I was just wondering, and i think it would make a debatable (sp?) topic, but why do we use a calendar that requires a leap year every 4 years when we could be using something like the Mayan (Im not sure if the civilization is correct, but i know it is one of the early mexican cultures) calendar, which was almost perfect?
I thought it was because of tradition and racism, which seem to dominate many things. My friends scoffed, but i hold firm by my beleifs. And me, not beleiving that christ was divine, am disturbed by the fact that we use such an inferior calendar which is based on his birth.
Etc. What the heck is so darned “perfect” about that? Frankly, a “perfect” calendar doesn’t seem possible. The astronomical cycles which are important to humans just aren’t evenly divisible into each other. Months are hopeless, of course, but it’s not like the modern Western calendar really makes any attempt at tracking the phases of the Moon any more–quick, it’s the 21st, what phase is the Moon showing? Who knows?–but even making days and years match up requires some sort of hocus-pocus with leap years. Per the Britannica, the “solar year” (“the time between two successive occurrences of the vernal equinox [the moment when the Sun apparently crosses the celestial equator moving north]”) is 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes 46 seconds. The “sidereal year” (“the time taken by the Sun to return to the same place in its annual apparent journey against the background of the stars”) is 365 days 6 hours 9 minutes 10 seconds. The “anamolistic year”…well, anyway, you get the point.
Frankly, the Gregorian calendar (the current incarnation of the A.D. or C.E. calendar), with its carefully calibrated leap years* is probably about as good as it gets when it comes to making days and years match up, so that in the Northern Hemisphere it won’t (barring major global climate shifts) wind up snowing in August in the year 3001 or some damn thing. OK, we could probably come up with rational calendar reforms, but it won’t have anything to do with adopting “tzolkins” and “uinals”.
[sub]*1992, 1996, and 2004 were leap years; so were 1600 and 2000, but 1900 or 2100 aren’t; however, 16000 and 24000 C.E. won’t be leap years.[/sub]
Isn’t the Mayan calendar meant to end in 12 years or something, meaning the world is going to end?
[sub]Beats the Y2K bug, I guess…[/sub]
Anyway, back to the topic. The Mayan calendar suffered from the same problem They had 18 months of 20 days, I think, and then 5 days left at the end. They made no corrections for the .24 or whatever it is days on the end of each year. Unless you had cycles of four years, you’d still have this problem.
Our calendar (Gregorian?) is a lot simpler than the Mayan calendar, but had Mayan civilisation conquered Europe like the Romans did, I’m sure it would have become the most-widely used system. I don’t understand what you mean by racism being a factor, but tradition definitely is one.
As for your problem with the calendar supposedly starting with the birth of Christ, again, it’s tradition. I haven’t seen much use of C.E. and B.C.E. yet, but they’re based on the birth of Christ just because that’s the way it’s always been - it’s too confusing to change it. What would you suggest to become the first date in the new calendar? Some dates in Japanese are based on the coronation [sub]Do they crown emperors in Japan?[/sub] of the current Emporer. You’ll have to choose an event that had worldwide significance though, lest we get confused converting between dates. Tradition again - there’s no point in changing, it’s easier just to use the same system.
Well, the count of the years is based on his birth, or what some monk thought was the date of his birth, but the system of months and days (12 months in a year, 28, 30, or 31 days in a month, plus leap year) predates Jesus. That was created by Julius Caesar, who also added the whole “leap year day every 4 years” to the system. This was later reformed by Pope Gregory the somethingith, who realized that adding a leap day every 4 years was imprecise, so he changed the system so that a leap day wasn’t added in years that end in '00, unless the year can be divided by 400.
I don’t think it’s racism that has caused us to use this calender, so much as that Western Europe has used it for about 2000 years, and it works reasonably well.
MEBuckner sneaked in a footnote stating that the years 16000 and 24000 will NOT be leap years. Clearly the every 4 years but not 3 out of every 400 years scheme will need a correction eventually, but I had never seen one laid out before. Is this something that Gregory himself put in, or something added later with increased accuracy in measurement of the solar year? Who added it? And what about the year 8000 - did you just forget to include that in the list, or isn’t the correction needed until 16000?
I think some of you need to read my post more carefully. I didn’t say spefically the mayans, but there was a latin culture that had an almost perfect calendar.
But if there is none, that im confused, because i saw a supposedly educational video about how their calendar was better than the one we use now.
jebert: The Britannica just says “For still more precise reckoning, every year evenly divisible by 4,000 (i.e., 16,000, 24,000, etc.) may be a common (not leap) year.” I don’t know if that idea goes back to Gregory or was a later refinement. By that system, both 4000 C.E. and 8000 C.E. would also be non-leap years.
ssj_man2k: All I can say is that there are a lot of supposedly educational videos out there, and you still need to use some critical judgement, even if something is marked “educational”.
As far as calendar reform goes, while I can imagine sitting down and rationally re-designing our calendar, I strongly doubt consulting the Ancient Wisdom of the [Fill in the Blank] would contribute much to such an endeavor. You obviously have problems with the religious basis for the current system. Heck, I prefer “C.E.” to “In the Year of Our Lord” myself. But it’s not like the calendars of non-Christian pre-industrial societies are going to be any less based on religious ritual (or superstition, if you prefer). I have no doubt that the Mayan calendar was ingenious, sophisticated, and fascinating, but it was also deeply imbued with basically theological concerns. (Incidentally, the Aztec calendar and other Pre-Columbian calendars from Meso-America seem to have been based on the Mayan calendar.) Humans have been getting all mystical about the heavenly bodies and the cycles of time and the seasons since the dawn of history; the modern Western calendar certainly retains traces of this sort of thing, both Christian (“In the Year of Our Lord”) and pre-Christian (“the month of Mars”, “the day of Thor”), but we’re far more coldly rationalistic about time-keeping and date-keeping than earlier societies were.
I’m sure we could learn at least something from them still. Many ancient civilations were masters of astronomy, but they were wiped out either by disease or famine or being conquered. So i think we could still use some of that knowledge to our advantage.
No one denies that many ancient civilisations were ‘masters of astronomy’, but do you have any examples of this astronomical knowledge which is unknown to modern astronomers.
I had thought that Astronomers now insert “leap seconds” as needed so that our clocks are kept in synch with the Earth’s rotation, but a little research has confused me…