Christmas Day marks the birth of a wise man who revealed eternal truths to humanity and reshaped the course of history: Isaac Newton. Well\u2026 sort of. Had he been born elsewhere in Europe, rather than in England, his birthday would have fallen on January 4.<\/p>\n
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.<\/p>\n
Newton \u2013 the endlessly talented nerd behind the laws of motion, universal gravitation, and groundbreaking advances in optics and calculus \u2013 was born in England on December<\/a> 25, 1642. According to most biographical accounts<\/a>, he was born three months prematurely, so small that he could have been tucked into a quart mug. Few expected him to survive, let alone change the world.<\/p>\n His birth was\u00a0a time when the country was being torn apart by the English Civil War. Royalists and parliamentarians were butting heads, religious tensions were boiling over, and political structures were crumbling in a post-medieval meltdown. Amidst the chaos, the Scientific Revolution was gathering momentum, a movement that would soon reach its peak through the work of Newton himself.<\/p>\n England<\/a> had also just had a messy break-up with the Catholic Church, pissing off the pope and carving its own path toward Protestantism. As a result, the country was still hanging on to the Julian calendar.<\/p>\n Established by the Roman bigman Julius Caesar, hence its name, the Julian calendar is a solar calendar that features 365 days, divided into 12 months, plus a leap day<\/a> every four years. It functioned reasonably well, but it slightly overestimated the length of the year by about 11 minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over centuries, this tiny error amplified and caused the calendar to drift out of sync with the solar year and the seasons. This was especially bothersome for the Catholic Church, which was frustrated because the drifting Julian calendar confused their calculations of Easter’s timing.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n