SIMULIA is used by many airplane and carmakers to test the strength of their products: wings and hulls before planes fly, crash tests for cars, and so on. They would treat the Great Pyramid like a construction disaster and “back engineer” what had happened. Their construction forensics required three steps. First, they needed a geometric modeling, a re-creation in three dimensions, of the Great Pyramid. They had used the plans drawn by the French Opération Khéops team in 1986, which were the most detailed ever produced.55 But a geometric model isn’t enough to simulate physical events. All it can give you is the shape, the geometry of the construction. To re-create an event such as cracking of the beams you also need the physical characteristics of the materials used in the Pyramid. You need the weight of the materials, their elasticity, their texture. For this Jean-Pierre met with François Schlosser from Paris’s Bridges and Roads Laboratory, who was able to supply the specific parameters of the limestone and granite used in the Pyramid, which were entered into the computer.

The virtual Pyramid was becoming more and more detailed. The last feature needed was functional modeling. Jean-Pierre’s theory of how the Pyramid was built involves mechanical systems such as sleds and trolleys running on wooden rollers. The mechanical properties of these systems—friction generated by a block pulled on a sled, compression of a limestone rafter as it is levered into place—all had to be entered into the computer.