Time Passes

Since we're entering a new year, I felt it appropriate that we take a closer look at the concept of time. Movies like "Back To The Future" and "Late For Dinner" show time as a relative concept with alternate realities and varying futures. Great scientists like from Einstein to Stephen Hawkin share this feeling. I, personally, find it very difficult to conceptualize, but man's fascination with time has been going on for a long time.

Don't expect me to give you a definition of time--great minds have been arguing over that one for hundreds of years. We're going to look at a little history of how man has measured time.

Every culture has had some method of recording the passage of time. Whether based on the passage of days or the phases of the moon, time has been measured for thousands of years. All of these measurements of time have been based on some recurring event: the rising and setting of the sun, the movement of the earth around the sun (the year) or the moon around the earth (months). In our modern situation, very accurate methods of measurement have allowed us to carefully record each second or even fractions of seconds that pass. For early civilizations, the measurements were based primarily on daily, monthly or yearly measurements.

Calendars arrived quite early on the scene. Since man's activities are governed by the time of year, a calendar could tell them how many days to count before they should plant next year's crops or perform any of a variety of annual activities. The first calendars were thus based on the measurements of years subdivided into days and months.

One of the first calendar came from Egypt and had twelve months of 30 days each followed by a five day holiday. Our present new years holidays may have had some connection to these early celebrations. The main flaw with this calendar was its assumption that the year is 365 days long. In actual fact it is around 365¼ days in length. This meant that the Egyptian calendar very quickly got out of synchronization by one day every four years. Finally a few years ago, in 123 B.C., an extra day was inserted every four years to compen-sate for this variation.

It was Julius Caesar that developed the earliest form of today's calen-dars. It used twelve months with an extra day every four years. Since new years was originally in March, we got months like September, October, November and December which utilize the Latin roots for seven through ten. The month of July came from Caesar's first name.

Things were still not quite perfect. You see, the year is not even exactly 365¼ days long but is about 11 minutes shorter. This problem kept accumulating until in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued orders for a new calendar--the Gregorian calendar. According to this calendar, leap years starting new centuries will only be celebrated every 400 years. For instance, the year 1900 should have been a leap year, but was not. The year 2000 will be. This helps to correct the 11 minute variation each year.