Do you think the Gregorian is a good way of accurate time?

Question

What lunar year are we really in? Just out of curiosity

I understand it was made to distinct the important religious dates and etc and the human biological clock

Another question is do you think :

"The most accurate clock in the world is the peasant's stomach"

Wrote Tommaso Garzoni,

considering they didn't used sun dials at the time to measure time.

What is your opinion?

Answer 1

The Gregorian calendar has many fine adjustments, so it works quite well. The solar year is an odd figure (365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds), so it is hard to make a calendar even. Ours has leap years every 4 years to compensate for the odd length, but that is too much, so only 1/4 of the centuries are leap years, i.e. 2000 was a leap year, and 2400 will also be one, but 2100, 2200 and 2300 will not be. The chinese use a lunar-based calendar, and this is Year 4706 on it. Some primitive people do have a good sense of time, but not like an atomic clock.

Answer 2

Considering the fact that the calendar has been manipulated to suit the tastes of Roman rulers and popes. It's the best we have. Did you know at one time the calendar only had 10 months? It's true.

Julius Caesar wanted his own month in the summer so July was created. Not to be out done, Caesar Augustus wanted his own as well, so he created August. If you do any more research, you will note the following monthly names are really Latin. September, 7, October, 8, November, 9, and December, 10.

See you do actually learn something when you ask the right questions!

Answer 3

The Gregirian calendar is designed to keep track of the beginnings of the seasons, like when does Spring start, and it does that very well indeed. Better than any other calendar. Better than the Mayan calendar. Better than any Lunar calendar. Better than a peasant's stomach.

If you want to keep track of something other than the beginnings of the seasons, you may want to use a different calendar.

Answer 4

Actually it doesn't really matter much what calendar you use as long as everyone agrees to use the same one.

The second question is related to what is the relevance of the unit you are measuring. If you were a farmer the only points in the day that really mattered were sunrise and sunset. More importantly, the calendar was needed as a predictive tool to measure the length of the growing season in preparation for winter. You generally don't care what time of day it is if you are starving. So if all you really care about is the time of year, then what is the purpose of knowing whether it is 10AM or 3PM?

Answer 5

Which Lunar calendar?

We are in the year of the Earth Rat (Chinese Luni-solar calendar).

In the year 1429 in the Islamic calendar ( a purely lunar calendar)

On September 29, 2008, we will enter year 5769 in the Hebrew calendar (another Luni-solar calendar).

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There are many ways to determine what should be a year.

We could measure Earth's orbital period in relation to distant fixed stars (sidereal year -- this is the one to use when doing celestial mechanics calculations).

We could calculate the time from perihelion (our orbit's closest point to the Sun) to the the next perihelion.  This one is used (along with two others) when preparing tide tables.

The most useful seems to be the average time between the return of the seasons.  It is a period that is most useful to most people.  It certainly was extremely useful when our ability to survive depended on agriculture.

In that last one, the average duration of a year (from Spring to Spring, for example) is 365.24219 days of 86,400 seconds.

365 d 5 h 48 m 45 s

The Gregorian calendar, with 97 leap years per 400 year period, gives us an average of 365.2425 days per calendar year.

365 d 5 h 49 m 12 s

A difference (on the average) of 27 seconds per year.

Or 365.2425 - 365.24219 = 0.00031 day per year

Invert that (1 / 0.00031) and you get 3,225.8 years per day

It takes the Gregorian calendar 3226 years to fall one day behind the "real" year (based on the seasons).

Not bad for now.  We'll see later.

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They did not have sundials in 1586?

2500 years ago, the Egyptians had perfected the water clock so well that they were able to publish corrections for sundials (what we now call the equation of time -- the Sun is periodically moving ahead or behind "itself" because our orbit is not a perfect circle).

They were able to build sundials with gnomons shaped like an analemma (thereby providing self-correcting sundials).

I'm sure that such an old technology was still used in 1586, even though it might not have been "in fashion", what with the latest perfections to the mechanical clocks at the time.

Answer 6

thinking theoritically, time can never be measured with 100% accurately, by any thing in this universe.