Even a shop open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is closed for 6 hours a year!One of our earth years (a complete orbit around the sun) does not take an exact number of days (one complete spin of the earth on its axis). It takes 365.2422 days, give or take.
The leap year was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46BC, to make the calendar tidier. The extra day every fourth year made the average year 365.25 days long. This was still about 12 minutes longer than the solar year, which you can get away with on the short term, but in 1267 a monk called Roger Bacon noticed that the calendar had slipped nine days in the 13 intervening centuries.
It then took the church until 1582 to accept that it was celebrating Easter on the wrong week. That year Pope Gregory XIII adjusted the calendar, introducing the system we go by today: every fourth year is a leap year, unless it is divisible by 100 and not by 400. This makes the year 365.2425 days, which is still a little under 26 seconds too long, but nothing to fret about. (Unless you live more than 1,000 years, and even then, it's only about 10 hours.)
As a one off, Gregory's reform also skipped the 10 days they had gained since Caesar's time, jumping from 4 to 15 October 1582. It is said that this provoked demonstrations from people demanding their stolen days back.
This gives me pause... what would happen if the Pope said that tomorrow would really be April 1st... While people might not fear the time has been subtracted from their lives (I hope), they might protest wages lost from their bank account. Since life is real and money isn't, we might not have progressed so much after all.
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