A celebration of Dec. 25... ish.

Newton's third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Well we are fastly approaching a day of celebration. Yes, December 25, which marks the day of birth on one of history's greatest men ever to live… Author of the "Principia" Sir Isaac Newton.

Around 1666 Newton had what was referred to as "annus mirabilis", or year of miracles. While fleeing the plague Newton inventing calculus, the discovering the chromatic composition of light, and conceiving of the inverse-square law of universal gravitation. Newton later published his work as the "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica".

But wait, was he really born on December 25? The answer is yes and no, because it depends. Depends on what you say? Well it depends on the calendar, or specifically what calendar you are using.

The word calendar comes from Latin calendarium, or “account book”, and is derived from calendae or “the calends”, the first day of all of the old Roman months.

The early Roman calendar was based ten lunar months and an period of undetermined and unnamed length during the winter which would become January and February. The calendar year would begin with March (Martius, meaning month of Mars, Roman god of war). March was also marked the time for the resumption of war, back then always a good way to start the new year and probably carried some interesting New Year's resolutions like “I think I will conquer all of northern Europe this year”.

It was around 153 BC that Rome decided that January 1st should now mark the beginning of the New Year. This was based on a Lunar Year which did not properly sync up with the Solar year. So around 46 BC Julius Caesar using calculations from Egyptian Astronomers and based the new year on a 365.25 days period.

But that also was not exactly correct since the the calender was actually off by 11 minutes and it messed with Easter as the years were piling up. So in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII introduced his new Gregorian calendar to avoid having to change all the missals and breviaries of the Roman Catholic Church.

The new calendar would use a variation that adds leap days in years divisible by four, like the Julian calendar, every 4 years. The real change was that some new variables were added. If the year was also divisible by 100 there would be no leap day that year unless the year was also divisible by 400 then a leap day is added regardless.  This corrected the calendar so that Easter would now coincide with the spring equinox.

Now England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until September of 1752, a 110 years after Newton’s birth. So if corrected to the Gregorian Calendar would now mean Newton was born around January 4th of 1643.

That leaves us with a parting thought why do Ruffles... oh I mean Coins have ridges? Well Isaac was so popular that they made him “Master of the Royal Mint” in 1696. And one of his duties was to stop the “Clippers”.

Coinage in those days were actually worth the value they represented. A five dollar gold coin was manufactured with five dollars worth of gold. So by clipping or shaving off a little bit of a coin each time you could actually rob a little of the coins worth and create a little savings for yourself. By doing this in small amounts the next guy would not know you “Clipped” a little from him. About the year 1700 Isaac devised the reeded ridge on the coin so you could tell if someone tried to shave a little off.

So be it December 25th of January 4th it is a time to remember and celebrate one the great people of history... Sir Isaac Newton.

“The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.”

Plato

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