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SAN JUAN ISLAND LIBRARY |
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Email this page to a friend Related pagesSan Juan Island Library Web site Previous columnsPrevious columnsA global perspective on Christmas Balancing Privacy and Protection Gates, Gateway make viewing computer screen easier Log on and research before you vote Love of books rekindled in Colorado Hard to let go of peace and quiet How Does That Book End Up On the Shelf? part II |
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A Year by Any Other Calendar…
As January 1 approaches, I've been thinking about dates and years and calendars. At first I thought I would write about when the New Year begins by calendars other than ours, but I became so intrigued by the simple definition of a year by the Gregorian Calendar that I changed my mind. I never before realized quite how fascinating is the history of the counting of days. The basic problem is that a "year" varies depending on whether or not you use the sun or the moon as the primary determination, or what Stephen Jay Gould calls the "inconvenient noncoincidence of the lunar and solar year " in Questioning the Millennium. The difficulty arises because we have two solar equinoxes and two solstices each year, and because of harvests and other events most people prefer that these events fall on about the same date each year. Lunar cycles, however, do not cooperate with this idea. According to Gould, there are 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45.96768 seconds (365.242199 days) in a solar year, but only 354.36706 days in 12 lunations, or lunar months. If we designate months by the phases of the moon, we are left with a little less than 11 days (10.875139), to make up for in a year. The Julian Calendar, initiated by Julius Caesar during the Roman era, attempted to rectify the situation by adding a leap year every four years. This worked for awhile, but, as stated in a wonderful children's book on time (Keeping Time by Franklyn M. Branley):
This doesn't even take into account such things as tidal drag, the Tropical Year, the effect of the earth's noncircular orbit, or Daylight Savings Time, all noted in Marking Time: the Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar. Duncan Steel, the author, also discusses other calendars: the Chinese and the Hebrew (both based more on lunar than solar influences), the Japanese, the Soviet, the French Revolutionary Calendar (based on a decimalized system), the Coptic and Ethiopian, the Islamic, the Sikh, the Hindu, the Zoroastrian, the Voodoo, and the Iranian/Persian. Other books on the subject in our collection include Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures by Anthony Aveni and Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year by David Ewing Duncan. Epic, indeed. I think this could be a lifetime study. Have an epic New Year.
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