ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Time, Twilight, and Eternity. Thom Rock
Читать онлайн.Название Time, Twilight, and Eternity
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781498242776
Автор произведения Thom Rock
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
The trouble is, one complete planetary pirouette in the galactic ballet that is the exquisitely choreographed dance of our twirling orbit around the sun—and by which we’ve decided to measure time and construct a day—doesn’t always equal a day exactly all the time and everywhere. The earth’s rotational rate is neither static nor a reliable measure of time. In this age of high-precision timekeeping, navigators and astronomers look elsewhere more and more frequently for the tick-tock accuracy upon which we all depend. Astronomical observation over the last two centuries has revealed that the mean solar day—the time it takes for the planet to make one complete revolution on its axis—is slowly but measurably lengthening. Thus, even the measures of time we have come to know as weeks, months, and years are no longer completely accurate.
That is, if we’re all even talking about the same year, following the same calendar.
Which we’re not.
Year after Year
While some of us (religious, or not) follow the standard Gregorian calendar, that record of time measures years in relation to the presumed birth of Jesus Christ, a reckoning of time introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in AD 1582, (AD being an abbreviation of anno Domini—or, year of our Lord—a notation of historical time first assigned in the sixth century.) To be fair, Gregory hardly invented the system all on his own. He and the rest of the world had inherited earlier—and far from accurate—versions from both Christian and Roman pontiffs and emperors alike (who, in turn, had inherited even earlier calendars from their predecessors; ancient artifacts suggest that even our Paleolithic ancestors created rudimentary calendars more than six millennia ago based on the changes of the moon.) But by the time Gregory was pope the inaccuracies of earlier calendars were wreaking havoc; they were running either too fast or too slow compared to the true solar year or the actual seasons of the planet. The trouble was that so many timekeepers had conveniently rounded up or down (or even manipulated for political reasons) the number of days it took for the ball of dirt we call home to circle the sun. Some calculated the number to be 364; others 365. The more attentive thought the year to be 365 ¼ days. The actual length of the year is closer to 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds—although even that precise counting of time is neither steady nor static: on average, due to the gradual slowing of the earth’s rotation, the year decreases in time about half a second every century.
But seconds can turn into minutes; minutes can become hours, become days. By the time Gregory issued his papal bull “officially” correcting what time it was, the calendar had drifted off course by nearly ten days. Easter was no longer eastering when it was supposed to. (Not to mention Passover was passing over at the wrong time, and the Ramadan fast was running slow.) With a stroke of the pen, the days between October fifth and October fourteenth were eliminated from the year 1582. Widely adopted in Catholic countries, the Gregorian calendar took some time to catch on. Protestants, especially, were suspicious, not least because it meant forfeiting nearly ten days of their lives (and wages) forever. The Pope’s calendar was not officially adopted in Britain until sometime in the eighteenth century. Japan waited until the century after that, and Orthodox Russians and China held out until the early- to mid-1900s. The Eastern Orthodox Church still does not follow the Gregorian calendar but one based on a system first devised by the ancient Egyptians.
Previous to the Pope’s decree a year had been noted AUC, as ab urbe condita—or, from the (symbolic) founding of the city and empire of Rome, in what was then the dominant day-keeper of the time—the Julian calendar—a measurement of time introduced by Julius Caesar, itself an updated iteration of an earlier Roman calendar supposedly introduced by none other than the mythic King Romulus and which consisted of only ten months and lasted only 304 days. While the use of BC, or “before Christ,” and AD to identify years eventually superseded the Roman idea of what came before and what came after, those markers have now been widely replaced by the less Christocentric terms BCE and CE, or “before the common era” and “common era” respectively. Though there have been plenty of movements to embrace other demarcations of time throughout history. Some timekeepers, for example, lobbied for the observation of time since the “Era of the Passion,” with year one dating back to AD 33, the presumed date of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Mussolini imposed a new calendar, marked Era Fascista, to introduce and document his reign of power. The French Revolution ushered in its own method of keeping track of time, the Calendar of Reason, which lasted just over a decade—at which point the new emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, abolished it.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.