This Week with the Periodic Calendar (or, Dear World, I Think I Might Have Broken Your Calendar)

I knew from the beginning that the Periodic Calendar would disagree with our current calendar on birthdays and anniversaries in most years, but when considering one date at a time, it seemed more like a technicality in P-Cal’s favor than a reason to get out the pitchforks. As soon as I started looking at whole weeks of history, however, the inconsistent nature of our old calendar suddenly became a problem for which the Periodic Calendar seemed to be the solution.

… Or at least, that’s what it looks like to me.  Though I believe that the Periodic Calendar truly represents a new way to look at time, I’m still learning about it myself.  In an attempt to highlight the ramifications of this new calendar system, this week I am excited to present the pilot episode of a series in which we will explore both history and the Periodic Calendar a week at a time…

The quickest way to see the difference is to line up this week as represented by each calendar…

WeekVsWeek

With our regular calendar, we only see one dimension of the week.  Mention April 1st and Monday April 1st represents them all, ignoring the fact that most years April 1st is not a Monday.  Meanwhile, the Periodic Calendar captures this lost information via the band of Gregorian Isotopes running across each element.  The isotopes tell us what day of the month each element exists as given the type of year.  2013 is a Tuesday Year and so you’ll notice that this week according to our old calendar, ie. April 1st-7th, is represented by the orange isotopes.

Now consider the historical events laid out in the video as represented by the Periodic Calendar…

AprilWeek1-History-P-Cal

… and compare it to how our regular calendar would place the same events in 2013.

AprilWeek1-History-regular

The events in orange originally happened in a Tuesday Year, so they match in both versions.  However, in 2014, our old calendar will move every event to a new day of the week and it will be the Wednesday Year events that line up.

AprilWeek1-History-regular2014

In total, there will be seven different versions of history created along the way, whereas with the Periodic Calendar, the arrangement stays the same no matter what year it is…

AprilWeek1-History-P-Cal

While initially it might seem meaningless to worry about what particular day of the week something happened on, which day of the week would you rather have a holiday on, Wednesday or Friday?  Would you rather tomorrow was Saturday or Monday?  When you think about it, we are able to derive far more information from the day of the week than our ever-shifting days of the month could ever offer.

For more on the conceptual importance of the day of the week in regard to an historical event, check out my post about Pearl Harbor.  Otherwise, stay tuned for episode two and see if I figure out how to explain it all better next week!