The other day, I was considering changing back to “Standard Time” in a few weeks and I started thinking about all of the abstract ways humans think about Time.
Not to get too into the weeds here, but the time we keep, at least as a human construct, is really weird.
Time is wasting, time is walking
Hootie and the Blowfish references aside, time is a tough thing to not waste. Literally. Because we all think we get 365 days around the Sun. But we don’t.
It takes the Earth 364.25 days to go around the Sun. Yeah, not 365. That is how we got a Leap Day. Because the Earth is not a great time-keeping device. Nothing comes in a perfect, repeatable, pattern.
In fact, it isn’t even 364.25. It is more like 364.2-something. Because it turns out that the Jet Stream, the thing in the atmosphere that controls where large-scale weather patterns go, affects how fast the earth spins. Seriously.
The Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum dictates that as the Jet Stream gets more wavy (that is to say, when there are bigger ridges and troughs), the Earth responds by physically spinning slower.
So, “High Noon” on your watch isn’t always “High Noon” in reality.
On top of that the Moon is actually slowing down the rotation of the Earth, too. The gravitational pull of the rotation of the moon is slowing down the Earth rotation by fractions of a second every hundred years.
Because of all of this, many years ago Leap Seconds were tallied and they are now added to the calendar as needed.
And we humans do all of this so that we each of us look down at our watch (or our phone, which opens up another can of time-keeping worms) we all can tell each other what time it is.
I don’t care if Monday’s blue
More 90s rock, for you there. The Cure sang about the days of the week. Talking about Friday being in Love. It was fitting, even if on accident. Becuse the names for the days of the week are a mixture of Latin and Norse.
If you look at the days of the week in, say, Spanish, you start to get a closer idea about where the days get their names from.
– Lunes (Monday)
– Martes (Tuesday)
– Miércoles (Wednesday)
– Jueves (Thursday)
– Viernes (Friday)
– Sábado (Saturday)
– Domingo (Sunday)
The five that jump out are the first five.
– Luna (the name of our Moon)
– Martian (Mars)
– Mercury
– Jovien (Jupiter)
– Venus
Going back to The Cure, they say in that song that “Friday, I’m in love.” That makes sense. Friday, names after Venus, the Goddess of Love.
But you can see how in Spanish, a language based in Latin, that we have five of the seven days named for the Sun, the Moon, and four of the planets.
Sabado and Domingo, in Spanish, don’t have any hints. But in English, they may.
– Saturday (Saturn)
– Sunday (the Sun)
So, on a traditional calendar, we have The Sun (the “first” day of the week), the Moon (the “second” day of the week), Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.
What about Uranus, Neptune? Pluto? When the calendar was invented, those planets (well, and Pluto, no longer a planet) had not been discovered yet.
In fact, the term “Planet” comes from the Greek word for “wanderer” because these were the “stars” in the night sky that didn’t move in the same way as the rest of the stars. They later found that these “stars” were actually large bodies of rock and gas in our Solar (Sol = name of the Sun) System.
So, ancient humans, gave names to each next sunrise (day) a name based on these Planetas as well as the Sun and the Moon.
Why? To keep track of time. Then as each set of “days” ended, it was started over. A new “week” of days.
Once ancient humans did that, they were able to plan growing seasons around the predictability of the weather over a given time period. For example, after 12 weeks, you would start of a new season.
Now they could plant crops, herd cattle and sheep, and make plans for harvesting on a repeatable schedule.
Back to “falling back”
It will be time to “Fall Back” on November 1st this year. So you have another month of Daylight Saving Time before the sun sets even earlier. In time. You know, the made up thing that we use to organize life.
It is weird.
