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Old 12-13-2005, 01:37 AM
jason_t jason_t is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Another downswing?
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Default Re: No More Leap Year

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since leap year is actually just humans way of admitting, "Hey look... we screwed up. We miscalculated how long a second should be so that 31536000 of them equal the amount of time it takes for the Earth to do a full revolution around the sun,"

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It wasn't a miscalculation. It stemmed from the belief that astronomical events are regular. Historically the second was defined as follows. One day is divided into 24 units called hours. One hour is divided into 60 units called minutes. One minute is divided into 60 units called seconds. The 24 comes from the Egyptians and the use of 60 comes from the Babylonians which used a base-60 system (technically it's mixed-radix base 6 and base 10). The problem is that the Earth's rotation around its own axis is not uniform so defining seconds in terms of said rotation is bad. That's why time is now defined using a more regular natural event (the amount of time it takes for a certain number of periods of transitions between two hyperfine energy states in a certain cesium isotope under certain conditions.)
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