methods of making objects light could have once existed? The ancients might not have had a power drill to spin a wheel up to a few thousand RPMs, but what if they didn't really need that? Perhaps they had another way of spinning it up or maybe it wouldn't have needed to be quite that fast (maybe just fast enough to make it light enough for two people to life instead of one).
I like stuff like this because it shows how you can make a seemingly difficult task very simple.
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