What would happen if there were no leap days?More than you think

New York –

leap year. This is fun for the calendar and math nerds among us. So how did it all start and why?

Here’s a look at some of the numbers, history, and lore behind the quadrennial phenomenon (not quite) of adding a 29th day to February.

From a numerical perspective

To the uninitiated, the math is mind-boggling and can be accurate to fractions of days and minutes. There’s even an occasional leap second, but there’s no fuss when it happens.

What’s important to know, according to Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is that leap years exist in large part to keep the months in sync with annual events, including the equinoxes and solstices.

This is a correction to correct for the fact that the Earth’s orbit does not move exactly 365 days a year. NASA says the trip is about six hours longer than that.

However, contrary to what some may think, there is not a leap every four years. According to the National Air and Space Museum, adding a leap day every four years would extend the calendar by more than 44 minutes.

JPL noted that later, in an upcoming calendar (we’ll talk about it), it was stated that years divisible by 100 did not follow the four-year leap day rule unless they were also divisible by 400. In the past 500 years, there were no leap days in 1700, 1800, and 1900, but there was a leap day in 2000. In the next 500 years, if we follow convention, there will be no leap days in 2100, 2200, 2300, or 2500.

Are you still with us?

The next leap years are 2028, 2032 and 2036.

What would happen if there were no leap days?

Ultimately, no good comes of it, no matter when major events occur, when farmers sow, or how the seasons align with the sun and moon.

“If there were no leap years, in a few hundred years we would have summer in November,” said Younas Khan, a physics instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Christmas will be in the summer. It won’t snow. .It won’t feel like Christmas.”

Who came up with leap year?

The short answer: it evolves.

Ancient civilizations used the cosmos to plan their lives, with calendars dating back to the Bronze Age. They were based on the phases of the moon or the waxing and waning of the sun, just like today’s various calendars. Usually they are “month and day”, both are used simultaneously.

Now jump to the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar. He was dealing with major seasonal drift in the calendar used in his area. They solved the drift problem by adding months. He also explored many calendars in various ways, starting with the vast Roman Empire.

He introduced the Julian calendar in 46 BC. In a purely solar calendar, a year has 365.25 days, so one day is added every four years. Before that, the Romans had a year of 355 days, at least for a time.

But under Julius there were still deviations. Too many leap years! The solar year is not exactly 365.25 days! That’s 365.242 days, said Nick Eakes, an astronomy educator at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thomas Palema, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said ancient people added time periods throughout the year to reflect changes in the lunar and solar cycles. He said that the Athenian calendar used in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries had 12 lunar months.

This does not apply to seasonal religious observances. Palema said the drift problem resulted in the regular “insertion” of extra months to realign the lunar and solar cycles.

According to NASA, the Julian calendar is 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the Tropical calendar, so timing errors are still accumulating. But Palema said stability has improved.

The Julian calendar is the model used by the Western world for hundreds of years. Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who takes the calibration even further. His Gregorian calendar came into effect at the end of the 16th century. It is still used today and is obviously not perfect, otherwise there would be no need for leap years. But it’s a big improvement, reducing drift to just a few seconds.

Why did he intervene? Well, Easter. As it moves forward later in the year, he worries that Easter-related events like Pentecost could conflict with pagan holidays. Pope wants Easter to stay in spring.

He eliminated some of the extra days accumulated in the Julian calendar and adjusted the rules for leap days. Pope Gregory and his advisors came up with the really tricky math about when a leap year should or shouldn’t be.

“If the solar year was a perfect 365.25, then we wouldn’t have to worry about the tricky math involved,” Akers said.

What does leap year have to do with marriage?

Oddly, Leap Day is accompanied by legends of women approaching men with marital issues. It’s mostly benign fun, but it also reinforces gender roles.

and distant European folklore. According to a 2012 paper by historian Katherine Parkin in the Journal of Family History, one story tells of a fifth-century Irish woman’s idea of ​​courtship, St. Bry’s. St. Bridget calls upon St. Patrick to provide women with the opportunity to propose to men.

No one really knows where it all started.

In 1904, syndicated columnist Elizabeth Merriweather Gilmer (aka Dorothy Dix) summed up the tradition this way: “Of course, one would say…woman’s leap year privileges, like most of her liberties Same, just a sparkling taunt.”

The traditions that preceded Sadie Hawkins, whether serious or tongue-in-cheek, could have been empowering for women but only perpetuated stereotypes. These proposals were meant to be via postcards, but many of these postcards turned the tables and made fun of the women.

The ad continues the leap year marriage game. A 1916 ad from the Industrial Bank and Trust Company of America read: “Today being a leap year, we advise every girl to propose to her father a savings account in her name at one of our own banks.”

Because of the leap day, women no longer have the air of independence.

Should we pity jumpers?

Being born on a leap day in a leap year is certainly a topic. But from a paperwork perspective, it can be a bit of a pain. Some governments and others have stepped in by requiring a form to be filled out and a date of birth to be announced to announce the date the jumper was using (for example, a driver’s license), whether it was February 28 or March 1.

Technology is making it easier for leap-frogging babies to mark the February 29 milestone, although problems may arise for health systems, insurance policies and other businesses and organizations that don’t have the date built into them.

About 5 million of the approximately 8 billion people in the world celebrate their birthdays. Shelley Dean, 23, of Seattle, Washington, takes an optimistic approach to jumping. Growing up, she had a normal birthday party every year, but a special one when leap years came around. As an adult, she marks the non-jumping period between February 28 and March 1 with a low-key “Wow!”

This year is different.

“This will be my first birthday in eight years that I celebrate with my family, which is very exciting because the last leap day I was on the other side of the country in college in New York,” she said. “This is a very important year.”