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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 dwell on. However I wish to suppose leap years and days provide one thing much more fascinating to contemplate: Why do we’ve got calendars anyway?
And what have they received 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 in addition about area.
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 completely 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 serious celestial physique, that extends our notion of time. By stretching a span of sooner or later into one thing longer, it affords us an opportunity for philosophical reflection.
The solar (or its impact at the least) is both current or not current. The moon, nonetheless, goes by way of phases of transformation. It seems and disappears, altering form and hinting that one night time just isn’t 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.
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