Today is Monday. A beautiful Monday to all of you!
But hey, what is that: a Monday?
This morning is the beginning of a new day. But what is a day? The process of change between day and night at a certain location. As soon as the sun starts rising, a new day begins. And when the sun goes down, the day is over. The night is between the last day and the next.
To facilitate matters, we just define the time between sundown and sunrise as the end of the last and the beginning of the next day.
Now we have a clear definition of a day on earth. All that remains to be done is to give each day a name. The easiest method would be to assign a natural number n to each day. Not an imprecise and pseudo-scientific name like Monday, February, 8th, 2010.
Let us proceed as follows: this planet has doubtless seen its first day at a time in the past. So we call that day ONE. The day preceding it is the ZERO, it was not there at all.
Now we have to count the days starting from day ONE (I very much assume that the number of days the earth has seen is countable). After that, it is easy to precisely assign today to a natural number “n”. It is irrelevant that this number “n” is extremely high (by our standards). It is a very normal “natural number”.
After all, this is why we defined the set of “natürlichen Zahlen (natural numbers) axiomatically. By definition, this set is infinite, which means that really great numbers can be identified. The fact that we do not know what infinite actually means does not make the slightest difference as far as this concept is concerned.
Consequently, tomorrow would be the “(n+1)st” day (if it happens). And if at some day the world ceases so exist – which, too, is quite probably going to happen – then we have the last day. This last day will be assigned a very natural number. A number that has nothing to do with infiniteness, either.
So: how come we call this day Monday? Isn’t that total nonsense? Or at least very random and virtual? It is totally cultural and artificial, has nothing to do with nature and natural sciences. We do not even know how many Mondays there have been already. If someone had taken pains and counted diligently, it would be easy to find out by division with 7!
Some people differ in opinion about Monday or Sunday being the first day of the week. That, too, is as academic as the argument whether or not a new decade began on January, 1st, 2010 (see my article on the new millennium problem Neue Jahrtausend-Problem).
If I pick any set of days from a series of 7 days at random, than the first day of the set is day number one. Just like probably a new decade starts with every new day.
No matter what: I wish you a nice Monday and a good start of the week, regardless!
🙂 OR
A nice today followed by six more nice days!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
Here they are – The Mamas & The Papas, of course with “Monday, Monday”!
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