The number of days in a week wasn’t chosen as an arbitrary number, it was chosen because it’s the length of 1 moon phase. 4 phases of the moon is 1 cycle (new moon to new moon), or 1 month (28 days).
The fact that we now have most months with 30 or 31 days is basically a hack to try to line up 12 months to 1 year (1 orbital period of the earth), but that was never going to work!
By that logic, the length of the week would have to be variable, since the phases don’t line up perfectly with the day night cycle. Most of the time, it could be 7 days, but occasionally you would get a bonus day.
FYI, there is kind of a push toward this, usually by landlords and other bill collectors, who would just love to be able to charge an extra month of rent or bills each year.
There's no way in Hell under the current leadership in many parts of the world that bills would be multiplied by 12, then divided by 13, and then capped at that. The cap wouldn't work anyway. The only responsible way to do it would be to charge bills on an annual basis, and divide it by the "number of months" for the "convenience" of the consumer. Then it would just be set up to where all the monthly payments would go down. But yeah, no way they enforce that.
Weekly and bi-weekly pay cycles are much more common than monthly or semi-monthly. It would be easier to budget if bills directly corresponded to pay cycles.
Eh, that doesn't really answer it. Months are about 30 days long. First, there are better numbers than 7 to fit in 30. Five 6 says weeks would work much better for this. Second, moon "phases" are completely arbitrary. Really there are only two "phases", waxing and waning; anything else is arbitrary subdivisions.
The real reason there are seven days in the week is because there are seven moving objects in the sky. (From a human perspective.) There are seven days of the week:
The Day of the Sun
The Day of the Moon
The Day of Mars
The Day of Mercury
The Day of Jupiter
The Day of Venus
The Day of Saturn
These are the seven days of the week. They're named for the seven great moving lights in the heavens. Everything else is a fixed star or invisible to human eyes.
Yes, Augustus. But they didnt add months; they renamed existing months, and also got days added to them by taking off from the last month - which was February at that time. Related fun fact: September, October, November, and December are just names from the root words in Latin for 7, 8, 9, and 10 because they were the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months. When the calendar was rearranged to start with January, it threw that off.
Eh, don't forget that Julius and Augustus Caesar made months for themselves (July and August). Or is that made up? I'm not really sure. It's an interesting story though. But Sept- means seven, Oct- means eight, Nov- means nine, and Dec- means ten, so it stands to reason that July and August were disruptively added somehow.
The Roman calendar originally didn’t last all year round. It began in the spring and ended at the start of winter, and then the winter period just didn’t exist on the calendar.
Calendars were invented to plan the growing of crops, so tracking the days in winter didn’t have any purpose, so they left winter out.
That's also why the months are numbered wrong. If you know Latin, or at least one of the romance languages that derived from Latin, then "Septem"ber should be the 7th month, "Octo"ber should be the 8th month, "Novem"ber should be the ninth month, and "Decem"ber should be the 10th month. But that's not how it works today, as we no longer count March as the first month of the year.
Babylonians divided their lunar months into 4 weeks, the number seven was significant as the number of celestial bodies they could see other than non-moving stars. It wasn't until later that the seventh day got any association with resting.
That whole article is reaching. Like holy cow. "7 celestial bodies, therefore!!1!" I forget the proper name of it, but it's backwards looking. The lunar cycle holds a little bit, but they could have broken 29.6 days into any number of parts for any reason.
It's because 7 days of work (6 days 1 day off) is the maximum we can work, and then we wrote it backwards into religion and everything else.
That's not the best source necessarily but I read a few, maybe they did have the 6 and 1 days because of our working ability, but to say that would be an assumption whereas there are records about the reasoning of the seven days being based on the primary celestial objects in our sky. Why do you assume that's the maximum we can work? Plenty of people have worked more or less in different societies or careers.
Just to be an insufferable pedant, I would like to point out that a base-60 system would only have one digit from 0 to 59. So technically fewer digits than with our current system to express the same range of values, and as we all know, technically correct is the best kind of correct.
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, the overall number of extant digits would increase six-fold. I was trying to express the idea that the number of digits in an operation would decrease.
6 days on and 1 day off is the maximum workers can handle for a long period of time. France switched to a 10 day week after the French Revolution and then went back because it was unsustainable for the workers.
Lucky our existing names aren't stupid! Imagine if April just meant "Bud-opening-month," or if the rest were named after gods, or festivals, or emperors, or if they were numbered but the order was all wrong. That would be ridiculous.
yeah I think we should have 6 day weeks although someone pointed out to me 5 day is divisible into the number of days in a year but I can see dropping the size of the week by something close to 15% of 5 starts getting pretty short for a week
61 replies
The number of days in a week wasn’t chosen as an arbitrary number, it was chosen because it’s the length of 1 moon phase. 4 phases of the moon is 1 cycle (new moon to new moon), or 1 month (28 days).
The fact that we now have most months with 30 or 31 days is basically a hack to try to line up 12 months to 1 year (1 orbital period of the earth), but that was never going to work!
By that logic, the length of the week would have to be variable, since the phases don’t line up perfectly with the day night cycle. Most of the time, it could be 7 days, but occasionally you would get a bonus day.
13 months would have been 13x28=364 days which could just have an extra filler day (or two when needed for leap years).
And then we have a prime number of months. Checkmate OP
Congrats you
investedinvented International Fixed calendar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_CalendarEdit: typo
How do I invest too, I want in.
FYI, there is kind of a push toward this, usually by landlords and other bill collectors, who would just love to be able to charge an extra month of rent or bills each year.
There's no way in Hell under the current leadership in many parts of the world that bills would be multiplied by 12, then divided by 13, and then capped at that. The cap wouldn't work anyway. The only responsible way to do it would be to charge bills on an annual basis, and divide it by the "number of months" for the "convenience" of the consumer. Then it would just be set up to where all the monthly payments would go down. But yeah, no way they enforce that.
Oh, shit, I was finding the 13-month year a great idea until you made me think about the consequences...
Weekly and bi-weekly pay cycles are much more common than monthly or semi-monthly. It would be easier to budget if bills directly corresponded to pay cycles.
Maybe in the US. In Europe its either monthly or annually
Same here in south america. Never heard of weekly payments.
That's metric months.
Eh, that doesn't really answer it. Months are about 30 days long. First, there are better numbers than 7 to fit in 30. Five 6 says weeks would work much better for this. Second, moon "phases" are completely arbitrary. Really there are only two "phases", waxing and waning; anything else is arbitrary subdivisions.
The real reason there are seven days in the week is because there are seven moving objects in the sky. (From a human perspective.) There are seven days of the week:
These are the seven days of the week. They're named for the seven great moving lights in the heavens. Everything else is a fixed star or invisible to human eyes.
Wasn't (Julius) Caesar and some other dude responsibles for adding 2 months to the year (Augustus I guess) ?
Yes, Augustus. But they didnt add months; they renamed existing months, and also got days added to them by taking off from the last month - which was February at that time. Related fun fact: September, October, November, and December are just names from the root words in Latin for 7, 8, 9, and 10 because they were the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months. When the calendar was rearranged to start with January, it threw that off.
Time keeping back in the day was wild. Let's just jumo 8 days, change everything and so on lol.
So there were already 12 months before the julius/augustus, interesting!
Eh, don't forget that Julius and Augustus Caesar made months for themselves (July and August). Or is that made up? I'm not really sure. It's an interesting story though. But Sept- means seven, Oct- means eight, Nov- means nine, and Dec- means ten, so it stands to reason that July and August were disruptively added somehow.
The Roman calendar originally didn’t last all year round. It began in the spring and ended at the start of winter, and then the winter period just didn’t exist on the calendar.
Calendars were invented to plan the growing of crops, so tracking the days in winter didn’t have any purpose, so they left winter out.
That's also why the months are numbered wrong. If you know Latin, or at least one of the romance languages that derived from Latin, then "Septem"ber should be the 7th month, "Octo"ber should be the 8th month, "Novem"ber should be the ninth month, and "Decem"ber should be the 10th month. But that's not how it works today, as we no longer count March as the first month of the year.
Pretty sure it was religion, rest on the seventh day.
Babylonians divided their lunar months into 4 weeks, the number seven was significant as the number of celestial bodies they could see other than non-moving stars. It wasn't until later that the seventh day got any association with resting.
I read about it in a few places it this sums it up: https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-do-we-have-seven-days-in-a-week
That whole article is reaching. Like holy cow. "7 celestial bodies, therefore!!1!" I forget the proper name of it, but it's backwards looking. The lunar cycle holds a little bit, but they could have broken 29.6 days into any number of parts for any reason.
It's because 7 days of work (6 days 1 day off) is the maximum we can work, and then we wrote it backwards into religion and everything else.
That's not the best source necessarily but I read a few, maybe they did have the 6 and 1 days because of our working ability, but to say that would be an assumption whereas there are records about the reasoning of the seven days being based on the primary celestial objects in our sky. Why do you assume that's the maximum we can work? Plenty of people have worked more or less in different societies or careers.
If it were an even number those body builders wouldn’t have had to argue over it
All because of religion: rested in the seventh day.
I think 6 day weeks would be ideal (4 days work 2 days off).
Its also inconvenient that the number 10 only really has2 and 5 as factors.
We should switch to a base 12 number system.
Base 60 is my favorite.
Too many digits
It's way too long for a week, yeah.
Just to be an insufferable pedant, I would like to point out that a base-60 system would only have one digit from 0 to 59. So technically fewer digits than with our current system to express the same range of values, and as we all know, technically correct is the best kind of correct.
But you need 60 different symbols. That's what I was referring to
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, the overall number of extant digits would increase six-fold. I was trying to express the idea that the number of digits in an operation would decrease.
Just use Arabic numerals, but modified 5 additional times. Like 1-9, then 1-9 with a dot on top, then 2 dots on top, and so on.
Digits too much. Already have 10 and it took me long enough to memorize those ones.
Maybe it’s deliberate though - as the week doesn’t divide well it forces weekly rituals.
6 days on and 1 day off is the maximum workers can handle for a long period of time. France switched to a 10 day week after the French Revolution and then went back because it was unsustainable for the workers.
Inconvenient how?
I guess they think 60 seconds, 24h etc are convenient because you can easily split them up in halfs, quarters, 1/6 and so on.
Yeah i don't understand what op is talking about
The French had 10-day weeks for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
10 hours per day was already pretty stupid, but the name they gave to the months was worse, like Grapemonth, Frostmonth, Rainmonth, Flowermonth, etc.
Lucky our existing names aren't stupid! Imagine if April just meant "Bud-opening-month," or if the rest were named after gods, or festivals, or emperors, or if they were numbered but the order was all wrong. That would be ridiculous.
Not sure on grapes but the other three are pretty easy to match to a season.
Metric Week 💚
yeah I think we should have 6 day weeks although someone pointed out to me 5 day is divisible into the number of days in a year but I can see dropping the size of the week by something close to 15% of 5 starts getting pretty short for a week
Since it's popular to talk about a 4-day work week (reducing working days from 71.4% to 57.1% of the week), I have an alternative proposal.
73, 5-day weeks, with 3 working days and 2 weekend days each. 60% working days, which scratches that itch for better work-life balance.
February 29... well, have you watched The Purge? It's a little like that. We don't like to talk about it.
Very. I do dialysis every Monday Wednesday and Friday but I have to go 2 days off over the weekend. So Monday I always have more fluids to take off.
I was taught that it's a seven day week because of the seven visible 'planets' the ancients saw in the sky.
Sunday = Sol
Monday = Luna
Tuesday =Twe [aka Mercury]
Wednesday = Wodin [aka Jupiter]
Thursday = Thor [aka Mars]
Friday = Friga [aka Venus]
Saturday =Saturn
Tuesday: Tirs day
Wednesday : Odens day
Thursday: you guessed it Thors day
Etc.
Saturday was Lögardagen, the day for the bath
From scandinavia anyways.
You say tomato, and I say tomato.
But do you start with tomato or tomato?
You finish with the tomato.
The natural acids help rid the knife of any odors.
Weeks are made up. Like hours and minutes.
No shit.
Which is why we should stop believing minutes and hours and weeks are real
https://www.timecube.net/
What a fantastic website, thank you 😁!
Yes but also yes
I have no knowledge of this ; and would argue the 7 days are because they are prime . If not, it would have long ago be broken up into smaller weeks .
7 days is the Goldilocks zone of that unit of time size . 5 is too small and 11 is too long