The hot new thought (again) in some physics circles is that time doesn’t exist. Take a moment on this Friday to wrap what remains of your mind around that thought. Not possible. It’s like those “yes, but” thoughts you used to have lying awake at night when you were a kid and wondered what was outside the universe: nothing, right? Yes, but…
So lacking the math or the philosophical chops necessary to dispense with time, most of us reckon with it. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, ad infinitum. Yet of all of these measures, it’s really only the year and the day that are wedded to the natural order of things, a.k.a. the sun-earth do-se-do. The rest are constructs. There’s no necessity [1], for example, that there be seven days in a week — though there have been in the West since Sumerian and Babylonian times (except for that brief French flirtation with a ten-day week [2] at the turn of a couple of centuries ago) — or, indeed, that there be a week at all.
But it’s when things come to months that the going gets rough for time-ravellers. The problem, as we all know, is that the Earth’s sidereal year of approximately 365 days 6 hours 9 minutes and 9.76 seconds isn’t divisible by a whole number without creating remainders, and remains of not quite a day at that. We all know that some time a while back Julian did something to Gregory (or vice versa) and now we have our only slightly cranky leap year thing, with the odd leap second thrown in to make the Taylorites happy. But you might not know that some people are still unhappy with this arrangement and are arguing for another grand change.
The latest model proposed is the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar [3] explained in this Wired article [4]. The gist of it seems to be a desire to have every February 10th fall on the same day of the week year in and year out. (Actually, it seems it’s already Feb. 11 on the Hanke-Henry calendar [3]. Did I get paid for that lost day?) The thought is that this relentless regularity would make things easier for businesses and, well, for others who need to plan for when US Thanksgiving arrives, like… businesses. It would also mean that your birthday would happen on the same day of the week for the rest of your life. So if you were Wednesday’s child, there’d be nothing whatever you’d be able to do about it. Ever.
According to that Wired article, here’s how we’d get to this perfect state:
. . . eight months would each have 30 days. Every third month would have 31 days. Every so often, to account for the leftover time, a whole extra week would be added.
That extra week — Saturnalia/Carnival anyone? — would get added at the end of December “every 5 or 6 years.” Just in case you want to plan, those extra-week years would be, in fact: 2015, 2020, 2026, 2037, 2043 . . . which, I reckon, takes you far enough ahead to arrange for catering.
If you’d like to try your hand at ruling time, and why not, I say? you’ll find Calendar Wiki [5] a helpful repository of a few dozen of humankind’s past and current attempts, my own sentimental favourite being theAbysmal Calendar [6], a sort of multicultural clockwork developed in Vancouver a few years back.