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What’s the deal with Leap Years?

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on by

Today’s episode is the first Science Explainy Bit of the season, and it’s another basic, classic topic: Leap Years. As a reminder, I love looking at the questions that seem simple because we think of them as the sorts of things that children ask their parents, but the thing about these questions is that they never are simple. These are things that took humanity centuries or longer to figure out, and that most of us still don’t really understand because we first asked these questions as kids ourselves, and got the sort of answer which people give small kids, and nobody ever asked again! Last season we talked about about the tides and what happens if you shoot a gun in space, and why it is that we sometimes see the Moon during the day when we all expect to see it at night. And today, we talk about how leap years, how they relate to Easter and politics, and why they even exist.

A few weeks back, we were featured as guests on Podcast Insider, the official podcast of the Blubrry podcasting platform. Although this show doesn’t live on their hosting platform, we do use their software to make it all work on our own servers, and it was a bit of an honour to be invited onto their show. Give it a listen here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:57 — 16.4MB) | Embed

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Comments

What’s the deal with Leap Years? — 1 Comment

  1. The difference between the two Easters is that the Orthodox Catholic church logically requires that it follows after Passover, therefore having to be subject to the wanderings of that celebration in the Gregorian calendar. After all, the Last Supper was a Passover celebration. The western church appears to have wanted to eliminate the idea that Jesus was a Jew in their anti-Semitic zeal and therefore eliminated that requirement from their definition for the date of their Easter. This is a major stumbling block, besides a Pope, for their (eastern and western) reunification. “East is East and West is West…” may not be what Kipling had in mind, but who knows for sure.

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