The End Of Time As We Know It
One of the traditions of fall in 48 states across the country is the end of Daylight Savings Time-a peculiar ritual wherein people seem to think that time really changes-or at least, they know it doesn’t, but don’t try to think too hard about it.
This is not one of the many things that will be written this week about why we should abolish Daylight Savings Time forever as a peculiar relic in our history. This is about getting rid of the Gregorian, Julian, Chinese, Jewish, Australian Firefighters with puppies, and all other calendars as the standards of how we measure time. Before we get to those tho, we have to wipe out the second, the minute and the hour.
The Sumerians and Egyptians are largely responsible for our subdivisions of time within a day, and we should be angry at them, because they screwed it up, and because we are a species that relies heavily on tradition, we don’t often think about how we can do things better.
Let’s start with the Sumerians. Since they measured everything in 60 and 12s(because 12ish moons in a year and 360ish days in a years, and 5ish fingers to count them out and 6 x 60 is a 360 degrees, which makes a circle, etc, etc), a minute seemed to be a natural division of time, as you could count to 60 in accordance with heartbeats or breaths. But it wasn’t perfect. It also wasn’t ever defined. If you have two people counting to a thousand who can’t harmonize, one will invariably finish before the other. So seconds and minutes, like all measurements were more guessable.
Around the same time(in historical context, so give or take hundreds of years) ancient Indians used water clocks-basically hourglasses, but made of water to act as stopwatches. Of course, since you had to fill the water vessel and let it flow, it didn’t really act as a way to keep track of continuous time. The water clock was a great method to keep fixed measures of time, but it certainly didn’t sync with calendar time. After all, if your calendar requires someone to crank it periodically, it’s probably going to have some errors.
The Egyptians were the ones that really tried to standardize this, with their ingenious sundials. Living near the equator in a pretty sunny place, the sun pretty much always gave you mostly consistent positions on the dial. Because base 12 was pretty well established, it made sense to divide the day up into 12 segments. It also didn’t hurt that you could count to about 3600 as the sun inched across each of these notches, and you could subdivide those into 60s.
But what the Egyptians built, the Greeks and Romans later built further upon. Once Eratosthenes established the roundness of the Earth , that made 360 degrees another perfect base 60 number, with 24 hours being a base 6 number. Combining the widely used ancient 60 base with the Roman style base 10 is one of the many ways Romans co-opted their colonies traditions for their own-but we’ll give them a pass on this one.
So, that’s where the second, minute, hour kind of started. There’s about a thousand years between Sumerian counting, Indian water dials and the Egyptian sundials and another thousand years before Eratosthenes(not Columbus)discovered the world is round, and early astronomers and mathematicians were pretty busy planning to make 20th century teenagers angry with various forms of torture.
Since humans lives are measured basically in relation to solar years, someone decided it would be a good idea to make calendars that measure them. Early calendars were observational-that is, they were based on lunar months or solar years, and most civilizations approximated 12 30 day lunar months in a solar year, so that was pretty much the standard. Some inserted days, some inserted hours, some inserted whole months after every few years.
Always fans of order(and of colonization), the Romans wanted to impose a single calendar, comprised of days and months. The initial calendar was built on the decimal system popular among Greeks and Romans, so there were 10 months of of 29 to 31 days, shifting yearly. Obviously, this would really change up the years. Caesar, upon consolidating his power ordered the new Julian calendar to be more consistent with astrologers and mathematicians findings, which is the one we widely know today-365 days every year, with a bonus day every fourth year. Of course, after his assassination the month that was logically named Quintilis for being the fifth month was then named July, and subsequently Sextilis was named August, for egotistical reasons that ran in the family.
As the Romans exerted a stranglehold over western civilization, the Julian calendar became widely adopted, until adoption of the Gregorian Calendar, which kept the same structure, but fixed the leap day to properly align with the solstice, which had been slipping to earlier and earlier on the calendar over the previous 15 centuries. Other calendars existed, and continue to exist, including the Wu Xing calendar in China and numerous Mesoamerican calendars, but the Romans and their successors, the Catholics really pushed their calendaring on the rest of the world.
And that brings us to where we are today. So, it’s not broken, right? Wrong. All these calendars are observational. We measure the start and end of years. But, as we already know, a year is one orbit around the sun. So what’s wrong with that? Well, it’s how we define the individual days in the solar year, and how we ascribe hours to them. In essence, we’ve taken the longest measurement of time we commonly use and pigeonhole all other measures of time to fit into that. We do this because we don’t have constants.
Or do we?
As we established earlier on, the second is the smallest regular interval of time, but it’s relative. In fact, since the introduction of calendars and breaking them down into days, we’ve been sort of extrapolating that timeframe, as it’s been roughly when water or sunbeams meet a mark. This was calculated to some degree based on rotation of earth, but to keep track of seconds, you’d have to have something that’s tracking them perpetually.
A second hasn’t really existed in any measurable way until the first pendulum based clocks in the early 17th century. If you were trying to establish the world record for say, a speed of someone running, you’d have to use a best guess. Pendulum clocks and watches eventually gave way to electronic clocks, which now are synced to atomic clocks. Of course, pendulums are subject to various environmental effects, so it’s not 100% accurate, and wasn’t until it was defined as an SI measurement(along with the other SI base and derived units) in 1875. There’s been numerous updates to those base and derived units since then, with the second being defined against an atomic constant in 1967.
So, knowing what we now know, a second is a real, defined constant. We no longer have to measure it against the motions of the earth, and we can measure time against this.
So, the question now is-why bother messing with the current system?
Well, the most obvious reason is that a year loses it’s meaning when you’re sitting on Mars. It’s rather silly to measure the passage of time using earth measures when you’re simply not on earth. A calendar measuring years and days won’t provide anything measurable-much less a calendar measuring lunar time when you have multiple moons. In other words, all relative times can have relative calendars, but before humans can place phone calls from Earth to Mars, we need a calendar that works for both.
Another very valid reason: When you’re talking about a day, are you referring to the time it takes to complete one axial rotation, or are you talking about 86400 seconds? The two are not the same, and you can’t build something from the largest units down, it has to be built from the smallest units up.
Fortunately, we already have something like this, albeit not perfect-Epoch time. Epoch time is a computer science term that simply counts from zero every second since the arbitrary date/time of January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC. In using this approach, the exact date and time on our gregorian calendar can be mapped to a fixed time on epoch time.
Unfortunately, there is one fatal flaw with epoch time, in that it has been already accommodated to skip the odd second in accordance with the gregorian calendar, so once again-it’s a timekeeping system that contorts to the observational relativity of solar earth year, instead of the other way around.
But this shouldn’t be hard to fix. After all, we have numerous extant calendars that are still being counted to this day. Numerous religions and cultures use distinct calendars from the Gregorian one. The Mayan long count calendar is still only it’s second era, and won’t expire for another 2752 solar years. Hebrew holidays, while we see them on our gregorian calendars are counted and predicted on their own lunar calendar and Chinese calendars and years are still used for traditional holidays.
A new Epoch calendar should be how we chart history and calendar events going forward, with all regional and cultural calendars deriving their time against it. Leave the other calendars to manage leap seconds. For all intents and purposes, we could take the existing Epoch calendar and adjust it so that the scheduled leap seconds are no longer removed(and annotate this as perhaps an important bookmark in epoch time). For the purposes of scheduling events, regionally, globally and interplanetary, we should use Epoch time solely.
Does this mean we lose the other calendars? Not at all. After all, it’s fairly important to know when the seasons will happen and how the tides will operate, and numerous traditions rely on these older calendars, which as has been stated-still are in use today. But epoch time is a universal calendar, not a planetary one.
