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Science of Easter & Passover

From: William S. Hammack
Series: Stories of Technology
Length: 02:54

Determining the dates of Easter and Passover led directly to our modern calendar. Read the full description.

Piece Audio

Playing: Science of Easter & Passover
From: William S. Hammack

Default-piece-image-2 This week represents a great triumph of scientific learning. Right now we're between the Jewish Passover Feast and the Christian Easter. To develop a calendar that placed these holidays at the same season every year took the work of the best minds in science over 1500 years to solve.In the late 16th century Pope Gregory assembled a council to survey the best scientific work of the time and of the previous centuries, including Copernicus's earth shattering observations about the motion of the planets. The Pope charged his council with finding the exact length of the solar year, and then matching a calendar to it. They came up with a calendar based on a year only twenty-six seconds short of the true length of a solar year. They invented a calendar with unequal months and the occasional leap year - the calendar we use today. In many ways our science today descends from this calendar because the search for a new calendar helped keep alive mathematics and astronomy in a time less than ideal for scientific inquiry. Kept alive not, though, by a love of learning, but to solve an administrative problem of the Pope.

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Piece Description

This week represents a great triumph of scientific learning. Right now we're between the Jewish Passover Feast and the Christian Easter. To develop a calendar that placed these holidays at the same season every year took the work of the best minds in science over 1500 years to solve.In the late 16th century Pope Gregory assembled a council to survey the best scientific work of the time and of the previous centuries, including Copernicus's earth shattering observations about the motion of the planets. The Pope charged his council with finding the exact length of the solar year, and then matching a calendar to it. They came up with a calendar based on a year only twenty-six seconds short of the true length of a solar year. They invented a calendar with unequal months and the occasional leap year - the calendar we use today. In many ways our science today descends from this calendar because the search for a new calendar helped keep alive mathematics and astronomy in a time less than ideal for scientific inquiry. Kept alive not, though, by a love of learning, but to solve an administrative problem of the Pope.

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Transcript

This week represents a great triumph of scientific learning. Right now we're between the Jewish Passover Feast and the Christian Easter. To develop a calendar that placed these holidays at the same season every year took the work of the best minds in science over 1500 years to solve.

The solar year, the time it takes for the earth to go around the sun, takes a precise 365.2447 days to complete. The position of the earth relative to the sun determines the seasons, but because of the uneven number of days in the solar year the seasons shifted in early calendars. For example, the weather we associate with February slowly crept into March, spelling disaster for humanity. A farmer, for instance, needed to know when to plant, or the likely date of the first frost.

The Roman Emperor Julius Caesar tried to conquer this problem with a new calendar. He declared the length of a year to be 365 day...
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