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Is there a scientific calendar which uses a different reference than Jesus? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by stardustpathsofglory@lemmy.world to c/science@lemmy.world

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I hope questions are allowed here. I am curios if there is a different sort of scientific calendar which does not use the birth of Jesus as a reference like AD and BC. For example Kurzgesagt's calendars use the the current year plus 10000 as this represents the human better or something like that.

Would there be a way to do this more accurately? How could we, in a scientific correct way, define a reference from where we are counting years?

Also I have read about the idea of having 13 months instead of 12 would be "nice" because then we could have a even distributed amount of days per month.

Are there already ideas for this? What would you recommend to read?

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[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 26 points 3 months ago

The start of the calendar has to be arbitrary, there's no way around that as it's not feasible to measure the time since the beginning of the universe with good enough accuracy.

As others commented, the Julian Day is a time measure that is actually used in astronomy, and Unix time is a time stamp standard (not really a calendar, although it could be if we got used to it) that is mostly a way to store time points, not really to consume them before converting to a more readable form.

But as a scientist who is wholly irreligious, I'm not overly bothered by using the Gregorian calendar, even though it has Christian (and a lot of pre-Christian) elements. Its annoyances (different numbers of days in each month, weeks not aligning with years, leap years etc.) are due to the fact that we decided to measure time in these arbitrary units. At least it's universal in the modern era (often in conjunction with another calendar), and everywhere you go people understand what "August 5, 2024" means (although August might have to be translated to the target language, since the names of the months are not universal).

That's more than you can say about non-time units of measurement (I'm looking at you, imperial and US customary units!!)

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

The second best thing about US customary units is that they are now defined by metric units.

The most best thing will be when they finally go away.

[-] marcos@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

although August might have to be translated to the target language

Funnily enough, Augustus being a person's name¹, anybody that uses those same months will understand without translation.

1 - Well, ok, a personal title. Even more funnily, a claim of being god... that's completely independent from the one the OP is concerned about.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 months ago

Interestingly, that is not the case. Month names can differ in different languages. I discovered the hard way that Ukrainian has completely different names for months when I had to connect to a Linux machine in Kyiv with Ukrainian locale (I can read Cyrillic, but the abbreviated month names meant nothing to me). The name for August is "serpen" by the way, and it is similar in some other Slavic languages. Also Arabic has its own month names based on Akkadian, August is "ab" but an Arabized version of the word August is also commonly used and understood. Finally, in Mandarin and presumably other Chinese languages, Gregorian months are only referred to by their number, so we are in "bayue" (lit. eight(th) month).

[-] LucidBoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months ago

Wow I just realised something crazy. August in Ukrainian is серпень, while srpanj in Croatian is July. July in Ukrainian is липень, while lipanj in Croatian means June. I wonder why they're shifted like this...