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Originally posted by Sovaka
I thought about this a day before christmas of 2012 and I have wanted to post it for quite some time.
Having discussed the measurement of time with a couple of friends, I came to the conclusion, that we aren't actually in 2012 (at the time), now being not in 2013...
The reason for this is our time scale is wrong.
We measure days in 24 hours, years in 365 days... Discounting of course our Leap Years that are supposed to make up the difference (which they do not).
Undisputed, check your watch or time piece
However, according to Earth, it takes 23hrs, 56mins and 4 seconds to complete a single turn, which gives us a time discrepancy of 236 seconds or 3 minutes and 56 seconds.
And it takes 365.256363004 days to make one complete 360° orbit of our Sun.
My initial thought was how do our watches keep pace and how do we not go out of sync with the planet?
IE if we are over counting by nearly 4 minutes, over the span of a month, Noon would actually be only around 10am... compounding as time went on... yet it doesn't?
I wonder if watches are made with this discrepancy in mind and automatically compensates?
Anyway, I decided to run the numbers on how many seconds, minutes, hours, days and years have actually passed since Year 0.
This is what it came to;
687,061 ACTUAL days VS 735,261 counted by our inferior measurement...
So instead of it actually being 2013, we are actually in the year 1881.
Quite an amusing number and quite a large discrepancy no?
Just for giggles... I ran my age through the calculator and instead of being 31, I am actually 29 Earth Years.
Now I know a lot of people hate it when Wiki is referenced... but in this context, I am sure it will be acceptable
Reference: en.wikipedia.org...
How could we have got it so wrong?
Oh I know how... Convenience of the 24 hour cycle to make everything neat and tidy...
Originally posted by alfa1
Originally posted by Sovaka
However, according to Earth, it takes 23hrs, 56mins and 4 seconds to complete a single turn, which gives us a time discrepancy of 236 seconds or 3 minutes and 56 seconds.
Its the difference between sidereal and solar time.
Sidereal - the actual time it takes for the earth to turn, relative to the universe = 23hrs 56mins.
Solar - the time it takes for the sun to go from noon to noon = 24 hours.
The difference is because the earth is orbiting the sun, and that makes the sun a "moving target" with respect to the earth rotation.
In the 23hrs 56 minutes that it takes the earth to turn, the earth has also moved along a bit in its orbit and it needs an extra bit of time to turn a bit more for the same part to face the sun.
So... it depends what you're interested in.
If you're as astronomer, you might have more of an interest in Sidereal time. If you want to meet friends for lunch, you'd better pay attention to Solar time.
edit on 16-1-2013 by alfa1 because: spellinh mistakez
Historic and mythological descriptions of Sirius provides further insight into the nature of the relationship between the Sun and Sirius. A shaft leading from the Queens chamber of the Great Pyramid of Egypt was -- and still is -- aligned precisely with Sirius. Given the high probability that it was constructed that way, and considering that the pyramids form a star map in and of themselves, it shows how many epochs Sirius has been in a stationary position relative to the movement of the other stars.
We choose the Sun as our reference point, and this is obviously highly inaccurate. Every 4 years a day has to be added to keep accurate time. But even Sirius was not accurate enough for the "Keeper's of Time", the Mayans. With their remarkably advanced astronomy they quickly detected the inaccuracies in using Sirius as a marker for the passage of time, and switched to an even more accurate cycle involving the Pleiades. There is however an even more stable reference point than the Pleiades and that is the Galactic center, which from the perspective of our galaxy is the ultimate center of rotation.
Having discussed the measurement of time with a couple of friends, I came to the conclusion, that we aren't actually in 2012
Originally posted by CB328
I thought that every few hundred years they adjust the calendar to fix these errors? I know that they did when the catholic church ran everything.