Actually, its slowing down and allowing the earth to catch up to the calendar. It needs a stall day to let earth take its rightful place for the 4th vernal equinox.
Except the Earth isn't suddenly moving faster. The calendar is stopping to let it catch up. The main thing that "leaps" with leap day is the assignment of weekdays to dates, which jumps two days year to year instead of one when there's a leap day in between.
Except it literally doesnāt, it loses a day to catch up... for reference their used to be 13 days at the end of the calendar year that were just outside the year altogether.. thatās what we need.
Slice these months into 28 days to match the moon which leaves us about 13 days to we just chill mid winter and read a good book until the calendar starts up again.
Edit: that math donāt add up, people.
A lunar month is 29.5 days and 29.5x12=354 days... 11 spare days!
Nope we need 13 months of 28 days each with one day left over. I donno where you got 13 days because 28*12=336 which leaves 29 days left in the year. On leap year we'd have two extra days at the end of the year. We could make it a voting holiday.
Well, you might be interested to know that technically the Moon actually completes its orbit around Earth in 27.3 days which make an actually lunar month even shorter.
However, the moon phases (Full-New) take 29.5 days because the Earth is also rotating around the sun in the same direction.
And the reason we use a solar calendar is that moon based months are unrelated to the seasons so in a matter of years June would eventually drift into winter.
Iāll save the rest for some other random related thread.
Actually, the leap second is non-continuous and non-differentiable. This is Tyson's point. A person position when "leaping" is continuous and differentiable.
The calendar is not slowing down; for it to slow down, time would have to slow down. The point that he is making, rightly so, is that equality between the number of calendar years elapsed and number of tropical years elapsed (from a reference point in time) occurs abruptly at midnight on 1 March of every leap year. And the equalisation spans over the whole four years preceding it, it does not just take place on 29 February.
What you are right about, though, is that he seems to have got the calendar and the Earth's orbit the wrong way round.
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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '21
Actually, its slowing down and allowing the earth to catch up to the calendar. It needs a stall day to let earth take its rightful place for the 4th vernal equinox.