Now Let's Question Time And The Earth's Movements

Hey buddy! Do you have a friend who is there for you 24/7/365? Sorry, that is not really good enough. If your friend truly had your back, then he would be there for you 24.0000006/7/365.2421891. Also, George Washington was born on February 22nd, 1732. At least, that is what we are told. However, his family bible says he was born on February 11th, 1731. So, which is it, Mr I-cannot-tell-a-lie? Do not even ask about 1752. In Russia, 1752 was pretty normal, but check out what the British Empire was at that year. Nothing really out of ordinary, except September, where 2nd was followed by 14th, so eleven days just deleted? Where did they go? What happened there? It is time.

Pixabay image (Public Domain - CCO Licensed)

To question time and how the earth moves, we are considering both of these as strange things

We all love time-lap videos of the stars moving across the sky but really, we are the ones that are moving. Tumbling through the universe on a giant wet rock vehicle called earth with a windshield called the sky. As viewed from above the North Pole, we spin anti-clockwise, West chases East. I usually remember thinking of the US as a weird main headed animal with Texas and Florida lakes running forward. But we do not just spin, we also revolve around the sun on a plane tilted to 23.4° relative to our spin. It is kind of nasty at this scale but from this perspective, you can see the sun rising and settings. It is just the earth pointing you towards and then away from the sun. This motion causes your sunrise, your noon the moment when the sun is highest in your sky before your sunset.

Meridian

To more closely investigate this movement, let us talk about meridians. You are on one at this very moment. Your meridian is just a line from where you are right now straight towards the North and South Poles. It is a line of Longitude as opposed to the horizontal lines that lay flat when North or South is up that we call a Flatitude or actually, Latitude. The sun is highest in the sky to you, your noon when your meridian is pointed right at the sun. But something happens at this moment. All shadows around you points directly towards one of earth's poles. And last, you are on the Subsolar point.

The Subsolar point is the point on the earth surface directly below the sun.

It is always at somewhere. You can check its current location online, links as always the description on. The Subsolar point, shadows or straight down, so they can easily disappear. Twice a year, the Subsolar point crosses over Hawaii, the only place in the US where it lands and when it does, it is called Lahaina Noon meaning Cross sun. Straight vertical objects will unnatural during the split time where they do not belong as if they were photoshoped in without regard for reality. In Honolulu, a sculpture by Gucci called Sky day cast a shadow all day every day except during Lahaina Noon when its shadow is a perfect circle.

You may not live in a place where the sun ever appears directly overhead but once every earth rotation, the Subsolar point falls somewhere on your meridian making it noon (for you). The technical name for this noon(for you) is Local Apparent Solar Noon. The clock on your wrist and the clock on your phone do not tell you your Local Apparent Solar Time because long ago we realise that every meridian has its own time. A person that is just few kilometers away seeing different shadows than you did will disagree with you on what time it was. So, towns adopted their own time and later on they sticked with standardized and time zone that we know of today.

Lahaina Noon day in Honolulu: Wikimedia image (Author: Daniel Ramirez - CCO Licensed)

Well, that is not all we did not like about shadow based sun dial time. To explore deeper, we have to begin by asking what is a day? I mean obviously it is just the time it takes the earth to turn around once but according to WAT, everything on space is moving in some way too. The universe does not include a convenient sheet of graph paper at absolute rest that we can trace path on. The best we can do on that front is to look at very far away stars. So far away, like this feature of the landscape out of the window of a moving car. They barely move.

So to them, a meridian on the earth completes its move around about once every 23.9 hours. This is called a Sidereal day. Sidereal means pertaining to the stars. Even though the Sidereal day seems pretty clear, it is not what our calendars and clocks are based on. Because there is a neural star which position relative does as a bigger effect on our lives.

Looking down on the North pole at earth's anti-clockwise spin, the earth also moves anti-clockwise around the sun. After a Sidereal day, the earth is moved a bit longer at its orbit, so some more rotation is required for the same meridian to point back towards the sun again. This longer definition of one rotation is what the modern timer and clock is based on. This is called a Solar day.

But here is the thing. Exactly how long the earth has to rotate to complete a Solar day changes day to day, Our clocks are just based on the average amount of time this takes. So throughout the year, they fall ahead and behind the sun. Below is a picture of the sun path to cross the sky every single day. If our clocks actually told us the Local Apparent Solar time, if you take the picture of the path every day at noon, you should get a line of sun.

Sun's path to cross the sky every single day: Wikimedia image (Author: Jim slater307 - CCO Licensed)

But this is what really happens. Over the cause of the year, it will appear that your clock is running slow and then fast and then slow again and then fast again. This problem has been known since ancient time even if its clock wasn't. In other to reconcile the two, the Equation of Time was constructed. In this sense, equation means to reconcile. The Equation of time was applied to what the clock says in order to compute the Real Time, the Sun Timeis sundown.

Some fancy clocks called Equation Clock well, may reduce the difference but eventually, we gave up. We gave up and just said the Real Time is not what the sun says, it is what our inventions say. But this transition was a big one. It was humanity growing up. It was the first time you realise you are stronger than your parents. We realized that our time pieces were more regular and turned us back on the time pieces nature had.

But what causes this disagreement in the first place?

As it turns out, the answer revolves around revolving. The way the earth revolves around the sun. If the equator faced the sun all the time and the earth always orbited at the same speed, the Subsolar point would just stay right there on the equator throughout the year. Anymore of extra time spent rotating, the solar day will always be the same. But two things are the case. First of all, the earth's orbit is slightly equitable. So its speed varies throughout the year.

When its moving around the sun faster (around the beginning of January), the amount of extra turning time needed to complete the Solar Day is longer than when it is farther away from the sun and moving more slowly. There is more. Because the earth is tilted, the Subsolar point is dragged throughout the year and it circles around the earth, it is not the equator. So, it changes direction, moving North-East then leveling out to go South-East before leveling out and going North-East again.

During the time of the year when the Subsolar point is being dragged by earth's orbit, mostly, East gains against earth's spin faster and more time is required for the day to finish. By coincidence, we arrive at the time when both of these phenomenal, lengthened and shortened days are roughly the same time. So they add up making September 18th almost a minute shorter than the longest day of the year, December 22nd.

December has the shortest period of daylight but the whole solar day from sunrise to sunrise is for everyone on earth, the longest of the year on December 22nd. People in the North just enjoy most of the day in darkness. That does not only affect how long the day is, it also affects how long the year is. This is because the earth's tilt is what causes the seasons. For the half of the earth tilted towards the sun, the same amount of solar radiation is spread across less space. So there is more heat energy laid down for area. This causes what we call Sumer and Winter for the other half. The amount of time for one of these seasonal orientation of the earth to its kind again is called a Solar year or a Tropical year.

It is a very useful way to define a year because it contains every single season exactly. So it is based on the very orientations that caused it. But the problem is this; the number of Solar day that occurs in a Solar year is not a whole number. It is almost three hundred and sixty five. But after of that many Solar Days, about a quarter of the day more happens before the Solar Year starts again. This makes designing a calendar more like designing a calenDAAAR!

If your calendar only ever has three hundred and sixty five days in a year, overtime, those days will drift from the seasonal positions they used to occur on. Unless this extra cover of the turn has up to a full day after four years. After four years, you could see March 1st coming too soon. So if we just delay much by having an extra day at the end of January every four years, a leap day, we are back on track. Leap days do not add days to your life, you are still going to live the same number of them. They just change what we call them. But who cares about being one day earlier every four years!? After all, one day is not much. you hardly notice it. But overtime...

Julian calendar

Well, if American founders have declared not only independence from Bolton but also from Leap days, today, two hundred and forty years later, their calendar would be about two months ahead of earth's position, putting America coldest winter days in April and its hardest summer days in October. Adding a day every four years is what the famous Julian calendar does, introduces in 46BC by Julius Caesar, it was the key factor that standardize Western calendar for a very long time. But it is not perfect.

Look closely. Leap days actually move the calendar just slightly too far each time. That is because three hundred and sixty five and a quarter Solar Days do not occur within one Solar Year. The real number is slightly less and fluctuates year to year based on long time changes to earth and the sun's movements. Which means adding one day every four years is just too many.

Okay, just for the record. The actual days in a year is not 365.25 but 365.242181

By 1582, Julian calendar dates were ten days behind the seasons compared to where they used to be. That is not bad. Ten days was not too much but the Catholic Church cared because they wanted history to occur exactly when it used to centuries ago. Then we realized that if the Leap days push the calendar too far behind the seasons, we would just need to celebrate few of them and that is the problem.

Specifically, we would need three fewer Leap days every four centuries. The way they wanted to achieve this is that every four years will continue to be a Leap Year except if it was divisible by a hundred, unless it was also evenly divisible by four hundred. This removes three every four hundred years.

Gregorian calendar

On October 4th, 1582, Pope Gregory (The 13th) introduced the new calendar which took his name - the Gregorian calendar which is what we use today. He also undid the drift that had occurred since the olden days of the Julian and declared on October 4th that tomorrow would be October 15th.

October 5th to 14th never happened in 1582 in countries that listened to the Pope. It took the rest of the world centuries to hop onboard. England and its colonies (soon to be the United States of America) adopted the Gregorian calendar in September 1752 by which point their Julian days were off from the seasons by eleven days, hence the disappearing of the 3th through 13th.

When adopted, the 1st of the year was also moved from March to January 1st. This explains why George Washington's birthday has two answers. Although more closely hit the seasons than the Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar is still imperfect. Its difference causes date to become one day off from seasons every three thousand two hundred and sixteen years.

Although counters have been proposed and trust me, they would be great anyway, but enough of all of these. Let us sit back and enjoy earth's movement without trying to divide it up. Keep in mind that the earth's oceans and the liquid inside and other celestial bodies are always pulling and slashing around and might slightly slow the earth's movements. That is worth measurable, but difficult to notice in big scales and also do not look at this in a short term like the length of the human life.

Our universe

Looking from above the North Pole, the equator spins counter-clockwise at about 1670 kilometers per hour relative to the sun whose orbits counter-clockwise at 108,000 kilometers per hour along the path towards to 23.4° of its spin. Within our local neighbor stars, our entire solar system is drifting 70,000 kilometers per hour.

Our solar system is part of the giant galaxy called the Milky Way on a point turned to about 60° approximately like the windshield occur. Our entire solar system rises clockwise around the center at about 792000 kilometers per hour.

Our whole galaxy is also moving through the universe. We noticed this because when the universe was very young, it was so hot. Electrons and protons jumped around and light scattered constant. They could not travel very far before scattering again so the universe was whole peak. But then, around 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe cooled just enough for the electrons and protons to form Hydrogen.

Protons decoupled from the obstacle course and could travel relatively uncompounded and thus, universe became transparent to light. Since then, those early protons have been propagating through space. It took the universe around 400 million years to emerge from the cosmic microwave background radiation. It is visible in every direction. Microwave because although they used to be more energetic, the universe expansion has done a great job.

Some parts of this radiation are more active than the other and that is because of our own movements through the universe. controlling from the movement we have already talked about, relative to this infinite baby picture of the universe, the first and oldest detectable light, we are all headed right along the molten way in the direction that the consolation of Leo and Virgo are at a speed of 2.1 million kilometers per hour.

This is how you and earth's surface are moving through the universe. You did not buy ticket for this ride, your parents signed you up for this great adventurous ride.

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References

• Lahaina noon
• Solstice
• Our Expanding Universe: Age, History & Other Facts
• Meridian
• Calendar
• Julius Caesar
• Pope Gregory XIII
• Time

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