Editorial Ritchie Way June 2009

Time is an elusive dimension. Back before the invention of the steam engine each English village and city set its own clocks by the rising of the sun, but when these towns were connected by the railway it was necessary for them to have a common time, without which a reliable railway timetable would have been impossible.
Later, intercontinental travel revealed an even greater problem with keeping time. As Jules Vern’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days revealed, it is possible to gain or lose a whole day depending on which way you travel around the world. I had the experience of getting aboard an aircraft at Heathrow in England for a flight to Hong Kong. We turned the lights out and pulled the shades down about 10.00pm, slept eight hours and woke up at 2.00pm the next day. In the process of our journey eight hours had been deducted from our day.
Every few years the day is lengthened by a second because the Earth is slowing down. Twenty-two leap seconds have been added since 1972. Three factors are slowing earth’s spin, the tidal forces due to the moon’s gravitational pull; the inertial effects of earth’s liquid core sloshing around and the cycle of evaporation, in which water at the equator gets deposited at the poles as ice, but which melts and returns to the equator.
The problem with adding a leap second every now and then, to maintain synchronization between our clocks and the earth’s rotation, is that Global Positioning Systems do not adjust for leap seconds, causing the clocks in some GPS receivers to malfunction. This problem is caused by the fact that the clocks on earth stop briefly, but the GPS satellite clocks don’t. In addition, the leap second that is taken out of time at midnight in Greenwich in England, occurs in the middle of the day in New Zealand and Australia.
The big problem, however, is not the leap second, or even the leap year, but the fact that our year is so frustratingly irregular. Wouldn’t it be just perfect if the year was exactly three hundred and sixty-four days long, giving us four quarters of exactly ninety-one days each. Then every quarter could have two months of thirty days and one of thirty-one. Furthermore, every month could start on the same day every year and every birthday and holiday would also be on the same day every year. That would be a boon for accountants and analysts who compare one quarter’s operations with another.
There was a time, not too long ago, when there was a world-wide movement to get a calendar of four equal quarters accepted by the nations of the world. That movement was ingenious, except for one critical factor, it disrupted the previously unbroken cycle of the week. Under this new calendar the last Saturday of the year would be eight days away from the first Saturday the following year, or nine days away in a leap year. Among those who regard the seventh day of the week as a sign of their New Covenant relationship with their Lord and Saviour, such a change would be extremely distressing and unacceptable.
While calendar reform has not yet happened, in the light of Daniel’s prophecy that a person or power would arise seeking ‘to change the set times and the laws’ (7:25), I thought it wise to acquaint our readers with the work of the Calendar Reform Movement in the past, so that we will be better prepared should people seek to reform the calendar in the near future, which is what they are planning to do.

—Ritchie Way.