In the column Cecil correctly states that the reason is based on the Babylonian calendar. That was completely correct but then He goes on to try to explain the difference in days by saying “Standards of scientific measurement in those days were a little more relaxed. Three hundred sixty was also readily
divisible into thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, etc.–no small advantage.”
He did not have to say any of that because the Babylonian Calendar only had 360 days.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_194a.html
I think you and Mr. Adams agree, it’s just that Cecil explained it differently. The Babylonian calendar had as many days as they thought were in a year - 360. So they based their circle on that. I suppose with inexact sciences, you might be faced with a year of 360 to 370 days. So you pick the one that seems best - in this case, the one with the most integral factors.
I’m not disagreeing with either of you, I’m just saying that the circle and the calendar could and probably did have 360 units for the same reasons.
I don’t want to make people think like me, I want them to think like me of their own free will.
The notion that the number of days in a year should be more-or-less constant is a relatively modern (Roman) invention. Both Jewish and Moslem calendars are closer to Babylonian. E.g., Jewish calendar uses a leap month - a leap year has a whole extra month, Adar II, added, instead of Feb 29th in Julian/Gregorian calendar. The main advantage of a near-constant year length is that astronomical events like the equinoxes or the solicices fall on the same calendar date. Some people just don’t consider this important.
dlv
I disagree that the main advantage of a near constant year length is because of astronomical events. Didn’t the calendar arise to predict yearly events? Supposedly, the flooding of the Nile was very predictable, once you had the basic calendar.
It didn’t take the Sumerians long to figure out that they had screwed up.The irrigation canal work wasn’t hapening when it was supposed to. They started having leap years,leap months, leap weeks, even leap days. It’s what comes of trying to base a solar year calendar on the lunar cycle. They just weren’t as smatr as the Mayans. So why are there 6.28318 radians in a circle?
“Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.”-Marx
People from Radia have 6.28318 fingers on their hands. That’s why.
Because in our universe, that’s how many times (approximately) a radius of a circle fits on the circumference (2 * pi, where pi = 3.14…). Of course, the Bible tells us there are exactly 6 radians in a circle.
I think one of the biggest screwups we inherited from the Babylonian calendar is the 7-day week. 7 doesn’t divide any reasonable number of days in a year.
“Standards of scientific measurement in those days were a little more relaxed.”
Shame! Shame! For Shame! Cecil! Shame!
This was a civilization, as was the egyptian, who had even in their lowly construction efforts an exactitude the arrogant scientist of today can not imagine how to repeat, using the same given tools.
And the Babylonians and the Chinese and a lot of other ancient astronomical records are still referred to by modern astronomers, relied upon for their ancient exactitudity. (How about “exactitudinality…”?)
Sure they were accurate. Very. Except for a few oddities now and then, such as, the ancient belief that the sun rose in the west and set in the east. Or that there wasn’t any such thing as the planet we now call “Venus” until around 1500 b.c. And this little bit about there being only 360 days in a year.
Crap. A mistake like that would have destroyed Babylon and any other civilization that relied on a calendar in about 5 years. Planting season would have been missed. No food. Oops. But hey, at least they knew exactly where Jupiter and Saturn were at all times.
Not only the Babylonians had a 360-day calendar, so did everybody else. EVERYBODY else. And they all changed it to 365 and a quarter days about roughly the same time.
Something funny could have happened. Maybe there WERE only 360 days in a year. Anyway, I think Velikovsky was right. The earth got bumped out of orbit, and the survivors had to adjust their calendars.
Why didn’t you say so at the top of your post? 
Stop, stop, everybody STOP THIS RIGHT NOW!!!
Whew. Sorry. I let the WSH get away with a reply that, while a little fuzzy, was not really wrong, but the level of misinformation has since been growing exponentially and I have to jump in. Okay! First things first:
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When we talk about the Babylonian influence on the number of degrees in a circle, we are not talking about Sumerians (of whose achievements in geometry or astronomy we still know very little) but about their Semitic successors, the Babylonians, and specifically the Babylonians of the Late-Babylonian and Seleucid periods, after about 1000 BCE.
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The calendar of 360 days per year was not in actual use in this period (or anywhere else that I know of; it shows up as an “ideal” calendar in various contexts but not as a practical timekeeping device). Are you thinking of the Egyptian civil calendar with 12 months of 30 days each plus 5 epagomenal or year-end days? The Babylonian calendar used 12 months of either 29 or 30 days, depending on the first visibility of the crescent moon, with intercalary months (I never heard of Babylonian intercalary weeks or days!) thrown in on an ad hoc basis to keep the months aligned with the seasons. In the last half of the first millennium BCE, intercalation was standardized as the 19-year or “Metonic” cycle similar to that in the modern Jewish calendar, with seven intercalary months at assigned intervals in 19 years. (This system, by the way, produces an error of only about 1 day in about 7000 years, so you can quit sneering at the ancients’ “imprecision.” Sheesh.)
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We get weeks not from the Babylonians, who did note the phases of the moon but didn’t implement any seven-day cycle to correspond with them, but from other Semitic calendaric traditions, notably the ancient Hebrews (cf. Genesis).
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Babylonian astronomers divided the day into 12 “beru”, each of which contained 30 “ush” or time-degrees, making 360 time-degrees in a day. The corresponding unit of distance was applied to the rotating sky, denoting the amount of its motion in one time-degree. (Yes, it was handy to have a unit that roughly corresponded to the average daily solar velocity, but don’t kid yourself that at this period anybody actually thought there were 360 days in a year!) This was used in measuring ecliptic longitudes (the twelve zodiacal signs, originally constellations of unequal lengths, were by this time standardized into equal twelfths), giving twelve signs of 30 degrees each. The sexagesimal system was borrowed (and never returned!) probably sometime in the Achaemenid period by the Greeks, who divided the equator (of earth or sky) into 60 parts. (The earliest surviving evidence for this sexagesimal division is in the work of Eratosthenes, around 250 B.C.E.) Over the subsequent years of development of arc and angle measurement among Greek scientists, this division was broken up into various smaller parts (sometimes 360, sometimes 720), and by about the middle of the second century B.C.E. the division into 360 had evolved into the accepted standard. And that’s why there are 360 degrees in a circle; it’s really not all that “ancient” a tradition, with its origins only about 3000 years ago and reaching the level of standard scientific convention nearly 1000 years later.
(I get all this, by the way, from O. Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 3 vols., Berlin: Springer-Verlag 1975, and Hermann Hunger and David Pingree, Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia, Brill: Leiden 1999.)
Thank you! I feel much better now. But I refuse to get into the question of how they measure angles in Radia.
I just want to say that the column in question is the source of my all-time favorite Cecil-ism:
“When in doubt, blame the Babylonians.”
I’m reluctant to enter into an argument where I am rusty with the facts, having been awhile, but come to think of it: why not “kid” oneself that people actually believed there were 360 days in a year? A few things Velikovsky found blaring in ancient records, which I imperfectly recall:
The Mayans and the Chinese and the Egyptians counted 360 days in a year, for instance. This remains worldwide historical fact until roughly 1500 BC, when calendars began to change worldwide in trial-and-error. In Egypt, the 360-day year was retained ceremonially, as a “sacred year,” while the new adjustments in the calendar were duly put to practical use. Previously, the calendar days were counted as 360 – for some rough thousands of years. Agrarian civilizations thrived by depending on them.
The idea that the Babylonians adjusted their calendars “ad hoc” appears to be a mere surmisal. Limiting the scope of the Babylonian civilization to a period around 1000 b.p.e, or BCE, or BC, etc, would not address earlier records than then; failing to compare those same records with others of the same time period would not give an accurate picture of the facts of the day, particularily where surmisal supplanted the possibility of other conclusions based on comparable evidence from other records of the time. Nor would it give a clue as to why a day would have been assigned 360 degrees, and so no clue as to why 360 degrees are traditionally assigned to a circle.
It would be a reasonable surmisal to guess it was an imitation of the calendar, or count of days and nights in one full orbit of the earth.
It is not so reasonable to presume that planets have never budged from their orbits, so that overwhelming bodies of geographical and written testimony must be overruled or ignored to force it into line with that surmisal, which is itself an offshoot of evolutionary theory accepted without proof.
Never use “rusty with the facts” and “Velikovsky” in the same post.
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Velikovsky’s preposterous flinging about of planets in their orbits like billiard balls fails so spectacularly on the underlying physics, that it is completely unnecessary to consider ancient calendrics in a discussion of the man’s ideas.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Oh, and BTW, you’re wrong about the Mayans, too.
http://webexhibits.com/calendars/calendar-mayan.html tells us that:
“Among their other accomplishments, the ancient Mayas invented a calendar of remarkable accuracy and complexity.
At right is the ancient Mayan Pyramid Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. The Pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá, constructed circa 1050 was built during the late Mayan
period, when Toltecs from Tula became politically powerful. The pyramid was used as a calendar: four stairways, each with 91 steps and a platform at the top, making a total of 365, equivalent to the number of days in a calendar year.”
And:
"Although there were only 365 days in the Haab year,the Mayas were aware that a year
is slightly longer than 365 days, and in fact, many of the month-names are associated with the seasons; Yaxkin, for example, means “new or strong sun” and, at the beginning of the Long Count, 1 Yaxkin was the day after the winter solstice, when the sun starts to shine for a longer period of time and higher in the sky. When the Long Count was put into
motion, it was started at 7.13.0.0.0, and 0 Yaxkin corresponded with Midwinter Day, as
it did at 13.0.0.0.0 back in 3114 B.C.E. The available evidence indicates that the Mayas
estimated that a 365-day year precessed through all the seasons twice in 7.13.0.0.0 or 1,101,600 days.
We can therefore derive a value for the Mayan estimate of the year by dividing 1,101,600 by 365, subtracting 2, and taking that number and dividing 1,101,600 by the result, which gives us an answer of 365.242036 days, which is slightly more accurate than the 365.2425 days of the Gregorian calendar."
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Tom Dark said:
This is just an amplified restatement of your earlier claim. I still don’t see in this, nor have I ever seen elsewhere, one shred of actual evidence from textual or artifact sources that a fixed year of 360 days was ever established as the practical agrarian calendar of any ancient civilization.
In fact, there are countless cuneiform sources attesting to the existence of a practice of non-standardized intercalation (i.e., without a fixed pattern of intercalary months); e.g., the early-first-millennium Diviner’s Manual, describing “the possible ways of determining whether a year needs an intercalary month” (Hunger & Pingree [see my previous post], p. 23). The celestial divination series Enuma Anu Enlil that became canonical no later than the second half of the second millennium (ibid., p. 12) attests to intercalations (ibid., p. 38). If you continue to insist that everything was different before about 1500 BCE, I say again, produce your evidence. (For those who aren’t sure what kind of evidence is provided by an unsupported quote from Velikovsky, I recommend reading the comments of the distinguished Assyriologist Abraham Sachs at http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/vsachs.html.))
To descend to more trivial errors, I forgot earlier to nitpick dlv’s remark about the “Moslem” calendar being closely related to the Babylonian: the Islamic calendar is a true lunar calendar, with months extending from one true first lunar visibility to the next, and thus its year has only about 354 days (intercalation being strictly forbidden by the Qur’an). The Babylonian and Jewish calendars are luni-solar (i.e., they try to keep lunar months and solar years synchronized over the long run), the Julian and Gregorian calendars only solar (we gave up on trying to keep track of the moon).
And on that note, happy full moon and winter solstice!
I meant, it’s closer to Babylonian than Julian/Gregorian. It’s all relative
Contributors, I wish there were enough intriguing to me in your responses to prompt me to go back and load up for a little fact-battle here where “ignorance has been fought [unsuccessfully] since 1973,” but there isn’t.
As to whether my memory of V’s statements about the Mayan 360-day year are wrong, you’ve proved only that you are inattentive to your own rebuttal. What evidence is made of the Mayan pyramid to project on them their knowledge of the length of the year, you have as referring to ca. 1050, some centuries after the claim Velikovsky makes (for which he produced prodigious supporting historical evidence, Kimstu) that civilizations counted 360 days in a year. What IS all that junk about counting it back to 3,000 - odd supposed to prove? That you are tricky? I think inattentive.
As to “Velikovsky’s preposterous flinging about of planets in their orbits like billiard balls” failing anything, all that V. failed was obedience to mathematical traffic laws – an Abomination unto the Unimaginative, I’m certain. Still, the track record for Science divining (and attempting to enforce!) putatively immutable laws is hardly as impressive as Religion’s in its way… hardly as long-lived, and hardly as durable. As we see what a mess religions have made of things with THEIR damnable immutable laws, we mustn’t discount the damage scientific “law” can do, either. You probably have little idea of what results of nuclear physics studies are being dumped 'way up in Canada, for instance.
Physics laws are not different. Compared to those of most religions, they change much faster. Why SHOULDN’T the solar system have been juggled about like so many billiard balls at some point? Because you have a law?
How many millions of years have you been observing to see that this law is worthy of enforcement by Universities and government grants?
I’m not even moved to put up the URL for a “recent discovery” reported somewhere here on 'net official science news, where some bright new astronomers have postulated that Jupiter and Saturn must have once been in different orbits – one of dozens of things Velikovsky concluded, in all reason, sheerly from historical evidence as he accepted it, in 1940. Attempting to uphold their immutable laws of physics had led them to the conclusion about Jupiter and Saturn, if I read the thing attentively enough.
Einstein was one of the few opponents of Velikovsky’s conclusions to have troubled himself to read anything Velikovsky wrote. I see no Einsteins here, that is to say, I see no indication that those here opposed to Velikovsky’s ideas have actually read any of his work. As time went by, Einstein came more and more into agreement. It’s plain that new scientific discoveries of the times forced him to, to some extent.
To declare any quoting of Velikovsky’s work as “unsupported” is surely an indication of ignorance of it.
“Intellectual Tarzan read book. You read book. Your book stupid; Tarzan book smart. Cheetah know your book unsupported, Tarzan not read.” And there’s the entirety of the ludicrousness of your remark. Or shut your face and pass me a piece of carbon-dated mummy and YOU prove something.
V. was hardly unaware of the “countless” instances of changes in the Babylonian calendar as they struggled to re-calculate the movements of the seasons. He was aware also of the “countless” instances of what you are misnomering “ad hoc” adjustments in the calendars of quite a few civilizations, all attempted trial-and-error within the same time period. Have you failed even to notice that these “countless” instances are specified by your source to have occurred for a certain historical period of time, not before, not afterward? So the information as given is a mere surmisal, as I said, and the surmisal is likely wrong and unsupportable when considered the more encompassing body of evidence available. Of the 360 degrees of it available, so to speak, you refer to a single degree as the whole of “proof.” That’s nuts.
V. researched “countless more” instances that point to periods of instability in the solar system, some in the recorded memory of man which created several catastrophes on earth. The geological evidence alone – which he researched and compiled does not add up to anything remotely resembling the Darwinian theory of uniformity, which was the prevailing guideline of the day as to how the universe supposedly worked, a parade of “bullions and bullions” (Sagan) of years where something happened at random once every “bullion” or so and added up ever so excruciatingly slowly, up to the birth of the tiniest light bulb.
Despite the protests and the blackballing, V. kicked Darwin’s theories in the butt in a way from which it has never recovered. (That’s one reason for the lame PBS propaganda about a single meteor extincting all the dinosaurs.)
The conclusions he drew about the nature of various features of the solar system, due to his research, are more than impressive. Space probes to the moon and the planets have done far more to confirm his expectations than to support anything Science officially believed before those explorations using advanced technology. I’m old enough to remember my science book saying that I might need a sweater at most when I take a rocket to the planet Venus, because it was usually a cozy 80 degrees! V. was right, it’s a hell-hole the temperature of boiling oil vapor. His list of confirmed expectations against Science dogma of the day goes the length of his books.
A few years ago I happened to hear of an astronomer, retired, who ran an observatory. He was a classmate of and graduated with Carl Sagan; they were lifelong friends.
Sagan slandered Velikovsky, routinely and aggressively, as though to build a career out of it (Charles Ginenthal wrote about it. That too is on the 'net somewhere).
I’d read one of Sagan’s anti-Velikovsky diatribes when I was 19, having read WORLDS IN COLLISION then. I was surprised to see that Sagan had obviously never read the book. Sagan fictionalized Velikovsky’s supposed statements. Sagan was indeed dishonest and unethical about it. And he played the same old trick fat-bellied Cardinals did against any heretic, smugly trotting out “laws” that “proved” his very existence untenable among the good people of Science, to sum up Sagan’s aimless point. Sagan, by the way, “knew” that the temperature of Saturn was 250 F below, or so, where Velikovsky pointed out in the 40’s that it obviously had to be quite hot, and still emitting cosmic rays as a result of having been a supernova. It is hot. Turns out it’s hotter than the surface temp of the sun.
This friend of Sagan’s, the retired astronomer, had for years fielded questions visitors to his observatory had about Velikovsky. He found the subject of Velikovsky’s ideas irritating and always “set people straight” about them.
I’d written him to ask what it was he used to tell people, in his annoyance, about those ideas. He wrote me back a childish and condescending lecture about “good science” versus “junk science.” You each can deduce which was his, and which was projected on Velikovsky. You may each sit next to him in the same school of thought.
I had written him asking how he had countered any of V.'s claims. He admitted he had never read anything Velikovsky wrote. He was certain his friend Sagan had, however, and Sagan had to have been right, and so, that was that. This is the science tax dollars pay for.
Einstein died with a copy of WORLDS IN COLLISION open on his desk. He was reading his friend Velikovsky’s work yet another time, as they’d had friendly arguments and regular meetings, and correspondence about it all, in detail. Einstein helped V. find a publisher when the academic community organized a boycott against him. Einstein’s greatest objection to Velikovsky’s conclusions was the idea that planets had electrical charges – and that thus, Jupiter must emit radio waves. Shortly before Einstein died, a pair of astronomers discovered radio waves emitting from Jupiter.
I just don’t FEEL like digging u
So, let’s see if I can recap accurately:
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The observable laws governing motion and thermodynamics were completely different within the last 5,000 years than they are today.
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You have difficulty understanding that we don’t simply postulate laws and expect physical objects to obey them, but
rather deduce those laws from the behavior of objects. -
The kinetic energy released by a tiny (200-ft.) exploding fragment over Tunguska leveled 850 square miles of forest, but
Earth can be repeatedly hit or grazed by a Venus-sized object without having all life on the planet completely destroyed; and in fact, life survives well enough to write stories about it. -
The well-researched and well-documented impact event which probably contributed to dinosaur extinction is “PBS propaganda.”
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Like many do, you invoke the name of either Einstein or Galielo, in this case Einstein, as if it proves something. Might I point out that in a May 22, 1954 letter to Velikovsky, Einstein quite clearly said, “To the point, I can say in short: catastrophes yes, Venus no.” He also dismissed much of Velikovsky’s manuscript as “wild fantasy” and “insane,” and pointed out nicely that he seemed not to understand much of the science.
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Two successful predictions (the temperature of Venus, which by the
by wouldn’t have had nearly enough time to cool to its current temperature anyway; and radio noise from Jupiter) do not a successful
theory make. -
You have all sorts of evidence out there, but won’t post it because we are all just big stupid meanies.
That about sum it up?
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Oh, by the way, Saturn was never a supernova, and I don’t know where you get the idea that it was. You also appear to be comparing the core temperature of Saturn (~12000K) with the surface temperature of the Sun (~5800K). Unfortunately for you, the core temperature of the Sun is about 15,600,000K. Also unfortunately for you, Saturn, like Jupiter, give off more energy than it receives from the Sun thanks to gravitational compression.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather