Many laws and regulations and countless many contracts refer to months, years, etc. But who actually estabishes the calendar? I believe there is an international agency which inserts leap seconds. But suppose it were decided, as has been proposed, that the leap-year day rule be changed to make the calendar more accurate. How would the world go about deciding? I suspect each country would have to go it alone and try to convince others.
The calendar was established over centuries and no one calendar is absolutely universal. The Gregorian calendar is the de facto international calendar of international commerce and so on, but various regions still adhere to local methods of time- and datekeeping. The Japanese, for example, still maintain a calendar based around when the current Emperor ascended to the throne.
In modern times, such things are hammered out at international conferences and countries are free to adopt or reject things at will. Of course, if one country gets too far out of step with the world it will have to convert things more and more to maintain trade relations. (The US hasn’t adopted metric largely because it can not only afford these conversions, but because we can convince other countries to convert what they sell us. We still work in metric in all places where it really matters.) It’s all a grand game of politics, personalities, and outright hubris, like everything else in the human sphere.
More than you ever wanted to know about leap seconds:
So those guys decide when to add leap seconds. (And leap seconds are always added, never subtracted: The Earth is slowing, our Cesium-based atomic clocks are not.):
Apparently, I was (arguably) wrong:
So a leap second could be negative, but none ever has been.
A devil’s advocate question but what makes you think the current leap day rule - in every year divisible by four except in years evenly divisible by 100 which are not evenly divisbile by 400 - isn’t already extremely accurate, at lease enough so for the remainder of human civilization? Who exactly has proposed a change?
Just to add: the current Gregorian calendar is accurate to about one day per 3000 years. While that suffices (certainly in my opinion) for now, if not forever, I would hope that that time-scale doesn’t represent the limit of human civilization.
Those three millennia, they’ll be up before you know it.
I’ve wondered this myself, but not WRT leap days, but WRT Easter. The Vatican under JP2 stated that that there was no pressing theologial reason why the date of Easter had to be calculated as it traditionally has been, and that it could be made an immoveable date every year just as Christmas is, by eccumenical agreement. I suspect that in the unlikely event this became a popuar and pressing issue, that most major Protestant and Anglican denominations would go along with it. But you just know there would be some conservative anti-eccumenical churches that would refuse to let the Pope tell them when to celebrate Easter.
The question is, how long could they keep it up? The calculation of the date of Easter is rather complicated. It involves using ancient ecclesiastical charts for calculating the date of the full moon nearest the vernal equinox. (The actual date of the full moon may differ.) Major denomations (and most almanacs) publish official charts listing the dates of Easter and associated holidays for the next several decades. I doubt they all do the calculations themselves, though. The Vatican must surely have someone whose job includes doing this officially, so why duplicate they’re work?
I seriously doubt Hallmark, Page-a-Day, and Ducks Unlimited do the calculations for the calenders you buy in the bookstore themselves. They must use those charts, too. Eventually, the charts are bound to run out. And I doubt Jack Chick or anyone he knows can calculate the date of Easter on their own.
So–who does determine the official date of Easter (presumably for the Vatican? Does anyone else actually publish the dates of Easter based on independant calculations? And if all those people stopped publishing the dates, how far into the future would we know the date of Easter from allready published lists? (No fair using a computer program to find it–that’s cheating ;))
Sorry if this is a hijack, but I thought it was a variation on the question asked–who determines the calender? And I’m speaking about Western Easter, of course. The Eastern Orthodox and other Oriental churches have their own dates.
I think until relatively recently (and possibly still is for some countries), the official source for the Gregorian calendar (i.e. the one used in most of the western world) was the actual Papal Bull from Pope Gregory XII in 1582: Inter Gravissimas
According to Calendars through the Ages, the US doesn’t actually specify any official calendar:
They’ve also got list of when different countries adopted the Gregorian calendar.
Arjuna34
Ah, but why resist cheating in this case? The algorithm for calculating Easter, at least for the Roman Catholic Church (and presumably all Protestant faiths), is right here.
Hijack: I know NIST keeps very accurate time as part of UTC. Does that time have any legal standing in the US? That is if you are on time according to UTC (adjusted for time zone) but late according to Blockbuster / the USPS / a court appointment, could you argue that you are in fact not late but the agency-in-question’s clocks are fast?
Brian
Who establishes the calender?
< Bosda Sings >
Who controls the British Crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do. We do.
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Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do. We do.
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do. We do.
Who robs cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do. We do. </ Bosda Sings >