Back In Time When Sundials Were In Fashion

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

Sundials are the oldest known instruments for telling time. The surface of a sundial has markings for each hour of daylight. As the Sun moves across the sky, another part of the sundial casts a shadow on these markings. The position of the shadow shows what time it is.                                 

I was just thinking of one of my ggrandfathers;  Methuselah,  who died at the age of 969.  If you use base 12 instead of base 10, that  would be the same as 80 years and 9 months.  My ancestors kept records after his birth.  The children born after him were:  Lamech, Noah, and his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth, Arpchshad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg and Joktan, Reu, Serug, Nahor I, Terah, Abram and Haran and Nahor II, Isaac, Jacob and Esau, and the 12 sons of Jacob that were so important;  Reuben and Simeon and Levi and Judah and Issachar and Zebulun and Dan and Naphtali and Gad and Asher and Joseph (with sons Manassah and Ephraim)  and Benjamin.  

The point is, I believe the earth was going around the sun faster than it moves today.  People had more years to count, which helped their counting ability.  People were using base 12 back then.  Our clocks today are still using base 12.  Our years are divided into 12 months each.  We have 12 inches in a foot.  In England, 12 pennies or pence in a shilling;  12 black and white keys in an octave;  12 eggs in a dozen and 12 dozen in a gross;  and there are 12 signs in a Chinese and Western zodiac.  

Astronomers such as Neil deGrasse Tyson are saying that our planet Earth is moving farther and farther from the sun.  If that is so, and these are our scientists of today, great scientists, then we were closer a long time ago than we are now.  We aren't immobile.  We keep on swinging through the ages.  

Skywatchers have been trying to gauge the sun-Earth distance for thousands of years. In the third century BC, Aristarchus of Samos, notable as the first to argue for a heliocentric solar system, estimated the sun to be 20 times farther away than the moon. It wasn’t his best work, as the real factor is more like 400.

By the late 20th century, astronomers had a much better grip on this fundamental cosmic metric – what came to be called the astronomical unit. In fact, thanks to radar beams pinging off various solar-system bodies and to tracking of interplanetary spacecraft, the sun-Earth distance has been pegged with remarkable accuracy. The current value stands at 149,597,870.696 kilometres.

Having such a precise yardstick allowed Russian dynamicists Gregoriy A. Krasinsky and Victor A. Brumberg to calculate, in 2004, that the sun and Earth are gradually moving apart. It’s not much – just 15 cm per year – but since that’s 100 times greater than the measurement error, something must really be pushing Earth outward. But what?

One idea is that the Sun is losing enough mass, via fusion and the solar wind, to gradually be losing its gravitational grip  Other possible explanations include a change in the gravitational constant G, the effects of cosmic expansion, and even the influence of dark matter. None have proved satisfactory.

Resource:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17228-why-is-the-earth-moving-away-from-the-sun/

https://neildegrassetyson.com/essays/1996-06-ends-of-the-world/