MovieChat Forums > 11:14 (2004) Discussion > Connection to the leap year???

Connection to the leap year???


I couldn't help but notice a weird connection with the name of the film and the method of determining a leap year with the calander. The math seems to work out beautifully when you add an extra day to the calendar every four years to compensate for the extra quarter of a day in the solar year. When doing that yeh only problem was that the solar year is just about 365 ¼ days long, but not exactly! The exact length of a solar year is actually 11 minutes and 14 seconds less than 365 ¼ days. That means that even if you add a leap day every four years, the calendar would still overshoot the solar year by a little bit?11 minutes and 14 seconds per year!!
To rectify the situation, the creators of our calendar (the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582) decided to omit leap years three times every four hundred years. This would shorten the calendar every so often and rid it of the annual excess of 11 minutes and 14 seconds!!!

This correction worked in bringing the calendar and the solar year in harmony, it just about eliminated the extra 11 minutes and 14 seconds. The result is that the calendar year and the solar year are just about a half a minute off. At this rate it will take 3,300 years for the calendar year and solar year to diverge by a day. Who knows what will happen then.




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