RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 154, 27 March 1937, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events (By Kickshaws.) Well, but for a decimal or so. that blue ribbon of the Atlantic has become a lie. Whether or not the stars and the planets affect human conduct, it is a very charitable explanation.

Singing, it is declared, is extremely beneficial for certain types of deafness. Mercifully the opposite also holds good.

“1 was told by our headmaster, when at school, that Good Friday was the first Friday after the first full moou after the 21st of March, and have since been under that belief.” says “A.J.P.” “This year we are observing Good Friday before the first full moon after above date, as it is full moon on Saturday, March 27. Are we observing Good Friday on the correct date this year?" [The question is dealt with in detail below. ]

The recent statement in an item of news that the planet Uranus has a year that contains 68,000 days sounds appalling until one starts to think about years. Actually, Uranus has a year that, compared with our year, is nearly 84 years long. Neptune, in comparison, takes nearly 165 of our years to produce its own year. Mercury does the journey in 88 days. The whole galaxy to which we belong rotates on itself once every 250,000,000 years. Its year therefore is so long it can be reckoned as but 10 years old measured in its own time scale. In contrast the electrons in an atom have a vear that occupies a period of our time of one 10,Offi),000,000,000.000.000 part of a second. The only difference so far as we are concerned is not a difference of time but a difference of quality. The electronic year produces what to us is a solid. The solar year produces what is to us empty space. One begins, in fact, to wonder if there really is any such reality as time until one misses the last bus home.

Meanwhile, whether we agree to ignore time as unreal, we are confronted with the fact that Easter has arrived once more. However unreal time may be, calculations to discover the date of Easter Sunday are exceedingly real. Easter Day is always the first Sunday after the full moon, which happens upon, or next after, the twenty-first day of March, and if the full moon happens upon a Sunday. Easter Day is the Sunday after. This means that this year Easter comes very nearly as early as it can come. Actually, Easter may fall upon any date between March 22 and April 23. Calculations to discover when Easter will fall on any given war are very involved. Easter Sunday, however, will f.all earlier than it does this year on several occasions in the comparatively near future. It falls on March 26 in 1967, 1978, and 1989. It falls on March 23 in 1931, and on March 24 in 1940. the year of the Wellington Centennial. In fact, there will be no earlier date until the year 2008, when Easter falls on March 23. That is, of course, unless it is decided to put into force what is already au Act of Parliament in Britain, although it is not enforced: —That Easter shall be the Sunday following the second Saturday in April. This narrows possible dates to seven.

It is more than a century since Easter fell on the earliest possible date, March 22. It will not occur again until the close of the twenty-third century. Latest possible Easters are more frequent. April 25 was Easter Sunday in 1886 tu'd it will be so again in 11)13. The complexity of the present rules for deciding the date of Easter Sunday take us back to efforts on the part of the early Christians to make the date correspond with the Jewish Passover. This was i" itself a movable ceremony that depended upon the phases of the moon. Subsequently, a dispute arose between the Jewish and Gentile Christians. The Council of Nice in A.D. 325 decided that Easter Sunday should bo the Sunday following the 14th day of the Passover moon. The Bishop of Alexandria, supposed to be a spare time astronomer, was asked to work out the mathematics. The phases of the real moon unkindly refused to fall in with his arrangements. The discrepancy became so large that after some years Easter Sunday was being observed on dates that varied by as much as a month.

In order to solve the Easter problem Pope Gregory most ingeniously invented an artificial moon. The phases of his artificial moon were made to recur ou the same day of the year after a cycle of 19 days, producing a full moon on its 14th day. This never happens in the case of the real moon. The present system of fixing Easter depends upon a combination of Pope Gregory's artificial moon and the erroneous computations of the Council of Nice. In order to make matters more involved the Prayer Book omits to say that the moon referred to therein is entirely fictitious. It is for that reason that no ordinary person can hope to calculate Easter from (lie facts given. The task is one better suited for ecclesiastical senior -wranglers. Tn fact, a list of dates has been compiled that takes us to the year 2199. A movement to end these vagaries started in Germany 30 years ago. It was taken up by France and spread to Britain.

If, therefore, there be no such thing as time, a very considerable amount, of it has been silent in trying to calculate when Easter falls and how to control it. It would seem to stress the fact that if there be such a thing as time it does not come out of the past, but out of the future. Time flows into the past and disappears the moment it arrives. Consider, for instance, “to-day.” For a long time “to-day” was next year. Then it was next week. How time flies! Then it was “to-morrow.” Soon it will be “yesterday,” completely disintegrated, untouchable, irrecoverable, an empty nothing composed of dead yesterdays and unborn to-morrows. Indeed, efforts to make time flow from th past to the future hare so far proved fruitless. Yet it may be pns- i>„ ■this one day; if not wit li tin: events. Some events, such as a radio programme, the light waves that produce an object, or even speech, put their stamp on time. What has been produced speeds away at the speed of light, or sound, and lives for ever. We have only to capture the combination of light waves that represented Queen Elizabeth of yore to see her. We should have to search among the star# because light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles a second. Queen Elizabeth's light picture is therefore many millions cf miles off in uttermost space.