Hey, smart people, Joe, here, I was
looking at my calendar recently and
two questions popped into my head. One, why are Lambis in
jammies so stinking cute? And two, why are weeks a thing? Like why do we divide the
calendar into seven day chunks, not eight or five? Most of the units
we divide our calendar with come
from natural astronomical cycles. A year is the time it takes the
Earth to orbit the Sun once months, roughly the length of the moon's
full cycle of phases, days from the Earth's rotation on its axis.
But the week there's no natural, earthly or astronomical cycle that
measures seven days. Despite that, almost every culture on Earth today
divides its calendar this way. Some historians think the seven
day week is so old it may be the oldest known human institution
still functioning without a break. That seems like a week is
actually a pretty strong idea. But everything comes from somewhere. Every invention has an inventor.
So why is a week? Seven is an odd choice for
the number of days in a week, and not just because it isn't even.
It's also a prime number and we can't evenly divided into the three
hundred sixty five days in a year. But seven has been regarded as a
significant number by countless cultures for thousands of
years in religion, mythology, superstition and folklore. The Seven
Deadly Sins, the Seven Virtues, the seven days of Creation,
the Seven Samurai, the Seven Heavens, the Seven Chakras, the Seven
Lucky Gods and the Mercury Seven. The Mercury Seven were the
first astronauts selected for NASA's human spaceflight program. Each spacecraft in Project Mercury
was given a name ending and the number seven and Project Mercury
laid the groundwork that led to humans landing on the moon.
Incidentally, counting Apollo 13, NASA originally planned seven
missions to land on the moon. And the moon is where the story of
the seven day week begins. And there are roughly, though not exactly
twelve moon cycles in a solar year. And that was precise enough for
a farmer in five thousand B.C. as a fundamental division of time. Twelve is a convenient
number for a few reasons. For one, it's pretty small.
You can probably even count to it. It can also be divided into two parts
or three parts or four or six parts, which makes it a good basis for
measuring things like circles. Let's draw a circle with radius
are then from the edge market intersecting circle with the same
radius. And again on the other side, these points of intersection divide
a circle into six equal portions to subdivide each of those in
half and you can split a circle into twelve equal parts without
complicated measuring tools, which is handy for dividing the
sky into signs of the Zodiac. Once a month, ancient sky watchers
watch the moon cycle through the twelve slices of the Zodiac,
a seemingly unchanging backdrop of stars. It's an observer on Earth. The
stars do rotate slowly once per day, but their positions don't
change relative to each other. But like the moon,
a few other objects bright enough to be seen with the naked eye
do seem to move on their own. Not following the background stars. These were known as wanderers
or planets in Greek, and they were the moon, Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And if you add the biggest,
brightest wanderer, the sun, you get seven of them originally
thought to be each embedded in rotating spheres with
the earth at their center. Of these are not all planets
by today's definition, and that's not how the
solar system works at all. But ancient sky watchers from the
Babylonians to the Greeks and Romans, even India and China put the planets
in this order based on how fast they wandered through the sky with Saturn,
the planet, with the longest cycle at the top. And this is
where astronomy becomes astrology. Now, in many ancient cultures,
each planet represented a God whose position in the sky could influence
the lives of us puny little mortals. Seven planets,
seven gods, seven days. Can you see where this is going? Except things aren't
quite in order yet. Around the third century BC, Greek
astrologers writing horoscopes in Egypt decided that each God was only
in charge for one hour at a time, so Satan would rule for an hour
and then Jupiter, Mars and so on. But with twenty four hours in a
day and only seven planets this cycle spilled into the following
day each day, moving four planets down the list. And finally,
after one hundred and sixty eight hours repeating on the eighth day,
this is the planetary week. And in this astrological system, each
day was named for its first hour. Or translated Saturday, Sunday,
Monday, Mars Day, Mercury Day. Wait a second. That was sounding
really good for a minute. But then Mars Day and Mercury Day
don't really sound like Tuesday and Wednesday unless you speak Latin or
any of the many languages descended from it, like Spanish or French,
as the Greek astrological seven day week was adopted by the Romans
and spread across their empire. We can clearly see the planetary
roots in these languages names for the days as Christianity
spread throughout Europe, days were renamed to align with
Christian religious traditions, and the first day of the working
week was moved to Monday. I mean, Monday like it is today. I mean, I love the moon then.
Man, do I hate moon days now. Right now I can hear you asking
what the heck is up with English? Only three of these sound
like they're Latin root. Well, northern European folks,
Germanic, Anglo-Saxon and Norsemen ancestors, well,
they adopted the seven day week, but they translated some of
the day names and for others, the of their favorite local gods
in place of the Roman planets, maybe as a way to send a message to
their Roman conquerors. By fifteen hundred years ago, the seven day week
had even reached India and China. And the names for the days of the
week in Hindi and some older Chinese dialects are named for the same
astronomical bodies and space gods as the Greek and Roman system.
In the same order, even an indigenous American cultures like the Navajo
with no native concept of a week. The seven day system was
immediately adopted following contact with the Spanish and
adapted to the local language. So the seven day week is used
basically everywhere today. But the naming system
isn't completely universal. A few odd day names do still remain. Icelandic, German and Finnish
call Wednesday literally the middle of the week in the Gaelic
languages of Ireland and Scotland. Wednesday through Friday are
all named four days of fasting. The Icelandic Saturday means
the day to bathe in a pool, which sounds pretty nice, though.
I try to bathe every day. In some cultures,
a seven day week is used, but the names of the days are
simply represented by numbers which, after all, this seems like
a much easier way to do it. It is amazing how quickly and
widely the planetary 70 week spread around the world in the footsteps
of armies of trading and religion. And we still use it today. Stay right where you are because
this does not completely explain why the number seven is significant,
because so many disconnected cultures in so many ways.
I mean, hold on. OK, ok, OK. For one thing, the planetary week. Well, that's not the only seven
day week that we find in history. You see, the Jewish week dates
to at least five hundred B.C. and it's drawn not from the planets, but from the seven days of creation
in the Hebrew Bible. With the first six days numbered in order
and the seventh day a day of rest. Given a special name, Har, that name
Shabat was almost certainly borrowed from the ancient Babylonian shabi to
a festival of the full moon. Huh. OK, so it's obvious there's more than one
reason that seven was significant. And if we really want to uncover more
theories why seven is so significant. Well, the moon is a pretty
good place to start now. A month on our calendar, what traces
its origin to the cycle of the moon
from full to crescent, back to full. That big, bright thing in the
night sky is one of humanity's oldest and ancient ways of
tracking the passage of time. And it conveniently,
but only coincidentally, matches up with the time period between female
populations and menstruation, which happen to share the same word root as
the word modern, which we can trace back to the root, meaning to measure
as in measuring the moon's phases. And when we measure a lunar cycle, each of the four quarter moon phases
is separated by about seven days. Now one new moon to full moon, that's
approximately 14 days or two sevens. And the average time between one
new or full moon is pretty close to, but not exactly four sevens
or twenty eight days. This is a very special set of
numbers. The factors or the numbers that evenly divided into
twenty eight are one, two, four, seven and 14 and those happen to
add up to twenty eight numbers. With this coincidental
property there, factors add up to the number
itself are called perfect. Numbers not to be confused
with perfect letters, of which there is only one you now,
perfect numbers are rare, the ancient Greeks or they
just knew about four of them. And the next one is until
thirty three million, five hundred and fifty thousand
three hundred and thirty six. The precise length of an average
lunar cycle is actually slightly more than twenty nine days. But seven
is the nearest whole number of days between each of its quarter phases
and the near perfect number pattern. The Moon's phases centered around
seven that would have been known to mathematicians at least as
far back as ancient Greece. And speaking of math all. Speaking of math, we can trace the
mystical mathematical nature of the No.7 back to, well, the very first
math that was ever written down, ancient clay tablets
dating to nearly 2000 B.C., unlike our modern decimal base ten
system. Well, the Babylonian and Sumerian scribes who wrote these
used to be basically no system. Now, each place in our base ten
system tells us the number of hundreds and tens and ones, tens,
hundreds and so on in a given number. And when any place fills up with ten, we just roll it over to the next
highest place. The number two thousand one hundred and seven point
three would be two thousand one, one hundred at zero tens plus seven ones
and three tenths of a base 60 system. What works just the same way,
the number fifty nine. Well that would be written
using a single symbol, meaning fifty nine or fifty nine
once the number. Sixty thirty. Well that would be written
with a one in the 60s place and well three wants to make this easier. We can write this using our modern
numbers to the number seventy two. Well that would be one in
the 60s place plus 12 once. And we put a little comma there
just to make it easier to read. But what about fractions?
Let's take one half. We know in our decimal system that simplifies to
zero ones and five cents or a base 60 system that would be written as
zero ones and thirty one sixty FS. And we put a semicolon because they
obviously didn't have a decimal point one third. Well that would be
zero ones in twenty six. Yes. And one fourth or that zero one
in fifteen sixty one zero one twelve sixty is one six zero
and ten and one seventh hole. Well things are nice and tight.
We get them one step. We tried to buy one to seven
parts in a base 60 system. This simplifies into a repeating
six a decimal fraction. Eight. Thirty four. Seventy eight.
Thirty four. Seventy eight. Thirty four. Seventy more than
4000 years ago to the Sumerian Babylonian mathematicians who
invented the earliest mathematics, seven would have been the first
number whose fraction is infinite. And some scholars really believe
that this helped give birth to the mystical and superstitious nature, a number that's still associated
with luck and superstition. Today, more than four thousand
years later, I mean, perhaps when a superstitious Sumerian astrologer
noticed that there were seven heavenly bodies that moved across
the stars, he saw it as a sign. And there are seven stars in the
Big Dipper and in. Oh, right. And in there, pastoralism.
Oh, what's an astronaut? Well, that is a well known pattern of
stars that is visible to the naked eye within a larger constellation,
the way that the Big Dipper is
actually part of Ursa Major. And, of course, the arrangements and
brightnesses of these stars, well, they're just a coincidence thanks to
Earth's particular position in space. But still, our minds love to
insert meaning into coincidences
and to certain ancient eyes. The universe did seem to be
screaming that seven was special. Of course, we know
that those eyes, well, they just couldn't see far because
there are, in fact, eight planets. Don't fight me about Pluto today. I've got to wrap this video
up and it's just one of them. We orbit the sun and the moon
is not a wandering star goddess. It's actually a big freaking
rock that slammed into Earth billions of years ago.
And then it got stuck there. But by the time that humans figured
all of that out, there were already seven days in a week and
nobody felt much like changing it if they even ever wondered where
it came from in the first place. It is one of the rare ideas.
It is simply so old. No records remain of exactly who
first invented it or exactly why. And it shows us that even ideas
that we take for granted that seem
like they've always just been there. Well, even those came
from somewhere, of course, now, you know. What are you going to do
with all of this knowledge, please get rid of
Monday's stay curious. As always, we'd like to
thank everyone who supports the show on Patriot.
We could not do it without you. As you can imagine, videos like
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I've got a lot of questions. Thanks. Links on description,
seven day chunks, a seven day week seven seven seven seven seven seven
seven seven seven seven seven seven. Why the number seven seven
seven seven seven seven seven seven at seven centered around seven. The number seven seven
seven seven seven seven. The universe did seem to be
screaming that seven with special.
