by Dr. Mark Nicholson
I am writing this on the first day of 2017 in the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar. In the Western calendar it is September 11, a day that goes down in infamy and will be remembered for decades. I am sceptical enough to avoid saying ‘forever’ because the other day I asked a group of young U.S. students at our International school in Kenya to give me the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor, arguably of greater significance than 9/11, and no one even got the right year. Memories are short. In the U.S.A. neither day is commemorated as a national holiday.
Ethiopian New Year is normally a big celebration but as it was a Wednesday, a fasting day in the Ethiopian Church, the feasting began on September 12. Their New Year was set from the day when Makeda, Queen of Saba (Sheba) returned to Ethiopia from her visit to King Solomon, who had sired her son, the first emperor, Menelik I, around 950 B.C.E.
The Western New Year (January 1) is an arbitrary date. A more logical start to the year should have been the winter solstice, December 20/21 when days start to lengthen again in the northern hemisphere. Some of the dozen or so ‘New Years’ around the world start with the arrival of spring at the March equinox in the northern hemisphere, where 95% of humans have always lived. Had an aboriginal Australian devised a calendar we might well have begun our year on June 20 or September 20.
During the early Roman times, March was the first month of the year, September was the seventh month (septem means 7 for those who have forgotten their school Latin) and December (decem, 10) was the tenth. January with 29 days was the 11th month. In 153 B.C.E. the Roman Senate changed the new year to start at the eleventh month for political reasons. Thereafter the Julian calendar (devised by Julius Caesar), with its leap year, was adopted in Europe and lasted for over 1500 years. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII started a new calendar. The Julian one was slipping behind the seasons owing to the slightly longer duration of the Earth’s passage round the Sun. The Gregorian calendar was introduced in Britain during the reign of George II. September 2, 1752 was followed the next day by September 14, a change that upset many people as they believed they were losing eleven days of their lives.
Having an Iranian dentist, a Hindu Tamil doctor and a Muslim Gujarati car mechanic I have shared various New Year festivities at different times throughout the year. The Chinese, like the early Romans, have their variable new year in our January or February (the second new moon after the winter solstice). The Islamic New Year is also based on lunar cycles, giving the year 354 days, which explains why this year (2024) is split between 1445 and 1446 in the Hijri calendar. Jesus, being a Jew, would have enjoyed his new year (Rosh Hashanah) in October, when Jews mark the end of the seven days of creation (Yawm Teruah) as recorded in Leviticus .
So what is a ‘new year’? It is an arbitrary point in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, which takes roughly 365 days. The Earth does not fly around the Sun at a constant speed: its elliptical path is deflected and/or slowed or speeded up by the gravitational effects of other planets. More accurately, it is 365 and a quarter days which explains the need for a leap year every four years, except that in two (e.g. 1900 & 2100) out of the four ‘turn of the centuries’ one has to skip the leap year[2]. Even the more precise 365 days, 6 hours and 9 minutes does not satisfy Science; it is currently accurate to one-hundred thousandth of a day (365.24219 days).
So if a year is not an accurate measure of time, what is? A month is no good: our months are based on the lunar revolution round the Earth, which is a particularly ambiguous duration. A sidereal month, 27.3 days, is the time taken for the Moon to complete one orbit of the earth relative to a fixed point such as a distant star. But the Earth also moves relative to the Sun in that time so the Moon has to complete rather more than one orbit to return to the same phase as seen from the Earth. That is the synodic month (29.5 days). Our Western calendar has months with annoyingly different number of days in each month. The Ethiopian calendar has 13 months: 12 months of 30 days each and one month of 5 or six days at the start of the year. Why Ethiopia is now in the year 2017 is another question[3].
A day (one Earth rotation) is even worse because our planet rotates in 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds at the moment, and it is slowing down anyway.
We have to rely on the lowly second, which was always defined as 1/86,400th of a day. Does the day define the second or the second, the day? For accuracy we now have a more precise description of a second and to understand it, it might help to have a Ph.D. in atomic physics[4]. So finally, do we have a measurement of time that is accurate, easy to understand and immutable?
Sadly not, and we have our friend Albert to blame for that. We all know Einstein for his famous equation, E=Mc squared, but that did not give him half as much headache as the application of Pythagoras’s Hypotenuse Theorem to time. Einstein proved that there is nothing constant about time. I will try to explain it as simply as possible.
Einstein did not measure c (the speed of light). It had already been measured by various scientists with increasing accuracy since about 1650. Michelson and Morley had verified the accepted speed by 1887 at just under 300,000 km per second. What Einstein then postulated was that there were no instantaneous reactions in Nature; so there had to be a maximum possible speed for any reaction and that that velocity was the speed of electromagnetic radiation (which includes light).
While sitting at his desk as a clerk in the Patents office in Zurich, he considered various thought experiments. He imagined a man sitting on the front of a rocket going through space at the speed of light. Right in front of him is a mirror and he is trying to shave. If he is already traveling at the speed of light then the light from his face won’t reach the mirror unless it reaches twice the speed of light, which Einstein had already defined as impossible. These thought experiments drove him to the edge of a nervous breakdown and took him several years to resolve. The error he made was the error that humanity had always made, which is that time was regarded as constant.
Einstein proved that time was dependent on the speed of a subject. I am on the Equator spinning (rotating) at 1670 km/h. So if you, dear reader, are standing on the North Pole, you are not moving relative to me. Your watch will be travelling 0.0000000002 seconds per day slower than mine will: that is both accurate and measurable. We can live with that because the difference in speed is minimal. But if you send your spouse on a holiday to a nearby star at 0.8 the speed of light and wait for his/her return after fifty years, the traveller will aver that they have only been away for thirty years. You may argue as much you like but the reality is that you are both correct. I still have the five pages of relatively simple equations that I wrote out 50 years ago that prove his paradox on time (the Relativity of Simultaneity).
As Einstein might have said, put that in your pipe and smoke it, and have a happy New Year.
[1] Transliterated and pronounced as Melkam adissi ammyt
[2] Here I have a personal interest. A very good friend of my father’s whose family owned a model toy train company was a watch collector. One of his watches was made by Abraham Breguet around 1790 and was the only one ever made to correct the date not only for the turn of the centuries with no leap year (e.g. 1900 & 2100) but the turn of the centuries which had a leap year (2000 & 2400). He sold it at Christie’s in 1978 for 220,000 guineas, it would now be worth several million dollars.
[3] One slightly facetious answer is that the camel bearing the news of Jesus' birth took seven years to wander down from Bethlehem to the Horn of Africa.
[4] Under the Systeme Internationale (SI), grams, meters etc. have to be defined. The second is the time that elapses during 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation produced by the transition between two levels of the cesium-133 atom. This is the atomic clock.
Comments