Memories of the 28th Century

Horology (via Latin horologium from Greek ὡρολόγιον, from ὥρα hṓra "hour; time" + -o- interfix + suffix -logy; lit. the study of time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horology
I have written about horological reform before, and I thought it was time to do so again, but this dictionary in Microsoft doesn’t seem to realize that “horological” is a perfectly good and correctly spelled word. Perhaps other s agree.

Apparently there are few straightforward histories of systems of keeping time, and there is no coherent explanation of how a twelve/twenty-four hour day arose; although it appears to go back to ancient Mesopotamia. There probably is a good website for the history of horology, but I haven’t found it, yet. Or perhaps no one has ever dreamed up a good reason for the twenty-four hour day. It would make much more sense, if days were one hundred hours, and if there were one hundred minutes in an hour, and if there were one hundred seconds in a minute. Calculating time differences would be very easy, and those people who want more hours in a day would get their wishes. It is possible that this would result in seconds being too short; there would be one million in a day versus the present 86, 400. If larger seconds will be deemed more desirable, then we can simply reduce the number of minutes in an hour to ten, and that would leave us with one hundred thousand seconds in a day, not much different from the present second.

But we should remember that the length of a day has changed and will change in the future, because the radius of the Earth’s orbit has increased over the aeons; thus making the days longer. For that reason we might consider adopting a standard day (or a standard second) that would be independent of the planet’s location, along the lines of a standard “star date”. That system already partly exists in the form of the use of Julian days as a way to define when something took place.

Those who don’t want to go with a system that would be a simple and universally applicable might want to also improve the calendar instead. Here again the length of the year and of a lunar cycle have changed in the past, and they will continue to change, so there is no reason to use those as standards. The simplest system certainly is to just number the days and ignore the weeks, months, and years that we use now. What good is a variable unit? The only question is where we start the series. Julian days are a possibility; they start at January 1, 4713 BCE. But there are huge problems with that system. It would be safer to step away from the Julian calendar completely and introduced a more inclusive system. I already have some ideas about that period, but I don’t want to suggest that now; I’d rather that others had opportunities to give their input. We would be better off adopting a system that is not tied to a single planet, because we will be trying to apply that to many other planets with different periods, etc.

Then there's the matter of adjusting the Earth to the cycles that we want. It's only a small planet, so we could move it toward or away from the Sun, and that would change the length of the year. Similarly, we could move the Moon nearer or farther to adjust the length of its cycle. Thus, we could move the Earth sunward about 1.65%, and that would shorten the year to an even 360 days. If we kept the present eccentricity or increased it a little, then the average temperature would be about the same, but the seasons might be a little more pronounced. With a 360 day year we could have twelve thirty day months with no extras, so we could arrange it so that every date of one month would be the same day of the week as that date in every other month, if we used six day weeks, that is.

This is a matter that concerns all humans, so additional input would be desirable. What length year do you want? Do you want to keep months and weeks?

If it turns out that everyone wants to keep weeks and months, then we could move the Moon to an orbit that would result in a thirty day month, and that would allow us to have five weeks of six days each in every month. It would be much easier to calculate dates.


http://nrich.maths.org/6070
http://www.mcwdn.org/Time/TimeHistory.html
http://andersoninstitute.com/history...t-devices.html