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| By Godfrey Kneller National Maritime Museum |
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.
For the time of day, there was an attempt to introduce a decimal system with 10 hours of 100 minutes with 100 seconds each. That would make 100'000 seconds a day, a similar amount as the current 24x60x60 = 86'400 seconds. So a "new" second would have been a similar lapse of time as the "old" second. But obviously, the decimal time system did not gain any popularity.
ReplyDeleteHans
I can't remember what year it was but on 1st of April one year I did an announcement post about the new Decimal Time Standard!
DeleteWell, there was decimal time for a while, in your current neck of the woods...
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Rather than Sumerian/Babylonian 60 seconds/minutes.
And the 7-day week is likely to be a lunar phase (predating Abrahamic Creation scripture); I mean, where does the word 'month' come from...?
The date difference is caused by the Julian Calendar having one leap day every four years.
ReplyDeleteIn 1582, the Gregorian Calendar was introduced. This skips the leap day in three out of four centuries, including special adjustments like skipping the unskip of the leap day every 400 years in the year 2000 (making it a non-leap year).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
After about 1600 Julian years of too many inserted leap days in previous centuries, 13 days were skipped in 1582. Some countries refused to adjust their calendars accordingly.
Hans