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By Godfrey Kneller
National Maritime Museum |
When we look at the different diary inserts we have available we can start to get a little obsessed with time and how it is measured, or is that just me!
There are two fixed intervals of how we define time on planet earth. The first is a complete revolution of the earth and how many of those revolutions it takes for the earth to orbit the sun. In short a 'day' and a 'year' or what we call each of those.
Everything such as hours, minutes, seconds, weeks, months etc are all 'man-made'. We could if we wished divide up the day in something other than 24 'hours' or an 'hour' in something other than 60 'minutes' etc.
However, I realising changing these long standing divisions that have been in use for decades would be difficult.
Not all countries have always used the same 'calendars'. If you go back to the 1908 London Olympics you might notice that all other countries did very well in the shooting events, but nothing for competitors from Russia. This because when they arrived on what they thought was the start of the games on 10 July 1908 for Russians was in fact 23 July 1908. Russia at this time were using a different calendar!!
It is worth remembering that the earth takes 365 days 6 hours 9 minutes 10 seconds or for simplicity we can call that 365.25 days. Hence why we have leap years to account for that quarter day.
A favourite puzzle to try on children is to ask them how many days there are in a week? how many weeks in a year? they will nearly always say 7 days, 52 weeks. But 7 times 52 equals 364.... where does the extra day come from? They will often say 'A leap year' "No that would be 366 days" They might be a little puzzled... but a year is in fact 52 weeks and one day.... 365 or plus 2 days for leap years.
What questions or discussion points have you got for us today?
