VGRC

Lately for me, the concept of "New Years" has begun to mean less and less to me. Now, I'm not speaking from a practical point-of-view such as "Well, it's just another year who cares," (which is another view I subscribe to, but that isn't the point of this argument) but rather from a technical point-of-view. From this perspective, I see that society's general perception of a "year" is closely tied to an arbitrary set of rules known as the calendar year, a man-made system of measurement and organization that tries to mirror the movements of celestial bodies. This is in contrast to an astronomical year, which is (very loose definition) the time that elapses while the Earth completes one revolution of orbit around the Sun.

Of the two "years" mentioned above, only one of those is scientifically real: While the definition of a calendar year only exists in our minds or on paper, the definition of an astronomical year is backed by the physically occurring event of the Earth revolving around the Sun. This is analagous to my views on how the "law" and how physics view speeding in an automobile. The law, a physically intangible idea, says not to speed or you are breaking the law. Physics, however, says not to speed or you have a greater chance of losing control of your vehicle, potentially resulting in causing the death of yourself or others.

While putting together evidence to refute the "New Year" traditionally beginning on January 1st, I composed my argument that there is physical "starting line" for where a year begins, since the only evidence for our currently accepted transition point of January 1st is, well, it's January 1st. If the year is only the duration of an orbit, then the "start" and "end" of the year is only the furthermost points of the duration. With this logic, two conclusions can be reached:

• As a measure of revolutions around the sun, a year can start or end anywhere, so long as the endpoints do not exceed or cut short the duration of the orbit.
• As a measure of time, a year can (and does) begin or end at any given moment.

However, looking to better understand the astronomical year was a complicated affair, leading me through various articles of celestial activity and human systems of measurement. Join me as I attempt to weed the physical from the non-physical!

Mankind has had many ways of counting time, much of which revolves around years, days and lunar cycles, and attempting to correlate relationships between them all. So to fully understand how we measure a year, we need to know how we define a day.

Defined as a unit of time, a day is 86,400 seconds. Defined as an event, a day is a single rotation of the Earth on its axis. There are two ways to define a day: The solar day and the sidereal day.

The solar day is the mean time it takes for the Earth to complete one rotation in respect the sun. This day is the one we physically observe: The clockwork rising and setting of the sun. We experience roughly 365 of these days in a single orbit around the sun. However, there is also the sidereal day, which is a single rotation of the Earth in respect to distant stars. In this case, we can see that there are 366 rotations of the Earth in a year, because our rotation around the Sun hides rotation from our point of view. The sidereal day is actually nearly 4 minutes shorter than the solar day. Confused yet? Lets continue.

While the sidereal day is the actual 360 degree rotation of the Earth, observing it from the Earth would result in the sunup/sundown pattern gradually shifting forwards throughout the day until it was back to normal at the end of the year cycle.

If that doesn't confuse you enough, the rotation of the Earth is gradually slowing thanks to tidal acceleration, increasing the length of a day by a dozen or so milliseconds every millennium, making long-term units of time based off of a day virtually impossible.

In older societies, we also used to make use of the lunar cycle as part of the calendar. The concept of a "month" was originally based off the time it took the Moon to orbit the Earth. However, due to varying degrees of measurement, as well as the fact that a year cannot be divided into an integer amount of lunations, has led to this falling out of practice. Our current observation of 12 months is a result of ancient lunar calendars that observed 12 lunar cycles as "months," and every so often an extra month would be crammed in to keep the cycle in synchronization with the astronomical year. Needless to say, it was a bit messy, so now we observe "months" only as a way of breaking up the year, or to identify local seasons.

Which brings us back to the year. Once we got through the ancient fad of using intercalary months, we have been able to somewhat-accurately pinpoint the amount of days within an astronomical year. A calendar proposed in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, estimated to be written 3rd or 4th century BC, put it at 364 days. The ancient Egyptians had it at 365. The Julian calendar, as well as is derivatives such as the Gregorian and the Revised Julian, put it at 365 days with a formula for adding "leap days" to more subtly reconcile the calendar with the astronomical year. All of these calendars still deviate from the astronomical year; some by a few seconds, some by several dozen hours.

This is also compounded by how we "count" years, as different societies have different epoch dates. What some of us view as year 2010 is actually year 5770 on the Hebrew calendar.

With all this, we must ask ourselves, what of it all matters?

From a social standpoint, it's impractical to ignore all man-made calendars, as they serve useful in coordinating people on a large scale and quickly referencing events in the far past or future. Even numbered years, which are based on an arbitrary epoch, serve a use in computer programming, where it makes more sense to store time as an integer.

However, these needs of society don't mean we can't objectively look at how society views time, and adjust our own views accordingly. Remember that our own calendars are merely a tool to measure time in relation to how the Earth moves in relation to the Sun. These calendars do not define what time is. However, that doesn't stop people from taking the measurements of our tools as if their definitions are applicable to nature or the spiritual world, as evidenced by the cults that spring up every time a new "century" rolls over. If a God exists, I'm sure he isn't going to give a shit what number we're calling the year.

If you want to start counting "years" from anywhere, the only acceptable definition is the amount of orbits the Earth has completed around the sun since its creation. You can't say "beginning of time" because the measure of an astronomical year is completely irrelevant outside of the Earth-Sun system. So even from a spiritual standpoint, the figure of a "year" is meaningless.

The Earth revolving around the Sun is a fact backed up by an observable event. It being "Year 2010" is a fact backed up by nothing more than arbitrary rules on paper and in our own heads.