Calendar Crazy - Part 4
A day seems straightforward
MYTHOLOGY / SCIENCE / RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
I can tell by the open rate, that this topic is not as interesting as I think, so I intervened for tonight’s post to wrap it up and move on. For those of you who have been trapped in a conversation with me, sometimes I carry on so this is an attempt to move it along. To all of you that take the time to read, I appreciate it and I am still learning. So instead of more days of this calendar stuff, I merged and trimmed what I intended to post into this wrap-up. So this will be long but the topic will be DONE. Tonight I learned a valuable lesson. When I write I am going to ask myself, Mark are you getting to the point? I will return tomorrow to other stuff.
I love the KISS principle, (keep it simple stupid) and I should try to remember it. I can tend to make things more complex than they are and KISS helps me simplify things in many settings. It is fun to think, ala Geico, about what led to calendars. For those of you that WANT a tangent, I attached the original Geico commercial as well as a couple of fun collaborations (Tour Guide and Paleolithic Wing) with the History Channel that the creators did. All of them are funny, especially if, like me, you enjoy history. I always loved those commercials, it is so easy, even a caveman can do it. While I am not a student of philosophy, there are some well-known and oft-referenced principles that I have absorbed (today’s photo) such as Ockham’s razor. I like this simple philosophy for theorizing about how something happened. It was popularized by William of Ockham, a 14th-century Franciscan friar:
latin :: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
english :: More things should not be used than are necessary.
principle :: the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely the conclusion
The end of yesterday’s post focused on the three most obvious and inspirational sensory “out of body” celestial experiences that every cave-dweller would have experienced (assuming they were not blind). The historical record of time, seasons, and calendars around the world all seem to reinforce that the stars, sun, and moon inspired all of it. So in the principle of those simple and easy-going Geico commercials, let us keep the assumptions to a minimum and try to remain true to Ockham’s razor.
If you were a cave dweller, your life would have been marked by the rising and setting of the sun. The blessings of a circadian rhythm would also have given you awareness when the days seemed to be getting longer or shorter even without a daily newspaper or the weather channel. The passage of days, even if you did not call them by that name would have been marked by the progression of the moon. Finally, since our ancestors were trapped in the dark half of their lives until modern man conquered the night with artificial light, the most inquisitive amongst us would undoubtedly be inspired to observe where particular objects moved from nightfall to nightfall in the night sky. While they would not have understood that we were revolving around the sun, they would observe the pattern nevertheless. We are blessed with some great observational senses as I’ve spoken of in past posts and they are hard-wired to our primitive brains.
For longer periods, the sequence of the moon would have been hard to ignore and certainly would have inspired. Time for two big words, apogee and perigee. While the cavemen wouldn’t have named them, apogee is when the moon is closest and perigee is when the moon is furthest away. Skywatchers just get excited by the apogee and we call that the time of the Supermoon when it just looks so large in the sky. I think those times when the moon is closest and furthest would certainly have been noticed by folks looking upward. The 29 1/2 day cycle of the moon is “so close to a month” that it had to be noticed. It is no accident that our months seem to line up with that timing. Here’s a diagram of the moon cycle that we all sort of know.
I hope that my readers, at this point, are with me that the daily cycle of the sun would have been difficult to ignore and would have certainly shaped the lives of even primitive man. What a wonderful gift that daily cycle would have provided. A beautiful sunrise or sunset still inspires all of us today. In the same way, the proximity of the moon and its dominance of the night sky would also have been difficult to ignore. The progression of the moon through its cycles also dominates our culture even to this day. Here is a chart of that progression which is one of those things we can just count on. Figuring out what was happening would come later but the pattern is pretty easy to commit to memory and predict what is about to happen next. By the way, tonight, in the Northern Hemisphere is the New Moon so in the coming days, we will see a waxing crescent!
Unless you were at the equator it was also obvious that the sun didn’t stay out for the same amount of time every day throughout the year. Again without understanding it, the cool thing is the PATTERN would repeat and that readily ends up leading to understanding that a complete cycle of something, call it a year had occurred. You don’t need very many observations to eventually lead to days, months, and years. What you do need is a way to contemplate rather than just react. Thank you frontal lobe.
PART 5 — CONDENSED
Once you have the basic observations, we humans just get down to refining things. When humans came out of Africa they settled throughout the Middle East. Conditions were mild and there were wild grasses that prevailed so the possibility to settle down and store grain was right under our noses with domesticable animals to pull plows and multiply our labor. The conditions were good. After settling down, they created written languages and soon had calendars. 29 1/2 day moon cycles for 12 months meant 354 days a year. Kinda close but they (the Mesopotamians) figured out quickly that the constellations were about 10 days out of phase so they had a cleanup month at the end of the year to take care of roundoff errors. Since there is not much seasonal variation in the Middle East, the Islamic calendar is the only calendar of its type that survives to this day. If your weather doesn’t really change that much, the moon is almost good enough to run your cycles by. The Romans under Julius Caesar largely adopted the Mesopotamian approach and just renamed things a bit in the same way they did renaming the Greek Gods. The Romans made a great attempt to deal with the roundoff errors. The goal is to make a “year” end up with the night sky looking about the same. That was a rotation around the sun even if we didn’t know it.
The Romans did a great job but there was still some error. By 1582, in the reign of Pope Gregory XIII the Church “corrected” the accumulated error of the last 1500 years. It turned out that the Church liked a standardized calendar but the celebration of Easter is based upon the old lunar calendar. By 1582 Easter had drifted too far from the desired time of year. The Gregorian improvements on the Julian calendar remain with us today. Just some small tweaks around certain leap years and the elimination of ten days from history and we would be quite accurate again. Useless tidbit for those of you young enough and healthy enough to see it through. Thanks to adjustments to leap years, the year 2100 WILL NOT BE A LEAP YEAR! By tweaking leap years to ignore them in certain centuries, Easter would not drift anymore! Another steady improvement while preserving the importance of the lunar calendar for both Christian Easter and Islamic Ramadan.
The outliers that are left that run on a different calendar are the Jewish New Year and Chinese New Year. With those two large exceptions, the rest of the world largely embraces the Gregorian calendar as the standard. I wonder whether the Jewish calendar adherents were too worried about Y2K. The Jewish calendar year starts with their adherence to the earth being created about 5800 years ago. I am always game for two more holidays. Chinese New Year is an excuse to get some great takeout.
PART 6 — CONDENSED
The improvements in accuracy are striking. The Mesopotamians (and other civilizations) had a cleanup month to align with the sun so they were about 10-12 days out of synch each year. The Roman (Julian) calendar was a remarkable improvement and they only lost about 10 days over 1500 years. Pretty impressive. The Gregorian calendar tweaks improved things to only losing a day every 3236 years. Wow, that is progress. Nowadays, we all have cell phones that are synced to atomic clocks around the world and we hardly are one second out of synch ever. Being late in this era is hard to make an excuse for. Twice a year, on June 30th and December 31st international standard groups add or subtract leap seconds to keep us all in synch. Here’s a linked article to that piece of information if you are interested. Modern instruments depend upon such careful time synchronization that it would make Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory’s heads spin. What a wonderful world we live in and so much of it is based on greater and greater precision leading to more spectacular breakthroughs.
So why go to all this trouble. I guess for me, pictures like that below make it all worthwhile. Almost every image of this wonderful universe that all of us stare at in awe needs to know to excruciating accuracy where the earth is in its orbit around the sun to make sense of anything. This is a photograph from the Hubbell Space Telescope peering into the Milky Way 3,000,000 years ago. Gadgets like a space telescope depend on knowing the time and without all this attention we never would have gotten to see this wonderful photo. What a wonderful world.
Here is a quick sense of how far we have come as to what a day is since the Greeks. When you imagine that approximately 2,000,000 years of human history and after 1,996,500 years, this was our view of how things worked:
The Ancient Greeks envisioned the movement of the sun as a Titan named Helios who rode across the sky in a horse-drawn chariot, illuminating the known world below. A rosy-fingered dawn would herald his imminent arrival, while the arrival of the dusk god Astraeus, ever on Helios’ heels, marked the passage of day into night.
Today, time is not at the whims of Greek mythology but by the measurable and consistent movement of celestial bodies. A day on Earth is 24 hours long, but not every day has 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night. The actual time of one Earth rotation is a little shorter–about 23 hours and 56 minutes
If we were to take a picture of the sky each evening for a year, we would end up with largely the same positions one year from now. Since we revolve on our earth axis once every 24 hours or so, all we are seeing in the night sky when we are not facing the sun in the sky about 1/365 of a rotation around the sun advanced. In one year the view should be about the same. That brings me to the end of my exhaustive trip about calendars and time. I imagine some of the details were unnecessary but hopefully still entertaining. Hope you can join again tomorrow as I retire this Calendar topic and return to everyday writing. Here’s a song from an album that stands the test of time.
There is so much we did not cover and I am sure many of you are glad this is over. Thanks for reading and tomorrow we will return to a “regular” topic.