Startling Discovery: Time Travel Existed 400 Years Ago

There are no tourists from the future travelling backwards to visit us in the 21st century, as the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out.

Image via Wikipedia

So the concept of travelling forwards or backwards in time is still a subject for science-fiction.  Or is it?  In fact, millions of people were subjected to time travel right here on Earth more than four hundred years ago.

We all know (or perhaps ought to know) that the length of a year on planet Earth is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds. That’s 365.2425 days, but the ancient Romans thought it was exactly 365.25 days.  In the year 45 BC Julius Caesar reformed the very confusing way of measuring the year in early Roman times by introducing what became known as the Julian calendar, with regular years having 365 days, and every fourth year being a leap year of 366 days (by adding an extra day to the month of February).  So, at an average of  an extra .0075 of a day each year, which equates to almost eleven superfluous minutes every year for 1500 years, by the 16th century the use of the Julian calendar had effectively left the calculation of passing time ten days behind where it ought to be.

Italian scholars in the late 16th century came up with a solution: a calendar that manipulated the average length of a year by making exceptions to the rule that every fourth year had to be a leap year.  This calendar became known as the Gregorian calendar after Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull in the year 1582 to decree the use of the new calendar throughout the Roman Catholic church.

Image via Wikipedia

The difference between the Gregorian and  the Julian calendar is that the Julian calendar had a leap year every four years, without exception.  The Gregorian calendar, still in use today, omits the leap year three times in every 400-year cycle, that is, at the end of every century except where the year number is divisible by 400.  So the years 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not.

Of course, the fact that the Roman Catholic church adopted the new calendar did not automatically mean that secular governments would impose it on the nations they ruled.  In fact, some Catholic European countries adopted the new calendar immediately, effectively leaping forward ten days in time.  In Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland the populace went to bed in the evening of Thursday 4th October 1582, and woke up the following morning on Friday 15th October 1582.  This experience was repeated all over Europe during the next 170 years as more countries adopted the new calendar, and in the interim confusion reigned as travellers crossing national borders moved back and forth in time, not by the hours to which modern long-distance plane travel has made us accustomed, but by ten whole days.

By the time Britain and its Empire (which included, at that time, the eastern part of North America) adopted the change in 1752, it was necessary to make an eleven day adjustment.  There is a popular though unproven legend that the uneducated elements of the British population, incensed at the apparent reduction in their life span, staged a riot demanding that the government ‘Give us back our eleven days’.

The last major country to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar was Russia.  After the US purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, the switch to the new calendar in Alaska should have involved an adjustment of twelve days, but since the international date line was moved from Alaska’s eastern to its western boundary at the same time, the calendar adjustment remained at eleven days.  Russia adopted the new calendar in 1918, after the revolution.

Of course, the solar year on Earth is not exactly 365.2425 days long. It would take many more decimal places to approach real accuracy.  This means that, although the calendar we have now is reasonably accurate, unless we reform it we will once again be adrift in our measurements by one day after about 3,500 years have elapsed.

So, the very next time that you hear someone declare that time travel is impossible, you can tell them that our forefathers perfected it over four hundred years ago, and that our descendants will very probably rediscover it three thousand years from now.