Another orbit around the sun

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I shouldn't be surprised that lemmites would find a way to make hating the new year a personality trait.

Bob

Even if it were arbitrary, I think a personified celestial body would instantly recognise the humanity in celebrating something happening again and again. Like when someone keeps falling over and the people witnessing it go "wahey!" every time.

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Does January 1st coincide with the ending of winter anywhere?

Ending? Winter just started 10 days ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_solstice

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Kind of my point

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New years >>>>>>Christmas

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lol... casual searches for info on this yield a lot of questionable new-agey galactic alignment stuff.

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Summer is a much better time to celebrate anyway. I don't get why Europeans decided to do it in winter.

Anyway, it doesn't stop being an important day... after an arbitrary week-and-half delay.

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The measurement of earth orbiting for one revolution around the sun (a unit of time we refer to as a year) isn't arbitrary. It's clearly defined, you've either made one complete revolution or not. It's just that the original starting point for the first measurement was arbitrary because you'd have to start somewhere.

Many forms of measurement are absolute, like temperature, measured from absolute zero, or time, measured against the cesium standard (atomic clock). You'd have to break physics in order be able to define them as arbitrary.

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But divisions of time are arbitrary, no? 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 30(ish) days in a month, 12 months in a year. There were other ways to divide all that up. There's reasons they were divided that way, but the fact that we have to add a day every 4 years just because it's not perfect says a lot haha

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In this case I might argue that there are more "natural" points of reference (eg. solstices/equinoxes).

We use political/religious markers instead which are completely irrelevant to the planet's orbit.

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The change of year is not aligned with the solstice. The new year has been intentionally moved to an arbitrary date to obscure the solstice behind religious holidays.

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Fuck you, let us have fun.

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If there were reasons that it was divided that way, as you said, then that would make it non-arbitrary, as it was based on a system of logic. Define arbitrary, I guess.

I guess it could appear to be arbitrary to those that aren't aware of those reasons/logic, like the astronomical objects in the cartoon

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There's still a ton of non-absolute values though. Like the difference between absolute zero and absolute zero + 1.

Choosing one second to be 9192631770 transitions of a caesium atom seems quite arbitrary.

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I mean, winter solstice is a little more than a week away, I'd say that was probably a significant influence on the designation of end of the year.

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Ah, well, they moved it ten days away, very hidden and sneaky. Those dastardly fiends.

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I believe that was because at the time of its discovery, that was the most accurately we could measure it. It's still based on a stable, constant, absolutely measurable phenomenon though. You can divide it into whatever arbitrary or non-arbitrary units you want, but that system of measurement is still based on an absolute.

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We measure Right Ascension from the first point of Aries, which is the March equinox and one of the two times where the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator. (The other being the September equinox, of course.) That's easier to determine with a telescope than peri-/aphelion, and more meaningful to people on Earth. Might suggest that as new year, and then we won't upset the sun either?

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The modern definitions of units feel even more arbitrary because they are inextricably tied to more organic origins. Consider the often made fun of fahrenheit scale which was the first to define a reasonably repeatable degree size by using two widely available reference points as the 100 and 0 ends of the scale, human body temperature for the high end and an ammonium chloride ice water mix for the low end.

The definition of a second was a bit jankier. Etymologically the name comes from a second hand added to a watch face to give some kind of indicator that the minutes are passing by. NIST has an excellent writeup on this subject. Over time different repeatable ways to measure a second have been determined all with the goal of having some action a human could use to calibrate their device's second measurement to so their seconds are as long as everyone else's.

The point is, we didn't choose a second to be defined as some number of atomic oscillations. We had an already agreed upon definition of a second that used less precise methods than modern technology demanded and used a natural phenomenon that could be very accurately measured to make a less arbitrary definition.

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Which is why I said define arbitrary earlier. I believe it had to do with accuracy of measurement equipment in the 1950's as well as the ephemeral time scale, which was based on the observed movements of astronomical entities. So you can kinda argue either way. The selection of units can be influenced by an older system like you said, but that still is a system that was based on an observable or measurable phenomenon, which doesn't fit the definition of arbitrary.

Maybe those planets/stars in the cartoon were aware of their own non-linear travel, as well as red/blue-shift effects, and that we earthlings based our original systems of measurement on them without prior knowledge of those factors, thus making them inconsistent and arguably arbitrary haha