What Year is it anyway?
02/01/23 23:26
I confess that I am a little mixed up about time. Spending a week in Eastern Standard time is a break from living in Pacific Standard Time. Both places observe Daylight Savings Time in the summer, so that is another factor to consider, but that is not a factor at this time of the year. It is important for us to keep track of time because we not only flew here on the airlines, which operate on the local time, we will return by the airlines. On our trip home, our first flight will depart at a time listed in Eastern Standard time. We’ll change planes in Chicago, which is Central Standard Time, and change planes again in Seattle, which is Pacific Standard Time. The elapsed time on the clock will be different than the elapsed time when we traveled East, having a shorter than normal day, which didn’t turn out to be short for us because we got up at 2 am to catch a 5 am flight. Our return trip will be a long day, waking early to catch our first flight which is an early departure. I’m not spending too much time thinking about it because we’ll just get up at the appointed time on Thursday. Our son in law will have to get up early, too to drive us to the airport. He’s a good sport about it all.
Then, we are adjusting to living in 2023, which is a new year. But if one travels around the world, there are other ways of counting the passage of time. For example, in Myanmar there are two official calendars. In the Gregorian calendar it is 2023, but in the traditional calendar it is 1384. Tin Thailand it is 2566. Moroccans are praying in 1444 but farming in 2972. In Ethiopia it is 2015 and each year has 13 months.
We have a nephew who married a woman from South Korea, where everyone celebrates their birthdays on New Year’s Eve. It is possible for someone to have three official ages at the same time. Their domestic age is a year older than someone born on the same day in another place because they begin life at age 1. Koreans have little trouble with the difference, knowing that their domestic age is one year more than their international age. Then, there is the fact that many South Koreans celebrate their personal birthdays in a traditional way, advancing their age at on New Year’s Day. To confuse matters more, some traditionalists observe their symbolic birthdays on Lunar New Year’s day rather than on the Solar New Year’s Day. The Lunar New Year’s Day will be January 22 this year. It is also known as “Chinese New Year” and is observed across East Asian Countries and recognized worldwide because of the number of people of Chinese descent who recognize the holiday.
International time, however, designates this year as 2023, as the ISO-approved global standard calendar is the Gregorian calendar. We like to think of this calendar as being superior to other calendars because of its accuracy and efficiency, but it is not any more accurate or efficient than any other calendar. The reality is that we observe this particular way of counting the passage of time as a result of politics. It is a matter of who has won wars and which cultures have dominated world trade and commerce. The Gregorian calendar is a unique product of Renaissance science and Roman Catholic religious doctrine. It officially replaced the Julian calendar upon orders from Pope Gregory XIII in the late 16th century. However, neither Protestants nor Orthodox Christians were quick to embrace the change in the counting of time based on a papal decree. At the time, the variation between the Julian and Gregorian calendars was roughly 10 days. The Gregorian calendar was slightly more accurate, but the Julian calendar was impressive for a system set up in 45BC.
Protestant parts of Europe changed over to the Gregorian system little by little. The Netherlands made the change in 1700 and England and its colonies followed a century later in 1800. By 1900 non-Christian places including Egypt and Japan had switched to what was then the most common calendar, but Orthodox countries like Romania, Russia, and Greece held out for decades. 2000 was the first year that all of the countries of Europe agreed on the Gregorian calendar for the celebration of the new year.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that I have a bit of trouble keeping track of the time. There are plenty of reasons for confusion.
Scientists have now developed super clocks that define time to the tiniest fractions of seconds. No calendar completely lines up with the actual movement of the Sun and planets, necessitating leap years and even leap seconds in order for the calendar to remain synchronized with the movement of the Universe. Furthermore, the scientific theory of relativity acknowledges that time advances at different rates on different moving objects, meaning that there is no such thing as a single universal time.
There is an obscure debate about the nature of time in the study of physics that not only compares the rates of the passage of time on moving objects, but questions the direction of the flow of time. Observation of natural phenomena leads to the conclusion that time flows from past through the present to the future, but there are some ways of observing the flow of time that could lead to the conclusion that time actually flows in the opposite direction. I am not a physicist and I don’t fully understand how this works, but I can grasp the concept of thinking of my own life both in terms of the amount of time that has passed since my birth and also in terms of the amount of time that remains until my death. Since the time of my death is not known, this isn’t a useful way to count in practical terms, so I will continue to count from the time of my birth, which means that if I had been born in Korea, I might have turned 70 on New Year’s Day. Then again I might have turned 71. However, since I was not born in Korea, I guess I’ll wait until June 15 to celebrate my entrance into a new decade.
Then, we are adjusting to living in 2023, which is a new year. But if one travels around the world, there are other ways of counting the passage of time. For example, in Myanmar there are two official calendars. In the Gregorian calendar it is 2023, but in the traditional calendar it is 1384. Tin Thailand it is 2566. Moroccans are praying in 1444 but farming in 2972. In Ethiopia it is 2015 and each year has 13 months.
We have a nephew who married a woman from South Korea, where everyone celebrates their birthdays on New Year’s Eve. It is possible for someone to have three official ages at the same time. Their domestic age is a year older than someone born on the same day in another place because they begin life at age 1. Koreans have little trouble with the difference, knowing that their domestic age is one year more than their international age. Then, there is the fact that many South Koreans celebrate their personal birthdays in a traditional way, advancing their age at on New Year’s Day. To confuse matters more, some traditionalists observe their symbolic birthdays on Lunar New Year’s day rather than on the Solar New Year’s Day. The Lunar New Year’s Day will be January 22 this year. It is also known as “Chinese New Year” and is observed across East Asian Countries and recognized worldwide because of the number of people of Chinese descent who recognize the holiday.
International time, however, designates this year as 2023, as the ISO-approved global standard calendar is the Gregorian calendar. We like to think of this calendar as being superior to other calendars because of its accuracy and efficiency, but it is not any more accurate or efficient than any other calendar. The reality is that we observe this particular way of counting the passage of time as a result of politics. It is a matter of who has won wars and which cultures have dominated world trade and commerce. The Gregorian calendar is a unique product of Renaissance science and Roman Catholic religious doctrine. It officially replaced the Julian calendar upon orders from Pope Gregory XIII in the late 16th century. However, neither Protestants nor Orthodox Christians were quick to embrace the change in the counting of time based on a papal decree. At the time, the variation between the Julian and Gregorian calendars was roughly 10 days. The Gregorian calendar was slightly more accurate, but the Julian calendar was impressive for a system set up in 45BC.
Protestant parts of Europe changed over to the Gregorian system little by little. The Netherlands made the change in 1700 and England and its colonies followed a century later in 1800. By 1900 non-Christian places including Egypt and Japan had switched to what was then the most common calendar, but Orthodox countries like Romania, Russia, and Greece held out for decades. 2000 was the first year that all of the countries of Europe agreed on the Gregorian calendar for the celebration of the new year.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that I have a bit of trouble keeping track of the time. There are plenty of reasons for confusion.
Scientists have now developed super clocks that define time to the tiniest fractions of seconds. No calendar completely lines up with the actual movement of the Sun and planets, necessitating leap years and even leap seconds in order for the calendar to remain synchronized with the movement of the Universe. Furthermore, the scientific theory of relativity acknowledges that time advances at different rates on different moving objects, meaning that there is no such thing as a single universal time.
There is an obscure debate about the nature of time in the study of physics that not only compares the rates of the passage of time on moving objects, but questions the direction of the flow of time. Observation of natural phenomena leads to the conclusion that time flows from past through the present to the future, but there are some ways of observing the flow of time that could lead to the conclusion that time actually flows in the opposite direction. I am not a physicist and I don’t fully understand how this works, but I can grasp the concept of thinking of my own life both in terms of the amount of time that has passed since my birth and also in terms of the amount of time that remains until my death. Since the time of my death is not known, this isn’t a useful way to count in practical terms, so I will continue to count from the time of my birth, which means that if I had been born in Korea, I might have turned 70 on New Year’s Day. Then again I might have turned 71. However, since I was not born in Korea, I guess I’ll wait until June 15 to celebrate my entrance into a new decade.
