Time And Space

So you think the clocks going back Is Difficult

Spare a thought for those that were living in 1582 when the Gregorian calendar reform took place.

We might think that we are hard done by in the United Kingdom, when the clocks are reset by an hour and in effect we have two get up an hour earlier.

Of course, this is balanced by the fact that at the autumn equinox, when the clocks go forward, we feel as if we have gained an extra hour of sleep.

Of course, few of us will ever think about the reason for this, and least of all, connect this shift in our management of time to the Gregorian calendar.

But the fact is that in truth our calendar is founded on the solar year, and we have the church of Rome to thank for the reform to that calendar in 1582, undertaken primarily so that the calculation for the date of Easter could be more accurately connected with the lunar calendar.

There is an interesting connection between the lunar calendar and the solar, but it is a connection that we are not fully conscious of.

But the truth of the matter is that the old Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, failed to take account of small inaccuracies in the differences between the two.

The consequence of this was that lunar and solar had become unsynchronised, and the adjustments made were intended to bring things back into order.

And so the length of the solar year was properly recognised to be 365.25 days in duration, with alternate leap years providing the additional necessary time between the two.

But in addition, there was a 10 day difference to be taken into account, and the solution to this was simply to forget 10 days of the calendar, which as you can imagine, for a mostly illiterate population, felt a little bit like losing 10 days of your life.

And if your birthday happened to fall in one of those 10 days, it must have felt as if you had been deprived of an entire year of your life.

And so, whilst we cope with this simple daylight saving means of adjusting our clocks, spare a moment for those mediaeval folk, who must have pondered hard as to the way in which they were being dealt with by the church, and all for the sake of calculations concerning which they would have found mystifying.

But there is something of poetic beauty in the way in which time has been distilled from an observation of the way in which the Earth moves in space, in the context of our solar system.

And although time is a particularly human means of making sense of things, it is ultimately something outside of ourselves, and immutable.