http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/scie ... gular.html
This year, Christmas falls on a Saturday. Next year, it will fall on Sunday, and in 2006, Dec. 25 is a Monday.
Richard Conn Henry thinks that's unacceptable.
No, Henry isn't particularly opposed to Mondays. But he does think the sequential nature of the Gregorian calendar is darned annoying.
After all, he says, wouldn't it be nice – or at least convenient – if your birthday always fell on the same day of the week. Wouldn't it be better if Halloween didn't occur on a school night five years out of seven?
Henry, a professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has launched an online effort – henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendar.html – to change the calendar.
Under his plan, each new 12-month period would be identical to the preceding 12-month period, with each month having either 30 or 31 days. No more 30 days hath September, though June still would. So too would February.
Henry believes affixing permanent days to major events and holidays would have "profound economic and practical benefits" if adopted worldwide.
"Just ask yourself how much time and effort are expended each year in redesigning the calendar of every single organization worldwide to accommodate the coming year's calendar," he says.
This isn't the first time somebody has proposed a new and improved calendar. Henry says "calendar reform" has always failed because the alternatives involved breaking the historical seven-day cycle of the week and the Biblical commandment to keep the Sabbath.
Henry's calendar, inspired by the acknowledged work of earlier inventors, retains the seven-day cycle and insists the time to change is imminent because Jan. 1, 2006, falls on a Sunday in both the current calendar and Henry's proposed version. He says that would help make the transition seamless.
Ah, but what about leap years, which were concocted to account for the fact that an actual Earth year has an odd number of days: 365.2422. Henry's solution is to eliminate leap years altogether and replace them with a special, one-week "mini-month" in June or July that would occur every five or six years. The mini-month would recalibrate the calendar and could be used as time of international celebration. Henry suggests calling them "Newton Weeks" after his personal hero.
"If I had my way, everyone would get Newton Week off as a paid vacation and could spend the time doing physics," he said. "You can't say the same of leap years."
Whatever the merits of the proposed calendar, it would require folks to think about certain days in a new way. Take Halloween, which always occurs on the last day of October. That's the 31st in the current calendar. But Henry's calendar – dubbed the Common Civil Calendar and Time or C&T – allots only 30 days to October so Halloween would be October 30th, which is a Sunday night and a school night.
Changing the calendar isn't Henry's only goal. He also wants to change the way the world tells time, or at least get everyone on the same clock. At the same moment the world switches to the new calendar, Henry suggests everybody also switch to a 24-hour, universal time scale. That is, when it's midnight in San Diego, it would also be midnight everywhere else in the world.
That would take some getting used to since, depending upon where you were in the world, midnight could occur in the middle of the day. Indeed, the date would change at distinctly different times depending upon locale.
There are other glitches: What happens to everybody who was born on Jan. 31 – a date that doesn't exist in Henry's calendar? What happens to kids born during Newton Weeks? Do they celebrate their birthdays only once every five or six years?
Henry scoffs at such conundrums. People born on Jan. 31 could simply switch to Jan. 30. Kids born during Newton Weeks would have the rare chance to select their birth date.
"I suggest that such folk should all consider themselves to be born on the fourth of July," Henry says.
Is Henry kidding? A little, but he insists the calendar idea is real.
Will it really happen?
Who knows, but I'm not marking the date, even if I do know what day it falls on.
