Subject: God's Longitude and the Lost Colony of Virginia
At the BSS meeting in Cambridge this spring. Frank King outlined the problems assigning a unique date to a mark on a sundial. With our Gregorian calendar and leap year cycle the date for any given solar declination can vary over four days. He showed how a calendar based on a 33 year cycle devised by Omar Khayyam could reduce this spread to 24 hours. He then pointed out that for one specific longitude, the date of the first day of spring would always be the same. He mentioned that this was called God's Longitude and left it for us to figure out where that was as a homework exercise. I've done my homework and discovered a remarkable story, one that just had to be told at the NASS Conference in Virginia, at the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown colony of 1607. Fred Sawyer agreed to work with me as co-author and to present at the conference the story of "God's Longitude and the Lost Colony of Virginia". It is a great story of the birth of science in Elizabethan England, the global conflicts of religion and empires and a secret agenda for the English protestants to occupy the new world at longitude 77ºW, God's Longitude. I have posted the presentation as Fred presented it at this personal website for you to download and enjoy. http://www3.telus.net/public/rtbailey/GodsLongitude/ It is a 5.7 MB PowerPoint presentation. If you do not have PowerPoint, download the free viewer from Microsoft. This will allow you to view the presentation but not the speakers notes that go alone with it. I would like to thank Frank King for the inspiration, Simon Cassidy for doing the historical research and uncovering the secret agenda, and Duncan Steel for publicizing it in his book "Marking Time: The Quest for the Perfect Calendar". Enjoy, Roger Bailey www.walkingshadow.info Great presentation (via Fred Sawyer) Roger. I enjoyed your topic very much and I have retold the story 3-4 times. Nondialist people find it of interest. Thank you Roger, Simon Cassidy and Frank King. On the topic of the McLean - 2007 NASS meeting -- congratulations to Mac Oglesby as recipient of the Sawyer Prize, and thanks to Fred for all his organizational efforts, to Jack for hosting, to the British contingent for their insights, and all in attendance for their contributions. I ordered from Lulu.com and received within a week "A Treatise of Gnomonicks." It had the answer to the question -- "Why is a horizontal dial at the North pole called equatorial and one at the equator called a polar dial?" Answer in the Ozanam book says the name comes from the plane of the dial. At the North pole, the plane of the dial is parallel to the equator and the one at the equator has a plane that "intersects" both the poles. I have a question related to time/calendar relationships -- Is it possible to show the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday etc...) by a shadow on a dial face good for only a rather short range of years and knowing the relationship of the current year to the last leap year? Thanks again, Warren Thom
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