Duncan leads readers on an extraordinary journey through man's reckoning of time, from the earliest calendars to today's atomic clocks, in a book that answers--and raises--a host of fascinating questions about the nature of human timekeeping.
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Duncan leads readers on an extraordinary journey through man's reckoning of time, from the earliest calendars to today's atomic clocks, in a book that answers--and raises--a host of fascinating questions about the nature of human timekeeping.
Read Less
Add this copy of Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True to cart. $1.43, very good condition, Sold by BookHolders rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Gambrills, MD, UNITED STATES, published 1999 by Harper Perennial.
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The philosophy of time is an ancient discourse. The controversies raised by questions such as whether time is a vector or a cycle; whether time exists in all aspects of life; even what time is; are not much more clarified today than they were 2500 years ago. The questions have gotten more complex with the development of quantum physics and chaos theory, but essentially remain the same and remain unanswered. What has changed significantly over the centuries is how time is measured. Those of us living in the twenty-first century are so accustomed to the tyranny of clocks and calendars that we almost cannot conceive of a time when the relentless tick of the mechanical clock, or the pages of a calendar did not determine every second of our day?of a time when there weren't even seconds to be considered. At the outset of the journey through time measurement that is ?Calendar?, David Ewing Duncan warns his readers that ? . . . even in an age of measuring femtoseconds and star clusters 11 billion light-years away, time defies true objective measurement? (p. xiii). (In a footnote, Duncan defines a femtosecond as one quadrillionth of a second.) That warning given, however, Duncan then takes his readers on a fascinating voyage across time and space to look at how humans have tried to measure that most elusive of realities. The fulcrum on which ?Calendar? turns is the dichotomy between lunar months and the solar year as ancient peoples tried to make calendar dates correspond to the seasons. Since no measuring system was sufficiently sophisticated to account for the variability of the rotation of the earth around the sun, calendar dates drifted against the seasons until serious misalignment had occurred. By the closing years of the Roman republic, it was clear that something had to be done. The reform of the calendar occurred at the highest levels of government. Julius Caesar was a major reformer of the ancient calendar. ?When the new day dawned on January 1, 45 BC . . . Romans awoke with a new calendar that was then among the most accurate in the world? (p. 34). Caesar is also closely tied to the Roman calendar in many minds by the ubiquitous line from Shakespeare, ?Beware the ides of March (?Julius Caesar? I, ii, 33). For those interested in knowing just what the ides of March?or any other Roman month?are, Duncan provides a clear, concise discussion of this most complicated Roman dating system (p. 31). A few themes take center stage in this book filled with both the grand sweep of history and numerous fascinating minutiae. One of the chief of these is the date of Easter. The social and theological issues surrounding the date on which Christians are to celebrate the feast of the Resurrection is widely acknowledged to be the first controversy that agitated the primitive Church. Early solutions were, at best, imperfect, and the controversy continued to divide Christian communities for centuries, even up to the present day. Duncan has a great deal to say on this topic, and despite a few theological missteps (referring to the Resurrection as the Passion in a couple of places) he gives an insightful history of this enduring temporal problem. The other great theme that will interest the general reader is the Gregorian reform of the Julian calendar. Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572-1585) is forever linked to the calendar now in general use throughout the world. The heavy lifting on the mathematics of the calendar was undertaken by Christopher Clavius, S. J., and Aloysius Lilius, but it was Gregory who commissioned the work and who published the results in his 1582 bull, ?Inter gravissimas?. The key provision of the bull was the removal of ten days in October, 1582. Famously, Europe went to bed on the night of October 4, 1582 and awoke on October 15. In the late sixteenth century, however, conflicts arising from the Reformation had created a situation in which no Protestant country would accept a Papal bull, especially not one, such as ?Inter gravissimas? which framed its reforms in terms of mandates issuing from the Council of Trent (1545-1563). So Europe divided not only along religious lines, but along date lines as well. Italy, Spain, France, and other Catholic countries, accepted Gregory's reform. Protestant German states, the Netherlands, and England, did not. Countries adhering to eastern Orthodox churches likewise abstained. Russia, for example, didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1917. This accounts for the O.S. (Old Style) and N.S. (New Style) required in dating events in European history. It was only in the twentieth century that all nations aligned themselves with the Gregorian calendar for secular purposes. Many groups still cling to earlier calendars for religious and cultural reasons. Duncan concludes his reflection on the calendar with some comments on atomic time, cesium clocks, and the future of time. He points out that we have still not completely come to grips with a mathematic that will perfectly reflect the irregular motion on the earth as it revolves, rotates, and wobbles on its axis. Thus the calendar remains a metaphor for the imperfection of man. Duncan is not well-served by his publisher?numerous typographical errors and inaccuracies mar an otherwise excellent text. Avon is notorious for the carelessness of its editing, and that inattention to detail is evident in ?Calendar?. But what David Duncan has to say to us about ?humanity's epic struggle to determine a true and accurate year? is endlessly fascinating, repaying reading many times over. For those interested in the subject, or, indeed, interested in human development, ?Calendar? is a book not to be missed.
