Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2018 March 22

= March 22 =

Did any cultures or parts of history not mentioned in the article have an international date line?
If you asked a say Medieval French or Classical Athenian scholar where the date changes is there any evidence giving a suggestion of what they might've said? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:14, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
 * This is a purely intuitive answer, but surely one has to undertake a circumnavigation, or at least cross the Pacific, before a date line becomes necessary? Alansplodge (talk) 09:29, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, a thought experiment leading to the conclusion that there must be a date line is quite conceivable at any time after the Earth was known to be spherical. Double sharp (talk) 10:27, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Well maybe, but the OP seems to be suggesting a culture which actually had a date line rather than who just thought it might be something that would one day be needed. Nil Einne (talk) 17:19, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
 * According to one researcher the earliest known texts mentioning gaining or losing a day by circumnavigating the Earth date to the 12th century. Whether someone thought of it earlier is hard to tell if they didn't pen it down. 85.76.72.88 (talk) 14:30, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the link! According to that site the first references to such a thought experiment demonstrating the need for a date line occur in the works of Abu'l-Fida and Nicole Oresme in the 14th century. The thought experiment in question is termed the circumnavigator's paradox, in which two people circumnavigate the globe in opposite directions while a third stays put at their starting point; when they meet each other again at that starting point, a different number of days have passed for each of them. Double sharp (talk) 14:59, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The Medieval French scholar would probably have said "at the edge of Asia", since they didn't know about the Americas. (No, they didn't think the Earth was flat; this is a still-widespread myth in the English-speaking world.) For the Classical Athenian scholar, the idea was effectively meaningless to them. They had their calendar, and the barbarians had theirs, and the day starts for you when the Sun comes up. This only became something really necessary to consider with the advent of globe-spanning empires in the 1500s, and, the International Date Line article seems to indicate that Europe quickly settled on a line in the Pacific. Even then it only mattered for official record-keeping and similar things. Until the telegraph, you couldn't interact "live" with anyone whose solar time differed noticeably from yours, so why would the average person care what day it was on the other side of the globe? --47.146.60.177 (talk) 06:28, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Oresme was a medieval French scholar, which would answer the first part of the question, except that the site previously linked does not show that he had a suggestion for where exactly the date line should be, only that he knew there had to be one: "one ought to assign a definite place where a change of the name of the day would be made". Double sharp (talk) 07:31, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is no coincidence that the closely allied concept of time zones is tied directly to the advent of railways long enough and quick enough to make it matter. Matt Deres (talk) 14:12, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Of course, the exact Greenwich time around the world was known long before then Timeline of time measurement technology.  Greenwich mean time has been around since 1675. 92.31.142.218 (talk) 14:52, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Robert van Gent (who is one of our contributors) doesn't get it quite right .  The eleventh century view was that the date line was located six hours east of Jerusalem.   Support for this theory comes from the fact of the start of the month being delayed should the conjunction occur at noon or later - at that moment the date will be the same everywhere.   Also, with the sun being created at the beginning of the fourth day and the belief that it was on the Jerusalem meridian at that moment there is no other place for the date line to be. 92.31.142.218 (talk) 15:11, 23 March 2018 (UTC)


 * The question kind of assumes that the entire world uses the same calendar. The question would be, when did that happen? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:04, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The Gregorian Calendar was adopted by most Roman Catholic nations in 1582. Britain and its colonies, including what is now the United States, adopted it in 1752. Akld guy (talk) 22:22, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * When did China, et al, adopt the western calendar? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:31, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The whole world not using the same calendar didn't stop a date line from existing for Medieval Judaism. Also it doesn't have to be the same day on side X, Russian Alaska used the Julian calendar, and Canada used Gregorian and everyone using either calendar would agree that the date line is on their shared border. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:41, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * That would have nothing to do with what we call the International Date Line. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:15, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * A pole to pole line does tend to be international but very well, let's call it the date line that was international to one culture but unheard of to entire continents. had at least a little currency in at least one culture. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:01, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * That changes the nature of the question, and you changed the section title accordingly. Maybe you should start over? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:33, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Like this? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:26, 24 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Contrary to Bugs, I reckon that the question assumes only that some set of people using one calendar had concerns around the world. The Chinese calendar isn't of concern to Spaniards communicating with South America and the Philippines. —Tamfang (talk) 04:48, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The IDL would be of no importance in those cases. Each has dates and times relative to the Greenwich Meridian. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:50, 26 March 2018 (UTC)