Physicist wants to reform calendar

When Richard Henry talks about starting a new year, he really means a new year.

No more “30 days hath September.”

No more leap year.

No more questions about day and date.

Every year would be identical and have 364 days.

Christmas and New Year would always be Sundays.

Henry, a physicist and astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, calls his plan “calendar reform.”

Laugh if you like, but it makes more sense than some other “reform” ideas floating around.

“There are enormous economic advantages and practical benefits,” he told me.

“The primary benefit is you wouldn’t have to replan things every year. Everything has to reschedule every year, somebody has to go through the calendar, and it’s a complete waste of time.

“With my plan, I think there’d be new calendars — Easter and Passover would keep moving around, and the phases of the moon — but there’d be one basic, permanent calendar.”

He rates its chances as “highly unlikely, but most definitely not impossible.”

I’d give it better odds than Esperanto and slightly worse than metric conversion.

Henry, 64, got the idea three years ago when facing the annual nuisance of setting his course calendar and developed it in minutes on a computer.

“That’s my recreation – instead of watching football, I program Fortran,” he said.

“I said to myself, ‘Why waste your time on a hopeless cause?’ Then I said, `Wait a minute, there’s something new; there’s the Internet.

“That can make things happen worldwide without me having to do anything.”’

At henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendar.html, he is campaigning to change the calendar next Jan. 1. It’s a Sunday on both the current and proposed calendars, which make it a seamless transition.

Our current calendar, put in place by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 to put months in regular cycle with seasons, modified one instituted by Julius Caesar.

Henry is not the first to suggest improving it.

“The last time it was tried, they got remarkably far,” he said, noting India put a plan before the United Nations in the 1950s.

“It went a fair distance. The U.S. basically vetoed it.

“The Sabbath was the problem. All major proposals involved breaking the seven-day cycle of the week. It’s a serious problem. I wouldn’t advocate calendar reform that messed that up.

But C & T never breaks that biblical cycle.”

C & T stands for Calendar and Time. Besides changing the calendar, Henry urges a switch to Universal Time, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time.

“You’d never be confused about zones and daylight time — it would be exactly the same date and time, all the time, everywhere, forever, and you’d never be confused about it. Period.

“That,” he chuckled, “would take a miracle. But if I’m going to get a miracle, I might as well get my money’s worth.

“Good heavens!” he said. “I got a call a couple hours ago from the Russians, saying they’re bringing a TV crew over.

“I’m on a breakfast show in Western Australia later today. Even Cleveland is calling!

“Unfortunately, the station I was on last night in Washington is the one with Dan Rather, so I doubt that President Bush watches it.

“So maybe it’s not going to happen, but a lot of things don’t happen.”

We can dream anyway. Even the unavoidable flaw in his fixed calendar – which has eight 30-day months and gives 31 to March, June, September and December – holds undeniable appeal.

Because an Earth year is uneven, actually measuring about 365 1/4 days, leap year is necessary to keep the calendar aligned with seasons.

Henry’s correction is a weeklong “minimonth” every five or six years.

He suspects it would be added to December, but he proposes “Newton” – a week between June and July he named for Sir Isaac Newton.

“If I had my way,” he said, “everyone would get Newton Week off as a paid vacation and could spend the time doing physics or other activities of their choice.

“Let everybody have a good time.”

Laugh if you like, but he got me.

That sounds like a reform idea whose time has come.