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CalendarsCalendars are one of the more fascinating aspects of civilized man’s reaction to Time. On the one hand, calendars are extremely practical, ranging in everything from when to plant food crops (and thereby expect a good harvest -- and have food to eat), to when to chop timber, to when to set up your next appointment. Clearly, knowing that a warm spell in winter is not the same as the advent of spring is very important to the farmer. Knowing also that a late spring does not imply a late fall is also critically important information. Agriculture usage is obviously based on the desire to avoid attempting to harvest crops in the dead of winter. The example of chopping timber, meanwhile, is based upon an observation by James Lynch, an American scientist, who learned from Costa Rican farmers that a tree cut down during a new moon is quickly ravaged by insects, while one cut down several days before a full moon will stay free of termites for years. In other words, not only is the solar cycle important, but so also is the lunar cycle. As for keeping appointments, it is said, for example, that there are three stages of mankind in the use of calendars: 1) Where will we find food today? [What’s the weather likely to be like today and what will be its effects on our finding food?], 2) Where will we find food for the winter? [How many days do we have to find food before the winter sets in?], and 3) Where shall we do lunch? A truly excellent website, <http://webexhibits.org/calendars/index.html>, (from where the tree and termite story came) provides a host of insights into the subject of calendars -- most everything anyone might want to know about the history of mankind’s efforts to subdivide a year for the purposes of predicting the controllable aspects of his future. For our purposes, we will begin by noting that Cro-Magnon Man may have been tinkering with calendars some 15,000 years ago -- or at least such is the interpretation of at least one researcher investigating the Lascaux caves in France. Since then, calendars have been developed by the Sumerians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Celts, Greeks, Friends, Romans, Countrymen, and various groups -- such as Hebrews, Mayans, Christians, and believers in Islam. In all cases, religion was intermixed with the mathematics of the calendars. 44444444444444444444444444444444444 But also very important, particularly from the agricultural viewpoint, is a calendar based on the earth's motion around the sun (i.e. one year). The time from one fixed point, such as a solstice or equinox (solstices being far easier to ascertain), to the next is called a tropical year. Its length is currently 365.242190 days, but it too varies. In 1900 its length was 365.242196 days, and 200 years later, it will be 365.242184 days. Yes, the years are getting shorter, as you suspected, and you have less and less time to get your work done! 44444444444444444444444444444444444 Calendars are fundamental to the manner in which a civilization or culture thinks, and far and away more than merely useful devices for keeping track of appointments, or even of knowing when to plant and when to harvest -- activities considerably more important than knowing when to fold and when to hold ‘em. But seriously, even the Days of the Week have significance far beyond an apparent arbitrary cycle of seven days. To appreciate this statement, consider the following calendars: 44444444444444444444444444444444444 Various ancient calendars developed their own unique characteristics. Some of these innovations include multiple calendars for different uses (Egyptian), the perspective of a very long view of events (Mayans), a tradition of simply ignoring portions of the year (early Romans), and one which is basically divorced from natural rhythms (Gregorian). The Mayans’ Long Count began with a number written as “13.0.0.0.0”. (13 is a biggie with the Mayans as an important number in its own right, and interestingly enough is held over by popular demand in our modern day playing cards, each suit having 13 cards.) As to the precise date in the modern Gregorian calendar, there is some disagreement among scholars as to the beginning of the Long Count. Three possibilities are: 13.0.0.0.0 = 8 Sep 3114 BC (Julian) = 13 Aug 3114 BC (Gregorian) 13.0.0.0.0 = 6 Sep 3114 BC (Julian) = 11 Aug 3114 BC (Gregorian) 13.0.0.0.0 = 11 Nov 3374 BC (Julian) = 15 Oct 3374 BC (Gregorian) Assuming one of the first two possibilities, the Long Count will again reach 13.0.0.0.0 on 21 or 23 December 2012 A.D. -- what is commonly known as the End of the Mayan Calendar, and possibly the end of Time as we know it. [This might indeed effect your weekend plans! At the same time, it is not necessarily prudent for you to plan your finances such that you run out of money just prior to Christmas of 2012. Or to wait until Christmas Day to open your presents, either! It’s a tricky question as to just how much planning to do beyond December 21, 2012 A.D.! Keep in mind that there is also an alternative view with respect to the Mayan Calendar in terms of what 2012 A.D. actually means.] The Mayans were apparently aware that the solar year was longer than 365 days, and estimated that the solar year precessed through all of the seasons twice in 1,101,600 days. Based on this, the Mayan estimate of the year appears to be 365.242036 days, which is slightly more accurate than the 365.2425 days of the Gregorian calendar! Because of this greater accuracy, advocates of the Mayan Calendar like to suggest that the Mayans knew a great deal more than they’re generally given credit for. This leads them to point out that the ramifications of the end of the Long Count should be, perhaps, taken much more seriously. These same advocates also like to emphasis the greater adherence to natural rhythms of the Mayan Calendar over the Gregorian. [E.g., the 13 lunar moons in a year.] The early Romans borrowed parts of their earliest known calendar from the Greeks -- which traditionally was true of the Romans borrowing most every artifact of culture the Greeks had. The early Roman Calendar consisted of 10 months in a year of 304 days. No kidding. The Romans seemed to have simply ignored the remaining 61.24 days, all of which fell in the middle of the winter. (So much for the opera season!) The 10 months that were included were named Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. The last six names, obviously, were taken from the words for five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. By tradition, Romulus, the legendary first ruler of Rome, is alleged to have introduced this calendar circa 700 B.C.E. Later, the Roman ruler Numa Pompilius added January and February to the calendar, bringing the Roman year to 355 days long. Then in order to make the calendar correspond to the solar year, Numa lso added every other year a month called Mercedinus. Mercedinus was inserted after February 23 or 24, and the last days of February were moved to the end of Mercedinus -- while the normal month of February lost as many days. In the years when it was inserted, Mercedinus added 22 or 23 days to the year. (And you thought the Babylonian Calendar was fouled up!) In their earliest incarnation, Roman months were identical to the lunar cycle. Each moon was divided into three sections (three being inevitably more a natural division of the ancients, than say, four). These sections corresponded to three phases of the moon: new, first quarter, and full -- or in Roman jargon: Kalends, Nones, and Ides. Accordingly, when Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was warned of the “Ides of March”, he was being warned of the time of March’s full moon (not necessarily the fifteenth as some have surmised). [BTW, the “Ides of April” (tax time) are infinitely more threatening.) The Gregorian Calendar (or Christian Calendar) is the defacto calendar of choice in the modern world. A physician from Naples, Aloysius Lilius, first proposed it, after which it was adopted by Pope Gregory XIII in accordance with instructions from the Council of Trent (1545-1563) to correct for errors in the older Julian Calendar. It was decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in a papal bull, Inter Gravissimas, on February 24, 1582. (Typically, the man with the idea did not have his name attached to the end result.) The Gregorian calendar is based on a tropical year of 365 days, with a leap year (adding an extra day every four years). However, this does not apply to the century mark years which are not evenly divisible by 400 (e.g. 1800 or 1900 are both not leap years, whereas 2000 is a leap year). In other words, there are 97 leap years every 400 years. (See also -- if you dare -- Gregorian Conspiracies?.) This use of Fudge’s Factor and Finagler’s Theorem still does not quite make it -- i.e. the Gregorian Calendar continues to be less accurate than the Mayan Calendar. However, there is, in addition to a 400 year rule, a possible 4000 year rule. The idea has been suggested by several individuals, including the noted astronomer John Herschel (1792-1871) that a better approximation than the 97/400 leap year rule, would be a 969/4000 leap year rule. I.e. drop one leap year from the current Gregorian calendar every 4000 years. Given the fact that the ancient Egyptians had calendars that lasted some 2000 years, this would put the modern world in serious competition for longest running show. However, the 4000 year rule has not been officially adopted (again the political problem of too long a time before it makes a difference). Also, if the End of the Mayan Calendar is indeed the “end of time as we know it”, it simply won’t make any difference! Meanwhile, the Orthodox church in Greece, when it switched to the Gregorian calendar in the 1920s, attempted to improve on the Gregorian leap year rules, by replacing the "divisible by 400" rule by a rule which said that any century mark which when divided by 900 left a remainder of 200 or 600 was a leap year. This had the effect of making 1900, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2500, 2600, 2700, and 2800 all non-leap years, whereas 2000, 2400, and 2900 would be leap years. Thus there will be no conflict with the Gregorian until 2800. Interestingly enough, this version is slightly more accurate than the Gregorian, with the Greek version obtaining an average year of 365.24222 days. It might be pointed out in passing that “leap day” is actually February 24th. This derives from the Roman calendar and the celebration of feast days. Not the 29th. Sorry. 44444444444444444444444444444444444 Gregorian 2000 2012 2013 Chinese 4698 4710 4711 Hebrew (*AM) 5761 5773 5774 Egyptian 6236 6248 6249 Mayan 5114 5126 0! *AM stands for Anno Mundi, the Year of the World). 44444444444444444444444444444444444 The accuracy of calendars for the last three and a half thousand years has obviously been of concern to Kings, Emperors, Popes, and anyone attempting to correlate daily events with the rhythms of nature. A tropical year of 365.242190 days (and one which is slowly growing shorter) is obviously not a trivial matter for accuracy prone individuals. There is the distinct likelihood, however, that the ancients had it rather easier in this regard. In times past, the number of days of the year was apparently 360 days! In such times, the allegedly arbitrary division of the circle into 360 degrees would have corresponded rather nicely to the days of the year. And in fact 360 day calendars were in use for nearly a thousand years, until sometime in the eighth century B.C.E., civilizations all over the world began junking their calendars and starting over. Rather abruptly, the lunar month lengths were no longer fixed, but based instead upon sky observations. It became the rule that priest-astronomers would declare when a new month began (i.e. at the first sighting of a new moon), and the length of a month became simply the time from one new lunar crescent to the next. Of specific note, in ancient times, the Mayans had a tradition of a 360-day year. Then in the 4th century B.C.E., they took a different approach from both Europeans and Asians, and began maintaining three different calendars. In one of these calendars, they divided a 365-day year into eighteen 20-day months, which was then followed by a five-day period that was no part of any month. The five-day period was considered to be unlucky. The Celtic cultures supposedly used the same 360 day year for month calculation and then referred to the 5.24 extra days as special days at the end of the year (and not part of the monthly scenario at all). We might wonder what happened. After all, a 5.24 day error, in about 11 or 12 years amounts to a two-month error -- which agriculturally would have been disastrous! Heads of calendar-providers would surely have rolled, if such an error had been practiced for lo unto a thousand years. Such an error is not conceivable. Thus, the question becomes, did something happen to change the number of days in the year from 360 to 365.24? The answer is: Almost certainly! Immanuel Velikovsky was one of the first to notice the 360 ancient day, and not dismiss it as the mistakes or ramblings of an ancient culture. In his classic 1950 volume, Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky claimed that the events of the Exodus (circa. 1460 B.C.E.) was due in large part to an interplanetary contact of the Earth with another heavenly body -- in his view, Venus. Then later, in or about the 8th century B.C.E., Mars became the interacting body, and led to a change in the number of days in the year. The enormous destruction and other effects of this encounter might be an explanation for why the Mayans thought the extra 5.24 days were “unlucky”! [Think of its equivalent as adding an extra work day to the Days of the Week!] The idea of other planets having made close encounters with the Earth in ancient times has been met with derision and thoroughly unscientific skepticism by the mainstream scientific community. Even today, the idea is dismissed out of hand. After all, as Thomas Kuhn has so eloquently shown, scientists’ preference for one paradigm (e.g. “Be happy; everything’s stable and safe in the solar system”) over another (e.g. “occasionally, there will be comets, planets, and other intruders impacting our Earth in one form or another”) is determined by a host of non-scientific, non-empirical factors. (For example, Einstein’s theory of special relativity was once challenged by one alleged scientist as being wrong because the end result of Einstein’s famous twin paradox “would have allowed people to cheat death”.) Suffice it to say that the mainstream scientific community has been notably unscientific in its condemnation of Velikovsky, while others with a more rational frame of mind have taken the time to study the possibilities, and found much additional evidence. The ten volumes of Pensee (published by the Student Academic Freedom Forum, Portland, Oregon) and the Immanuel Velikovsky website <http://www.varchive.org/> provide an enormously more balanced, scientific view. From a physics perspective, the relevant question is whether or not such an interplanetary exchange would change the days of the year from 360 to 365. The means of doing so are discussed in some detail in Sun Stand Thou Still, where the alleged Venus-Earth interaction is demonstrated to be energetically plausible. Robert W. Bass has also noted in Pensee’s 8th volume that “it is perfectly possible, according to Newton’s Laws of Dynamics and Gravitation when three or more bodies are involved, for planets to nearly collide and then relax into an apparently stable Bode’s Law type of configuration within a relatively short time.” For the moment, if we assume an interplanetary contact has changed the number of days in the year from 360 to 365.24, what precisely does this imply? On the one hand, we might assume that the mechanics discussed in Sun Stand Thou Still are valid (i.e. the crust of the earth slips on the continuing rotation of the Earth’s core -- producing the perception on the surface of the Earth of the rotation ceasing). If we also assume that the earth continues to remain at the same distance from the sun, and at the same orbital speed, then we logically note that an increase in the number of days per year implies a shorter distance along the earth’s orbit per rotation (day), and thus a more rapid rotation of the Earth on its axis. This is less likely than other alternatives, in that the frictional energy losses caused by the rotating core bringing the crust back up to speed would imply a slower rotation of the Earth. There is the possibility that the other planet’s gravitational attraction might add to the rotational speed of the Earth, but inasmuch as the massive bulk of the Earth is in the core, and there is no gravitational “handle” to change its speed, this seems unlikely. A more plausible alternative is that we assume the same time of rotation of the Earth on its axis. This implies that there is no change due to the encounter, i.e. the core has brought the crust back up to speed with no, or very little loss). What might have changed therefore, would be the actual orbit of the Earth around the sun (including the mean orbital speed, currently about 66,000 mph). This might have been easily done simply by the gravitational attraction of the other planet pulling on the Earth in a direction, which slightly increased the size of the orbit -- or the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun. How noticeable would this be? We know that currently: Mean distance from earth to sun = 92,957,200 miles Max distance from earth to sun = 94,537,000 miles Min distance from earth to sun = 91,377,000 miles Difference in Mean and Max = 1,579,800 miles (or 1.67% eccentricity) The change from 360 to 365.24 days is a 1.46% change in the circumference/radius of the Earth’s orbit. This corresponds to a change in the radius of 1,353,044 miles. Considering that this change is within the current eccentricity, this may very well have been the case. Times do indeed change! 44444444444444444444444444444444444 An even more accurate method is to draw a triangle with sides of 5, 12, and 13. If the 5 side is subdivided into the harmoic of 2:3, then the 3, 12 right triangle will have a side of 12.369, the number of full moons in a year to an accuracy of 99.999%! “Incredibly, all of the current major time cycles of the Sun-Moon-Earth system can be expressed as simple combinations of the numbers 18, 19, and the Golden Section.” The revolution of the Moons Nodes (the two points where the slightly eccentric circles of the Sun’s and Moon’s orbits cross) equals 18.618 years (99.99% accuracy), such that the Saros Eclipse Cycle of 18 years (99.83% accuracy) in part derives. 19 is the number of years in the Metonic Cycle of full moons occurring on a given date (99.99%). Meanwhile, the eclipse year -- the time it takes for the Sun to return to the same one of the Moon’s nodes, 18.618 days short of a solar year (99.99% accuracy) -- is 18.618 x 18.618 days (99.99% accuracy). The 12 full moons of the Lunar or Islamic Year equals 18.618 x 19 days (99.82% accuracy), while the 365.242 day solar year equals 18.618 x 19.618 (99.99% accuracy). Also, 13 full moons equals 18.618 x 20.618 days (99.99% accuracy). “Coincidence or biophysics?” [1] 44444444444444444444444444444444444 Why do you suppose that is? Perhaps the 7 Days of the Week have some significance! 2012 A.D. Paatah Time Creating Reality Forward to: Mayan Calendar Gregorian Conspiracies? _______________________ References: [1] John Martineau, A Little Book of Coincidence, Wooden Books, Walker & Company, New York, 2001. |
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