Today i was thinking about our system of counting time and our calendar and why we have the particular calendar we have and what other systems have been in place in other cultures.
There has been tons of talk about Dec 21, 2012 in pop culture and now in movies. There's been a lot of chatter because that is the day that the Mayan Calendar "ends".
I wanted to look into that and find out what the fuss is because like most people i have no clue how the calendar works. I've listened to people talk about what they think it means, but i have yet to hear people speaking of it as it actually functions.
I do know the Mayans had a calendar system that was precise to a degree that our calendar doesn't even come close to. It takes into account not only the days, the months, and the years in our solar system, but it also factors the cycles and alignments of our solar system with the entire galaxy.
The 2012 mark on their calendar is the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. This is a galactic event that is very unusual though. Dec 21 2012 is the point where the winter solstice has made a 360 degree rotation in respect to the milky way and our solar plane will be aligned with the plane of our entire galaxy (the milky way). This is a galactic event that happens once every 26000 years! They marked this in their calendar as a new epoch, and in fact our solar system will stay in alignment for the next 700 years (since the galaxy has a bit of thickness to it).
They used a base 20 counting system instead of our base 10 for their calender and i suppose it is no accident as to why they used it considering it predicts the movement of our planet, the surrounding planets, even the entire solar system in respect to our galaxy.
Absolutely amazing considering they had no technology like we have today to measure and observe - and a complete mystery to me as to how they accomplished that.
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