If Physicist Has His Way, Existing Calendar’s Days Are Numbered

If Richard Conn Henry has his way -- and he concedes that he almost certainly won’t -- the coming year will be the last with 365 days.

The Johns Hopkins University physicist and astronomer has devised a better calendar, he believes, than the one that has sufficed for more than four centuries -- the one that graces office desks and hangs on walls, including in Henry’s kitchen.

The alternative might sound drastic, if not far-fetched: Some months would lose a day. Others would gain one. Leap years would be abolished in favor of a weeklong “mini-month” tucked between June and July every five or six years.

And most years would end at 364 days.

But the result, Henry says, would be a stable calendar -- identical from year to year -- that would make for much more convenient planning.

Under his scheme, if you were born on a Tuesday, your birthday would always fall on a Tuesday. Christmas would always be on a Sunday, the Fourth of July on a Wednesday. Election day wouldn’t be determined by clumsily calculating “the first Tuesday after the first Monday” in November. It would always be on Nov. 8.

Proponents of a fixed calendar say it also would reduce costs to businesses, schools and other organizations; they wouldn’t need to buy new ones every year. People might tire of the pictures, sure -- the same antique cars, quaint lighthouses, Clydesdale horses -- but think of the trees it would save!

Henry, who is director of the Maryland Space Grant Consortium when he’s not trying to manipulate time, has joined a long line of would-be calendar reformers who date to Julius Caesar and beyond.

Among their efforts -- the Thirteen Moon Calendar, the Ecliptic Calendar, the Long-Sabbath Perennial Calendar and the 60-Week Calendar.

Unlike many of his predecessors, however, Henry initially was motivated by his own convenience a few years ago when he realized that season after season, he was teaching the same courses at Hopkins. He was using the same textbooks. He was assigning the same homework. Yet he always had to change his syllabus to reflect the new year’s dates.

At first, he thought, that’s just the way it has to be. Then, he said, “I made a dreadful mistake: I looked into it.”

Under Henry’s proposal -- developed using a complex computer program he devised -- 30 days hath January, February, April, May, July, August, October and November. All the rest have 31.

“I am heartbroken over Halloween, because I love Halloween,” he says, referring to his calendar’s lack of an Oct. 31. Still, he thinks the holiday could be switched, without much trouble, to another day.

When he presented a paper on his proposed universal calendar at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society about a year ago, two young women approached him afterward. One was quite fond of his idea; the other wasn’t.

The critic happened to like it when her birthday occasionally fell on a weekend. Under his new calendar, she told him, she would be forever consigned to turning older on a Thursday.

But Henry, who at 64 deems himself an “old guy” who no longer pays attention to birthdays, has an answer. “You control when your birthday is celebrated,” he says in earnest. “You don’t have to have the calendar do it.”

The Gregorian calendar used in the United States and much of the Western world was instituted in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. He modified a calendar Julius Caesar had adopted in 46 B.C. to bring it into sync with the seasons. Ten days were dropped that year -- Oct. 15 directly followed Oct. 4 -- and the rule for determining leap years was altered.

Leap years are necessary every four years for one maddening reason: An Earth year contains an uneven number of days.

“365.2422,” to be exact, says Henry, who works in a discipline that requires such precision.

His calendar would eliminate leap years and institute a seven-day period he has dubbed “Newton Week,” in honor of Sir Isaac Newton.

He placed Newton Week between June and July rather than stick it at the end of December, he says, because he feared end-of-the-year partying might get out of hand. Newton Weeks would occur irregularly: in 2009, 2015, 2020, 2026, for starters.

Henry has embarked on an admittedly long-shot campaign to get his scheme -- called the Calendar-and-Time plan because it also espouses a shift to “universal” time -- adopted by Jan. 1, 2006.

“I don’t claim any originality to this,” he says. “My only interest in this, quite frankly, is to make my own life easier.”