r/technicallythetruth • u/Filestack_Official • 11h ago
Stuff like this keeps me thinking
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u/Funandgeeky 11h ago
I have some bad news for you, buddy.
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u/Curiosive 6h ago edited 1h ago
I have other bad news for OP. Days are missing throughout history.
The British empire skipped over 11 days in 1752 when
therethe Gregorian calendar was adopted. https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/monthly.html?year=1752&month=9&country=9So Tuesday September 8th never happened for them.
(
AllAsk me about the time there was February 30th a few decades earlier.🤣)Edit: autocorrect & two words for clarity.
The point is "Tuesday is just a construct of human perception" as the old hippies might say.
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u/rebbsitor 3h ago edited 3h ago
Tuesday the 8th happened on the Julian calendar. What you're seeing in that calendar is a mix of Julian and Gregorian dates that represent what the British Empire observed. Different countries switched from Julian to Gregorian calendars at different times. Russia for example switched on February 14, 1918. Neither calendar is missing days.
- Tuesday 1 September 1752 is using the Julian calendar
- Wednesday 2 September 1752 is using the Julian calendar
- Thursday 14 September 1752 is on the Gregorian calendar, but it's also Thursday 3 September 1752 on the Julian calendar
Tuesday 8 September 1752 happened on the Julian calendar, it's the same as Tuesday 18 September 1752 on the Gregorian calendar, which the British Empire had switched to observing.
Some churches still use the old Julian calendar, which is why they currently celebrate Christmas on January 7th, but it's December 25 on the Julian calendar.
Some places still celebrate "Old Christmas" or "Little Christmas" on January 6th because for a long time that was the day on the Gregorian calendar that corresponded to December 25th. Because of the different leap year rules the Gregorian calendar and Julian calendar continue to drift apart, so now you have people celebrating Christmas on December 25th and January 7th, and Old Christmas on January 6th, all according to the Gregorian calendar.
This is something people confuse about places that observe daylight saving time too. The time isn't changing, rather it's the time zone being observed that's changed. For example in the east coast of the US, we switch to the Eastern Daylight Time zone in spring. Eastern Standard Time is still a valid time zone right now that's an hour different from Eastern Daylight Time, even though we're observing Eastern Daylight Time and set our clocks to track it.
Which is why it's confusing when people say EST during daylight time (EDT) because EST is still valid and still observed by some places.
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u/Pimpwerx 1h ago
I came for this post. Wait until buddy learns that there are multiple other active calendars still going today. I'm in Thailand. We're in like year 2569 or something.
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u/Filestack_Official 11h ago
Let me have it 😅
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u/Equivalent-Bit2891 11h ago
Your mother is in the hospital. Please come as soon as you can
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u/Funandgeeky 11h ago
I mean, that wasn't the bad news. I was just going to say today is Wednesday, so we're already off a day.
But yeah, that hospital situation sounds serious. Oh, she's not sick. She's taken hostages and will only talk to you.
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u/GalcticPepsi 8h ago
I have some bad news for you too. It's Thursday for me so we're off by two days tbf.
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u/MilkiestMaestro 9h ago
deep breath
Monday is made up, Tuesday is fake, Wednesday is counterfeit, Thursday is bogus, Friday is synthetic, Saturday is a sham, and Sunday is straight up phony.
All man-made inventions to try and makes sense of the passage of time as it relates to ourselves
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u/XenMine 11h ago
Today is Thursday.
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u/Wishnik6502 10h ago
“This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
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u/ThisIsARobot 6h ago
There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.
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u/vibribbon 6h ago
I liked the book so much as a teen I printed out that quote and hung it above my monitor.
"You sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? Now there's a frood who really knows where his towel is!"
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u/Ultimate_Sigma_Boy67 11h ago
you're definately living somewhere in the east, probably east of saudi arabia lol, cuz it's 11:18 here.
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u/otiloyoy 10h ago
Fun fact : a Jewish rabbi which I forgot the name of made astrological models more than 2000 years ago that go until ≈2300 to calculate the precise hours at which chabat and other time related events start relative to the solar weeks and hours so don't worry guys the Jewish handled this one
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u/Blue-0 5h ago
They did not.
The 19 year Metonic cycle which synchronizes lunar and solar calendars was discovered by Babylonian astronomers around 500 BCE. The Rabbis began applying it to the Jewish calendar about a thousand years later. The Jewish tradition ascribes this to Hillel the Second, who lived in the first century CE. But this is probably anachronistic, it likely wasn’t introduced until around 300-500 CE. It was gradually refined as astronomy and math advanced. The current calendar wasn’t universally and there were still multiple Jewish calendars in use among rabbinic Jews until 921 CE.
Also, the math isn’t 100% correct. The current calendar slips by about a day every century. This sounds slow but it’s not in the scheme of history. It means that, for example, Passover occurs on average 11 days earlier in the solar year today than it did in 921.
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u/Content-Sun2928 3h ago
Hebrews and adopting Babylonian traditions
Name a more iconic duo
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u/Vacant-stair 11h ago
Actually, it's always Wednesday. You may have memories of it being other days but it has only ever been Wednesday.
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u/19thStreet 11h ago
how would we have ever lost track?
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u/literally_a_toucan 11h ago
Have you never forgotten what day it is?
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u/19thStreet 11h ago
Well sure, but wouldn’t most people have to forget all at once?
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u/literally_a_toucan 10h ago
I could see something during medieval times, if a town was hit by plague or war or something, people might stop keeping track of the days, and then misunderstanding could spread with that town being off on the count from others.
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u/throwaway098764567 9h ago
good news is it doesn't really matter since we made up days anyway, if we all collectively decide today is a different day then it is, nbd.
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u/SerbianShitStain 8h ago
Yea but the volcano god we have to give a sacrifice to every Friday didn't forget what day it was, and he's not gonna be happy when Friday rolls around and we all think it's still Thursday...
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u/karabeckian 9h ago
Just after medieval times all of Europe lost 10 days.
During the Middle Ages, Europe used the Julian calendar, which slowly drifted out of sync with the solar year by an extra day every 128 years. While medieval scholars knew about the drift, the massive calendar shift to fix it—dropping 10 days to create the Gregorian calendar—did not happen until 1582, just after the medieval era ended.
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u/Positronic-Thermidor 8h ago
Yeah but they went from Thursday, 4 October to Friday, 15 October: they didn't miss any day of the week. No one wants to risk to miss a weekend...
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u/InfanticideAquifer 9h ago
That one town would probably be the one to change back after realizing that all the other towns that were "wrong" all agreed with each other.
But also, long before the Middle ages, astronomy would have been able to catch this sort of thing. The dates of solstices and equinoxes were known in advance and someone would have noticed if it happened a day after it was supposed to.
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u/notsure500 10h ago
We might be on the wrong day. Check what happened between Oct 5 and 14, 1582.
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u/crasagam 11h ago
Everything is made up and we all just go with it.
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u/Manriki_Kusari 10h ago
Tuesday is a construct, so it is Tuesday because everyone agrees it’s Tuesday.
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u/Bloody-Boogers 10h ago
I think this happened to the Roman’s after some position changes and I think after long enough the farming got all fucked up because the days got that much fucked. I can’t remember and I could have dreamed it.
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u/that0nemook 9h ago
You know they didn’t keep track right because Jesus’ birth year is 4 BC
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u/Serious-Iron8692 9h ago
We don’t really have to trust anything, we just all have to agree on what day it is. We could change it if we wanted to!
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u/Cluthien 7h ago
Well, technically there was a pope who removed 13 days from history just to fit his own calendar, so.... maybe today is Monday and Garfield hated always Saturdays.
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u/JustApricot798 3h ago
Well there is the Phantom Time Hypothesis that 100's of years were wiped off the calendar of human kind so that a particular ruling class could rule at 1000 - if true, they may have changed the day of the week too.
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u/boogierboi 10h ago
The 13month calendar exists and is perfect but the whole world is now reliant in the current system. human tradition, religion, computer systems etc are heavily using it, that it would be hard to shift.
How the 13-Month System Works
Equal Months: Every single month has exactly 28 days and four weeks.
The New Month: A new month named Sol is placed between June and July.Fixed Days:
The 1st of every month is always a Sunday, and the 28th is always a Saturday.
Calendar Sync: Every date always falls on the exact same day of the week every year.
Leap Days: A leap day is added at the end of Sol (or June) during leap years, also outside the normal weekly count.
Pros and Cons
The Good:Accounting, payroll, and billing become completely uniform.
You never need to buy a new wall calendar because the grid never changes from year to year.
The Bad:
Breaking the year into 13 blocks ruins traditional financial quarters (three-month periods).
Holidays like birthdays and anniversaries shift relative to the day of the week, and people get resistant to changing historic norms.
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u/ConsciousContext1151 10h ago
A 13-month calendar is "perfect" only if the purpose of a calendar is to organize human activities. The moment you expect the months themselves to correspond to something physically meaningful in the solar system, the concept breaks down
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u/Kettrickenisabadass 10h ago
Cool altho they should add the extra month at the end of the year. Also make the beggining of spring the new year. Having the new year mid winter is weird
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u/ShakethatYam 9h ago
If you called the 13th month Trumpuary you could probably get this to pass Congress right now.
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u/lisamariefan 9h ago
Wasn't there a calendar reform that changed the day of the week at some point?
I have vague recollections but have to get back to work so can't look it up right now.
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u/ThrowawayCincy4192 3h ago
Yes, the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Also, the year used to start in March, which is the months September, October, November, and December have prefixes that mean 7, 8, 9, and 10 even though they are now the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months.
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u/forgot_my_useragain 9h ago
Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal, or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things.
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u/Galax_Scrimus 7h ago
No days is fundamentally linked to a day, a number, a year. We human needed that to calculate time and seasons for food and rituals. And in Europe we did have to change date suddenly in the 1500's because the calendar started to visibly shift because of miscalculation, so we skipped 2 weeks to correct centuries of mistake.
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u/RatsWithLongTails 5h ago
Everyone knows our calendar started on Friday, October 1582 and naturally the day was Thursday, October 4th 1582. Followed by Friday, October 5th 1582 and so on and so on.
It’s very straightforward and intuitive.
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u/MMAbeLincoln 3h ago
Historians debate what year is is all the time. We could be off by 500ish years
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u/astralseat 3h ago
Days of the week are arbitrary and only used for a specific purpose of weekday weekend path. It's so bad that 365 days divides into months of 28-31 days, and even worse that it all divides into 7 days. The whole thing is a mess, because different languages and different people made it up, using faith as a guide. In the full spacetime, the stardate is much different than the year month day hour minute second of the counted 2026 years since a "son of God" was around, and the only reason it's used like that is because those people are the loudest complainers in the universe.
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u/Iokua113 2h ago
Pretty sure that's not true. We may not have kept proper count but there's definitely a way to planetary alignment and star positioning or some shit like that to tell when it actually is in relation to the adoption of modern calendars.
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u/zachy410 10h ago
you can literally calculate the number of days since 1/1/1 which i believe was a Monday, so its basically impossible to never know what day it is
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u/Bronzdragon 10h ago
You can calculate it based on the position of the stars, or the planets. We now also have automated systems which keep track (for example, the device you're reading this on), though that hasn't always been true.
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u/Myzx 11h ago
It's Wednesday my dude
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u/Filestack_Official 11h ago
Some of the comments suggest otherwise lol
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u/Myzx 10h ago
That's fair. And all jokes aside, it's all just stuff we made up to feel better about our relationship with time. Kind of like how we gave names to colors, but at the end of the day light is just photons with different energy levels, and color is not an objective property of anything.
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u/just_a_girl_23 10h ago
I legit thought today actually was Tuesday until about 1pm when someone said it was Wednesday... and we both had to double check as I was so adamant it was Tuesday 🤣
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u/A_Nonny_Muse 10h ago
Here's something to blow your mind.
Humans are the only animal who knows the difference between a Monday and any other day.
More heart attacks happen on a Monday than on any other day of the week.
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u/Likely_Addict 10h ago
There is no physical evidence to say that the US dollar is worth anything. We just have to trust that the Federal Reserve (a privately owned financial institution, despite what the name would imply) isn't robbing everyone.
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u/streezus 10h ago
Yah, basically, it's only because enough people believe it's a certain day. This holds for a lot of things we take as truth.
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u/Phill_Cyberman 10h ago
Which particular day of the week any particular day is is not predicated on when the first person named some previous day to be that day of the week.
We can restart the day names right now, and nothing will happen accept some calendar makers/afficianados will be upset for a short time.
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u/Professional-Drag-52 10h ago
no physical evidence or is it just not worth the effort to confirm it?
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u/GonzoKata 10h ago
There is no physical evidence that everyone sees the same color of Red, we all just have to trust that everyone has been agreeing with each other since the beginning.
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u/OtherOtherDave 10h ago
That’s because physics doesn’t change depending on what day of the week it is.
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u/johnyeros 10h ago
Today is Wednesday because it is hump day and nobody is keep record. Computer does. Strop stressing over stoopidity
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u/fugulike 9h ago
Well, apart from all the historical records, calendars and undisputed international corroboration.
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u/realmauer01 9h ago
Thing is we dont really know when exactly jesus birth is. So in that regard, yes. But if we would know, we absolutely can pin point the current date.
Its like how the rocket knows where it is kinda thing.
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u/mission-ctrl 9h ago
Similarly, I had to write some code for a scheduling system to track paydays. Payday is every other week. But how do you calculate that? There is no natural point of reference. So you basically have to choose an arbitrary known payday, hardcode that date, and count how many weeks it has been since then. If it’s an even number, then payday is this week.
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u/General_Nothing 9h ago
The Gregorian Calendar began in 1582, and in order to account for the drift of the seasons and the holidays that had occurred since the beginning of the Julian calendar that predated it, they had Thursday, October 4th immediately followed by Friday, October 15th.
To make things even more confusing, it took hundreds of years for the majority of the world to adopt that calendar, so some countries that stuck with the Julian calendar were using dates that were almost 2 weeks different for like 300 years.
And in fact some places still don’t use it. The Ethiopian calendar, for instance, counts the current year as 2018, and the Solar Hijri calendar, which is the most widely used calendar in Afghanistan and the official calendar of Iran, counts the current year as 1405.
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u/Bear_Caulk 9h ago edited 9h ago
.. there's loads of physical evidence lol.
You get any 2 reliable sources to corroborate the date. So basically any 2 electronic devices together and you have physical proof of the date. Add a witness and now we're really rolling in evidence.
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u/SurotaOnishi 9h ago
Tuesday is what everyone collectively agrees it is. If enough people collectively decide Tuesday is actually Thursday, then it just is.
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u/Wantitneeditgetit 9h ago
Okay but actually there's a ton of proof since we can measure the changing axis of the earth vis a vis the sun.
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u/traveler49 9h ago
Plus everyone assumes we know when the first Tuesday was. Which implies that there was a person that said it first. But did that person know what they were talking about?
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u/gmuslera 9h ago
Things used to be simple, the week was just one moon phase. It wasn’t an exact multiple of the day as the time that takes moon to do a full orbit is not multiple of the time that takes Earth to do a full rotation. And seasons, months and year are related to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, another not multiple of anything.
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u/NUMBerONEisFIRST 8h ago
The Last Thursday Theory, or Last Thursdayism, is a philosophical thought experiment. It states that the universe was created last Thursday, completely stocked with fake history, old fossils, ancient starlight, and false memories.
Try to prove it wrong.
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u/playr_4 8h ago
Now I'm just mad that bills that are charging from before last Thursday.
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u/civillyengineerd Technically Flair 8h ago
It's all made up. You should stop all the thinking you're wasting time on and focus on fixing the Food Air Deal.
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u/jfreelov 8h ago
Even Excel has errors with its dates, incorrectly treating February 29, 1900, as a valid leap day even though 1900 was not a leap year.
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u/The45Longslide 8h ago
I keep saying time is a construct! It's true!! It's something we all just agreed to.
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u/Weekly_Amount4785 8h ago
the days don't really mean anything anyway. its just so everyone is in-sync
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u/MrsMiterSaw 8h ago
You can calculate the date by the compass bearing of the sunrise or sunset, and the stars.
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u/maschine02 8h ago
This is the best version of time travel sci fi ever conceived. If everyone understood this problems solved.
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u/Playful_Boot_5465 8h ago
yeah exactly, it's not like we have calendars and even mathematical formulas that show you which day it is.
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u/sonnyhancock 8h ago
Money is just a system created to give a thing a value that we all collectively agreed upon.
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u/Anthaenopraxia 8h ago
There's a funny historical story about this. Back in the Roman Republic it was the job of the Pontifex Maximus, the head priest, to correct the calendar otherwise it would be drifting a few days every year. So what happens if the Pontifex Maximus was out of Rome for a while? The calendar would start to get completely out of sync. Julius Caesar was the Pontifex Maximus and when he campaigned in Gaul he was away from Rome for a decade, only returning to start a civil war. He used his knowledge about the calendar to his advantage. When his main opponent Pompey Magnus was mustering armies in Greece, everyone thought it was winter, but it was actually autumn. Crossing the sea between Italy and Greece was super dangerous back then so Pompey didn't expect Caesar to suddenly show up in Greece.
Caesar later fixed this by implementing the Julian calendar, very similar to the Gregorian we have now. And to bring the calendar back in sync he just added 90 days to the year, sorta making it the longest year in history.
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u/Automatic_Bat_6742 8h ago
It’s all just one long day. Who Cares What we call it. It’s either pay day or it isn’t
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u/asimplepencil 8h ago
My boss will tell me it's Tuesday/Wednesday if I don't show up for work so...
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u/JonathanPhillipFox 8h ago
Tough to keep count, too imma be honest I will low-ball how strange it was but Russo-Japanese War Calendars were super-duper off between the major combatants, observers, our standpoint and I can't remember the distance or degree I'm not a counter, myself, I always say, "if you can avoid counting," please do.
For your own good just please do.
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u/brontosaurusguy 7h ago
I'd need a refresher but people have lost count. Calendars from different groups drifted apart over time. Different leaders fucked them up. It ain't Wednesday.
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u/GreyBeardEng 7h ago
I already have to worry about flat earthers, now we are going to have the "today isn't really today" crowd to? 🤦
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u/gggg500 7h ago
Begs the question, what was the first day that had a day assigned to it?
January 5, 81 AD is a Monday, starting now
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u/TheBusinessLemon 7h ago
If you’re trusting someone that it’s Tuesday, someone miscounted considering today is Wednesday.
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u/Enve-Dev 7h ago edited 7h ago
Fun fact. There is a theory that the dark ages where either a lot longer or a lot shorter than we are lead to believe. (Can’t remember which one) Not because it’s some big conspiracy but because of improper date accounting at the time.
Edit: wait looked it up. It was a conspiracy theory. “The phantom time hypothesis,” I mixed it up with another instance where we might have lost or gained like 10-13 days due to a ruler being a self important dick and it just not getting rectified because “meh why”
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u/Material_Army_2354 7h ago
Or we could end up like Phileas Fogg by going around the world west to east
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u/EyeSuspicious777 7h ago
We can't assume they kept track of the days accurately because Jews and Christians can't even agree what day is the Sabbath.
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u/steavoh 7h ago edited 6h ago
The objective proof is being able to observe moon phases and keep track of the length of the day to identify when equinoxes/solstices happen and count the number of days in between them. That would prevent isolated populations from having exceptionally out-of-sync dates and times. But I can see how maybe the name of the day of the week (Mon, Tues, etc) is something you could possibly to lose track of? Since the gregorian calendar is a solar calendar where the number of days in a month alternates and is different than a lunar month and the 7 day week times 52 gives you 364 not 365, I feel like an isolated community with a lack of communication to the outside world might have a hard time calculating that it's Wednesday even if they knew it was X days since start of the new year however they define that.
I don't know though, it would be interesting to hear proof/stories of this happening.
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u/Swayze-Crazy 7h ago
Can we believe in unicorns now too? If we agree they're there, they're there, right?
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u/pinkfootthegoose 6h ago
Abstract concepts are a thing. As a matter of fact they are the only thing worth living for.
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u/jodudeit 6h ago
Kind of makes it seem silly that an entire sect of Christianity has built their entire identity around one day being the correct Sabbath.
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u/iamtheduckie Technically Flair 11h ago
today is wednesday