What’s in a Year?

For at least as long as people have had written records, people have used celestial effects to mark off time. This continued until half a century ago, when we developed clocks more accurate than most celestial effects and measurements. Thus, the day and the month and the year. There are two issues with these units of time: what point in the cycle to start at, and what zero value to count from. For the day, sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight. For the month, new moon. For the year, the solstices and the equinoxes. Curiously, our calendar starts at neither a solstice nor an equinox.

What zero point should one count from? The first system was the beginning of the reign of some local leader, the year-reign system. Under this system, this year is Barack Obama 4, Queen Elizabeth II 60, David Cameron 2, Stephen Harper 7, Julia Gillard 3, John Key 5, Michael Higgins 2, Nicolas Sarkozy 6, Angela Merkel 8, Dmitry Medvedev 5, Benjamin Netanyahu (II) 4, Mustafa Abduljalil 2, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia 8, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan 9, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 8, Manmohan Singh 9, Hu Jintao 11, Emperor Akihito 24, Yoshihiko Noda 2, Felipe Calderon 7, Dilma Rousseff 2, Cristina Kirchner 6, …

Our calendar’s zero point uses an estimate of when Jesus Christ was born, an estimate made by a certain Dionysius Exiguus (“Dennis the Short”) some time around 525 CE. He never told us how he arrived at his estimate, and it is most likely mistaken. If there was a historical Jesus Christ, he was likely born a few years earlier than 1 CE, around 6 to 4 BCE. BC = “Before Christ”, AD = “Anno Domini” (“In the Year of the Lord”), BCE = “Before the Christian/Common Era”, CE = “Christian/Common Era”.

But there are some other zero points we could use. Here is this year in them:

• The French Revolutionary Calendar: 220
• The Jewish calendar, from a date calculated from the Bible of the creation of the Universe: 5772
• Anno Urbi Conditae (“In the Year of the Founding of the City”), from when the legendary hero Romulus supposedly founded Rome: 2765
• The 4rd year of the 697th Olympiad, from the first of the ancient Olympics: 2788
• From when the legendary Chinese Yellow Emperor supposedly established the Chinese calendar: 4649
• Holocene era, with a zero point near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the beginning of Middle Eastern agriculture: 12012

Since some of them do not start on January 1, I use the year of January 1 in that calendar.

Astronomers prefer to use a days-only calendar, because it makes calculations easier. They have used Julian Dates since the late 19th cy., where the Julian Date’s zero point January 1, 4713 BCE in the Julian calendar. The Julian Day of midnight 1 Jan 2012 is 2455927.5. Satellite trackers often subtract 2400000.5, giving a Modified Julian Day: 55927. Various computer operating systems and software represent dates internally by this strategy, using various zero points. For instance, the Unix time() function returns the number of seconds since midnight January 1, 1970: 1325376000.

Monarchy: How Did It Emerge?

As we have seen, monarchy has gone on a rather precipitous decline over the last few centuries, with many of the remaining monarchs being figureheads who preside over de facto republics. But here and there, hereditary succession of leaders has re-emerged, notably in North Korea and Syria. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Khadafy both wanted to be succeeded by one of their sons, though they failed, and their children are either dead, in exile, or in jail.

Jason Brownlee has written about another would-be monarchy: The Heir Apparency of Gamal Mubarak, about one of Hosni Mubarak’s sons.

He has some very interesting discussion of the question of succession, a discussion which may give insight as to how monarchy has emerged.

Since World War II, many autocratic leaders have been deposed, by coups or invasions or their parties or foreign pressure. But of those who escaped being deposed, he notes two categories of succession systems.

The first is where ruling elites have an orderly procedure for choosing successors. That is typical of Communist countries and other one-party states. You become a leader by moving up in the party and getting the favor of party bosses. But if they dislike you enough, they may remove you, like Nikita Khrushchev. A sort of oligarchic republicanism, like the Vatican and the Republic of Venice.

The second is where they don’t. Such regimes have a “crown prince problem”, where the chosen successors may try to get into power early. To avoid power struggles, and to keep from being overthrown, the safest choice is often a leader’s son. Thus, monarchy.

So monarchy emerges in the absence of alternative ways of choosing successors.

Communist Monarch Kim Jong Il now Dead

I’ve blogged here about monarchy, so it’s appropriate to report on the passing of a de facto monarch, North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il. He had succeeded his father, and one of his sons is officially his successor: Kim Jong Un. I’ve seen lots of speculation about which of his other relatives might have succeeded him or else might be powers behind the throne. Ah, the internal politics of a royal family.

Though officially atheist, Communists have been known to turn their leaders into god figures, and North Korea has gone very far. Kim Jong-il: man of implausible talents – Asia-Pacific – Al Jazeera English lists some juicy examples.

North Korean officialdom claims that he was born in a secret military camp on Mt. Paektu. His birth was announced by a small bird and when it happened, there was a double rainbow and a new star. But according to Soviet records, he was born in Vyatskoye near Khabarovsk a year earlier.

We have a plausible alternative hypothesis because we have good records, but if we did not, then how well could we tell fact from fiction?

That officialdom also claims that he hit 11 holes-in-one in a golf game, and that he invented meat sandwiches. Also according to that source, he was loved as a great leader by everybody else in the world, and his center-zipped khaki pantsuits were a big fashion hit the world over.

Here also, if we had no other sources, could we be able to tell fact from fiction? Fortunately we do, and the last two are especially laughable — I can easily discover oodles of counterevidence.

What next for North Korea? Kim Jong Un has been the “Brilliant Comrade”; will he now become the Brilliant Leader? He’s only 29, so he could be in power for an awfully long time.

Did They Find the Higgs Particle?

The biggest science news recently has been the almost-discovery of the long-sought Higgs particle or Higgs boson. I call it an almost-discovery because, while the particle seems evident, it does not seem strongly-enough evident. At CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland there are detectors around where the beams cross, detectors for detecting the particles produced by collisions. The ones involved in the Higgs hunt have been ATLAS and CMS, each with its own team of physicists who analyze its results. They do so by first looking for distinctive sorts of events, like pairs of energetic photons, which could be produced by Higgs-particle decay. They then plot how many by putative Higgs-particle mass.

On December 13, 2011, the ATLAS and CMS teams announced that they have discovered bumps in their plots, both at masses of about 125 GeV in particle-physics units. However, they are only about 2 to 3 standard deviations or sigmas above average, which is not enough to plausibly claim discovery. Particle physicists prefer a margin of 5 sigma before making such claims. But since the bumps have nearly the same mass, their combined height is about 3 or 4 sigma. Almost, but not quite. It could well be that this result is a false alarm, but that is very improbable.

Why is the Higgs particle so important? Because it is the only particle of the Standard Model that has yet to be found, and because this particle would give masses to most of the other Standard-Model particles. It would have a constant nonzero field value everywhere in the Universe, and this always presence would drag the particles it interacts with, giving them their masses.

The LHC is currently shut down for maintenance, and it will be restarted early in 2012. It should make enough collisions to go past 5 sigma, if the Higgs particle exists. So a year from now, we should know. In 2013, the LHC will be upgraded so that its protons will have an energy of 7 TeV instead of the present 3.5 TeV. Also on tap is increases in the number of particles being accelerated and collided, the “beam luminosity”. That will help not only in determining the properties of this putative Higgs particle, but also in finding other particles or setting improved limits on their masses.

This includes possible additional Higgs particles and supersymmetry partners of known partners, both of which are expected to exist according to some popular theories. So we are on the threshold of discovering some important new physics — or setting strong limits on its existence.

Monarchy: Who’s Next to Fall?

Monarchism in republics has a converse, republicanism in monarchy. How strong are republican movements in monarchies and how likely are they to succeed?

The more autocratic monarchies, like in Saudi Arabia, are not likely to have much tolerance for republican movements. However, the experience of the last few centuries suggests that political upheavals are likely to end such monarchies, with their successors creating republics that stay republics. Such monarchies may survive by letting republican organizations like parliaments take over much of the work of governing, and their nations may end up crowned republics.

Of the Arab monarchies, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, and Oman seem headed toward republicanism, with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia taking baby steps in that direction. Though these nations have avoided most of the “Arab Spring” strife, Bahrain and Syria are close to civil war, and it may depose their monarchies. Elsewhere, the Communist monarchies of North Korea and Cuba seem stable.

Turning to the crowned-republic monarchies, we find republican movements in many of them. The Alliance of European Republican Movements has members in most of Europe’s crowned republics: the UK, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Spain. There are also pro-republican organizations in the UK’s major dominions: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Most of these organizations are on the fringes of their nations’ politics, without much support from big political parties or big-name politicians, as far as I (lpetrich) can tell.

However, republicanism has gotten a surprising amount of support in the UK and its major dominions. Several politicians have supported republicanism in those nations, and Australia has gone as far as having a referendum on becoming a republic. It failed, however. The Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, has gone on record as stating that she wants Australia to become a republic, but that she wants to wait until Queen Elizabeth II dies, because many people seem to like her. So Elizabeth Windsor’s likability may be keeping the British monarchy going. Her likely successor, Prince Charles, has not been so likable, and if he becomes king, his personality may induce some nations to reject the British monarchy. So might the House of Windsor some day go the way of the Houses of Bourbon, Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov, and Savoy?

So Bahrain, Syria, and the UK and its dominions all risk losing their monarchies over the next few years to the next decade or so.