So every four years we add one day to the month of February making it 29 instead of 28 days... The reason: The actual year is one quarter of a day longer than our time-recorded year..
The question here is, since our current arrangement (adding one day every 4 years) seems a bit un-elegant and messy, wouldn't it have been much better if we had extended the second by the equivalent of a quarter of a day spread out...
To explain: Let's say that our current measure of a second is x ( x is the length of one second ) ; if we used instead another value x' ; such that our time-recorded year would be equal to actual year ; then we wouldn't need to add one day every 4 years .... x' would be calculated as:
x' * 60 * 24 * 365 ( number of new seconds in an actual year assumed 365 days) = x * 60 * 24 * 365 (number of old seconds in a 365-day year) + x * 60 * 24 * 1 / 4 (extra seconds we are adding with the 1-day per 4 years) ... calculating for x' :
x' = x * ( 60*24 * 365.25 ) / ( 60 *24 * 365 ) and x' = x * (365.25/365) ..... If we changed our measure of seconds to this new value, we wouldn't need leap years
* The problem remaining is to find an objective measure of a second that allows for its calculation as a rational number ( I guess that would facilitate things ) ... so if a second is defined as: since 1967 the second has been defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom ; Then the new second would be similarly defined by the equivalent of 9198928093.1301369863013698630137 such periods ... of course another element whose period can be expressed as a multiple of 365 would help here
The question here is, since our current arrangement (adding one day every 4 years) seems a bit un-elegant and messy, wouldn't it have been much better if we had extended the second by the equivalent of a quarter of a day spread out...
To explain: Let's say that our current measure of a second is x ( x is the length of one second ) ; if we used instead another value x' ; such that our time-recorded year would be equal to actual year ; then we wouldn't need to add one day every 4 years .... x' would be calculated as:
x' * 60 * 24 * 365 ( number of new seconds in an actual year assumed 365 days) = x * 60 * 24 * 365 (number of old seconds in a 365-day year) + x * 60 * 24 * 1 / 4 (extra seconds we are adding with the 1-day per 4 years) ... calculating for x' :
x' = x * ( 60*24 * 365.25 ) / ( 60 *24 * 365 ) and x' = x * (365.25/365) ..... If we changed our measure of seconds to this new value, we wouldn't need leap years
* The problem remaining is to find an objective measure of a second that allows for its calculation as a rational number ( I guess that would facilitate things ) ... so if a second is defined as: since 1967 the second has been defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom ; Then the new second would be similarly defined by the equivalent of 9198928093.1301369863013698630137 such periods ... of course another element whose period can be expressed as a multiple of 365 would help here
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment