TIME AND SPACE
That is simply a part of the historical past of how February – the shortest month, and initially the final month within the Roman calendar – got here to have the job of absorbing these inconsistencies within the temporal calculations of the world’s mostly used calendar.
There may be loads of science, maths and astrophysics explaining the connection between time and the planet we reside on. However I wish to suppose leap years and days provide one thing much more fascinating to contemplate: Why do we’ve calendars anyway?
And what have they obtained to do with how we perceive the marvel and strangeness of our existence within the universe? As a result of calendars inform a narrative, not nearly time, but additionally about house.
Our reckoning of time on earth is thru our spatial relationship to the solar, moon and stars. Time, and its place in our lives, sits someplace between the scientific, the celestial and the non secular.
It’s notoriously slippery, subjective and experiential. It is usually marked, tracked and decided in myriad methods throughout totally different cultures, from tropical to photo voltaic to lunar calendars.
It’s the solar that measures a day and provides us our first reference level for understanding time. However it’s the moon, as a significant celestial physique, that extends our notion of time. By stretching a span of someday into one thing longer, it gives us an opportunity for philosophical reflection.
The solar (or its impact at the very least) is both current or not current. The moon, nevertheless, goes by phases of transformation. It seems and disappears, altering form and hinting that one night time is just not precisely just like the one earlier than or after.
The moon additionally has a definite rhythm that may be tracked and understood as a sample, giving us one other sense of length. Time is simply that – overlapping durations: Instants, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, many years, lifetimes, centuries, ages.
