This probably doesn’t count, but Sosigenes of Alexandria was an Ancient Greek astronomer who designed the Julian calendar in 45 BC. This was replaced in 1582 AD with the Gregorian calendar (named after Pope Gregory XIII) and is still in use today. Of course both were found by science, but it took the weight of the Catholic Church to push for the more accurate calendar.
I think the vast majority of scientists, at least computer scientists, would argue against the efficacy and accuracy of the Gregorian calendar.
It’s more of a “we’re stuck with it” situation than a testament to its scientific veracity.
And that’s the way science should be, with more data and better tools, you adjust and make things more accurate. I’m not sure what the efficacy issues are, but it’s my understanding that current UTC leap seconds are put in place to reflect slight variation in the rotation of the earth. It is done in reaction to the earth’s movement, so not something that could be predicted 450 years ago.
The Gregorian calendar is pretty solid actually. Other than a leap second every few years, it’ll stay in sync for a few thousand years. You can easily calculate all leap days in a one-liner.
365 is semi prime, so we could do a 5 day week, but that’s pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. There isn’t a lot to improve on the Gregorian calendar
- leap days only coming at the end of the year, not in the middle
- 5 day week
- 73 day months
- 30 day months with 5 non month days
Don’t get me started on timezones
at least computer scientists, would argue against the efficacy and accuracy of the Gregorian calendar.
Agreed. If I had it my way, basically everything would be using unix time.
What would Unix time improve? Yeah let’s schedule to meet at 1693456789, repeating every 7*86,400 seconds.
Time zones are a mess, but that’s not the fault of the calendar.
