Happy New Year
It is a new year, 2022. Happy New Year!
Unlike Christmas, whose date has long since been settled (some say by Pope Julius I ), the date of the new year (i.e. the start of a calendar year) or even the notion what a "year" is has always been a bit murky.
There are different kinds of "year."
"Sidereal year" is the time Earth takes to orbit the Sun and come back to the position where stars are back in the same fixed alignment. The name comes from Latin "sidus," related to "asterism," or "star." That form of a year is approximately 365.256 days long, where "day" is defined as an"ephemeris day," which is exactly 86,400 SI seconds long. "Ephemeris" means "diary," but here it means "a book of tables with trajectories of astronomical objects." Such books have been in use for at least 3 thousand years, since the time of Babylonian astronomy.
"Tropical year," on the other hand, is the time Earth takes between equinoxes. Since Earth's axis wobbles, the Earth's position at equinox shifts with time and the stars will be in slightly different positions from equinox to equinox. As a result, the tropical year is about 20 min shorter than the sidereal year. That "wobble" is called precession, and we attach to it different adjectives depending on the type - axial, apsidal, nodal, etc.
Not to be outdone, "Anomalistic year" defines itself as the time Earth takes to complete its (slightly) elliptical orbit around the Sun , measured e.g. by using the extreme points or apsides of the Earth's orbit - the farthest ( aphelion ) and closest ( perihelion ) points to the sun. This is 4 minutes longer that the sidereal year .
We regular people are usually concerned with the "Tropical year," which measures seasons, and thus the right time to, for example, put seeds into the ground - never mind the exact star configurations we might have seen in the night sky if only weren't asleep, tired from all that plowing and seeding. Since not all of us are good enough astronomers to measure equinoxes by ourselves (which is actually not all that difficult, if you put your mind to it), we tend to rely on the "Calendar year" given to us by our culture and ancestors. Since Antiquity (year 45 BC, to be precise), Europeans have measured years as spans of 365.25 days. This is the "Julian Calendar," because it was Julius Caesar who set it up for us.
Julius Caesar's legacy is not only the length of the year, but also the start - on January 1st and not on March 1st, as was the case before. So our New Year is now, and not in spring.
The problem with the tropical year is that it is in reality about 365.242 days long, not 365.25, and those extra 0.008 days (or 12 minutes) per year accumulate. By the 16th century, the calendar year had drifted from the tropical year so much that action was needed to better align the calendar date of the calendar equinox (March 21) with the equinox actually observed. This was essential for people getting the correct time to celebrate Easter, the most important date in their (religious) calendar.
The "official" date for
Easter
was set (after centuries of wrangling) by the
Council of Nicea
(in 325) to be the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the
March equinox
. But by the 1500's, it was already well over week off, and people noticed. So they were thinking and thinking about it, and since at those times such projects took longer than today, it took them over a century to fix this.
Pope
Sixtus IV
started the project in 1475, but it took until 1582 to be completed, when
Pope Gregory XIII
finally set into motion our current system of "leap" years, in which an extra day is added in years divisible by 4, except when divisible by 100 but not 400. Thus was born the Gregorian Calendar.
However, an additional shift to correct the existing gap was still needed, so the Julian Thursday October 4 of that year was followed directly by Gregorian Friday October 15, thus shaving off the 10 days required for realignment to the equinox .
But the Pope is Catholic, so non-Catholic cultures continued with the Julian calendar, because you simply should not accept anything from your adversary, especially if it is a good idea. So the idea of using the Gregorian calendar and to start the year on January 1
was not accepted by many for a very very long time. It took until the 20th century for most countries around the world to finally get on board.
Now pretty much everybody accepts that this is a good way to record the days of the year. People use the Gregorian Calendar (but not always calling it that) as their civil calendar for things like assigning school days or writing shipping contracts. The big religions, however, don't always need all that precision and don't like to change too much. The Orthodox religion decided to be, well, orthodox, and stay with the ever-drifting Julian Calendar. By the 20th century, the drift was already 13 days, so the Russian "October Revolution" is called "October", but actually took place in November, not October; it was on November 7 of the current, modern Russian calendar, but on October 25 of the old Russian calendar, which was being used in 1917, when the revolution took place.
That's also why Orthodox Christmas was celebrated just this past Friday, which our "modern" Gregorian Calendar calls January 7, but the Orthodox Julian Calendar calls December 25, i.e. Christmas.
So now that we have established the meaning of Orthodox Christmas, we turn to the quiz question that needs to be posed now, because next week it might already be irrelevant:
Your Orthodox Christmas Quiz
(NovaxxKozack)
January 7 was Orthodox Christmas, so an Orthodox priest went to visit the Serbian top tennis player, Novak Djokovic , who is known for his anti-vaccine sentiments. Djokovic was refused entry by Australia because he isn't vaccinated and was waiting for his case to be resolved in a special "quarantine" hotel. His request to have meals prepared by his personal chef was refused, as well as the visit by the priest. Which of the following is also true?
-
He is ultra-nationalist and hangs out with with Serbians
associated with war crimes and genocide.
-
He believes that impure water can be cleaned simply through
positive emotions and thinking alone,
-
or that ancient civilizations built pyramids in Bosnia (in
Visoko) and the "pyramids" now have magnetic healing powers,
-
and also once determined that he was sensitive to gluten by
holding a slice of bread against his stomach,
-
while his wife posted views that 5G spreads Covid.
-
But tennis players are actually more likely to be vaccinated
than general population or other professional leagues
-
Note: professional
tennis players are generally not known to be great thinkers or very
accomplished academically. For example Rafael Nadal, often
considered to be one of the smartest ones, does have a doctorate, but it is an
honorary one. Romanian star Mihaela Buzarnescu earned
her Ph.D, but it was from "sports science", whatever that
means. Russian Mikhail Youzhny's case is similar: after being
awarded an "honour"(?) master degree (in sports) by
the Russian government for his Davis Cup success, he earned a
philosophy Ph.D. in "attitudes of tennis".
-
Note: Czechs were
always pretty good in tennis, even though mostly in the competitive, not the
recreational kind. (Yet my parents actually met playing recreational
tennis.) One of our street neighbours when I was growing up was a
higher-up tennis coach (maybe national, I don't remember) and did have an
"earned" doctorate. It was in the academic discipline of
"tennis backhand". He was a pretty nice fellow and we got along
well, but his academic achievements did not draw much respect from my parents, and his case was sometimes used by them as an exemplum in
their discussions on what's wrong with the academic system of the day.
(Those troubles in academia got much worse since then, I'd say.)
-
Note: Other sports are
a bit different in that regard. For example, Frank Ryan was
an American football quarterback, one of the best for Cleveland Browns,
where he spent most of his career.
But he also holds a degree in physics and a Ph.D. in mathematics, has an (impressive) "Erdos number" of 3, and was able to switch from being a professional NFL player to a career as a professor of mathematics and computational and applied mathematics at Rice University. Sports journalists were joking that "Browns' offense consisted of a quarterback who understood Einstein's theory of relativity and ten teammates who didn't know there was one"
-
A curious case
is Moe Berg, who was a professional baseball player, but also a
highly educated, charming man who fluently spoke a score of languages, perhaps
10. During WWII he was sent as a spy to Switzerland to meet and
befriend Werner Heisenberg, who was visiting there, and to gain
understanding of the progress of the Nazi nuclear program and the mental state
of its lead scientist. (Heisenberg was an incredibly
capable and talented scientist, but also a highly emotional anti-Semite with
self-delusions and questionable morality. Berg was
Jewish.) Berg's potential following his baseball career was high, but
eventually it didn't pan out and took turn for the worse. In the end he
even refused to work on his memoir because his assigned co-writer confused him
with Moe Howard of the
Three Stooges
.
-
There was a movie made about Berg's spying adventures.
There, he was instructed (and trained) to kill Heisenberg
if it seemed to him that the Nazi program was too close to making and
using the bomb and Heisenberg was capable of carrying it out.
In the end, he chose to let Heisenberg live.
(Maybe there was too much uncertainty about
Heisenberg, in principle, to take proper measures). 😏
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