I was at a talk about travelling in Uzbekistan this week where the presenter told us about Ulugh Beg, a Timurid rule, who estimated that a year was 365.2570370 days long in 1437. That stuck in my mind, and got me thinking about how we adoped the modern day calendar which we nearly everyone on earth now follows.
The story goes that later in 1525 Nicolaus Copernicus came up with a more precise value and set the length of one year as 365d 5h49m 15s. It took a bit of calculating to implement the new calendar in real life, such as when we should have leap years and then people seemed to recognise that this was a pretty good measure.
The Gregorian calendar which we’re familiar with was first adopted in a few Catholic countries in 1582. It took a while for many countries to adopt the calendar - the countries which were predominantly Protestant were pretty suspicious of this Catholic invention! My home country of Russia only changed over from the Julian calendar in 1918.
It interests me that the length of the calendar year is something of a universal truth. Whether you're a kilt-wearing Scotsman or a Russian miner, on one level every day is exactly the same - all united as a result of some pretty complicated calculations.
This one's going to Jon Foster who sent me a great mailart piece a couple of weeks ago through IUOMA.
If you're interested in this further, check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar
Lplate
The story goes that later in 1525 Nicolaus Copernicus came up with a more precise value and set the length of one year as 365d 5h49m 15s. It took a bit of calculating to implement the new calendar in real life, such as when we should have leap years and then people seemed to recognise that this was a pretty good measure.
The Gregorian calendar which we’re familiar with was first adopted in a few Catholic countries in 1582. It took a while for many countries to adopt the calendar - the countries which were predominantly Protestant were pretty suspicious of this Catholic invention! My home country of Russia only changed over from the Julian calendar in 1918.
It interests me that the length of the calendar year is something of a universal truth. Whether you're a kilt-wearing Scotsman or a Russian miner, on one level every day is exactly the same - all united as a result of some pretty complicated calculations.
This one's going to Jon Foster who sent me a great mailart piece a couple of weeks ago through IUOMA.
If you're interested in this further, check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar
Lplate
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