I admit to knowing nothing about the Mayan calendar, and I have been told repeatedly that is the most accurate calendar ever constructed. So I decided to ask here since my Google search was too specific. My question: "why don't we use the Mayan calendar?"

It's not the most accurate calendar ever constructed. The Mayans did pretty well, though. They got the length of the year approximately right.

So our modern calendar is the most accurate one?

Yes.

The Maya calendar wasnt as acurate as the modern one to the millisecond, but they had their years and what not pretty much spot on. The big difference is they had a variety of different measurements other than years, as their calendar(s) where used to calculate the harvests, religious events and all sorts of other things.

Take a look at this site (http://www.mayacalendar.com/mayacalendar/menu.html) if you want to know more, its a tad simplistic compared to some of the information available on the subject, but more than enough if you just want to feed your curiousity.

What a grand civilization, such a shame it was destroyed.

while we have a very accurate knowledge of the solar and lunar cycles, our calandar has been hacked to accomidate it.

Note the leap year- an additional day added every four years to account fot he extra 1/4th of a day the Gregorian calander doesn't account for.

Note the "day out of time" in many native american calandars, a holy day outside of the year which was devided up evenly into 13 28 day (lunar) months. This day is often a full day plus 3 or four hours. It divides much more nicely with the actual solar and lunar cycles.

The mayan calander is interesting because it has three calanders overlapping each other, resulting in a couple of different year cycles. What you end up with is a highly accurate system for planing cycles and for noting not only the solar and lunar cycles, but also the celestial cycles over hunderd-year periods, and overall the spiritual cycle which predicts the death and re-birth of the entire world itself. given that the calander was created (accoding to archeological theory) a couple thousand years after the begining of this world (according to the calander itself), and we have a couple hundred to go until the next (or 2012, depending on who you talk to), we may never know the accuracy of the spirirtual calander.
All told they were able to figure out the paths of sun, moon, and a number of stars over multi-year orbit variations without the aid of calculus or telescopes. A very impressive culture indeed.


I wouldn't say our calander is the most accurante- it's just the most used calander in a scientificly based society with the most numerically accurate estimation of the solar cycle. The moon doesn't orbit the earth faster in Feb. and slower in August. Why do those months have a different number of days in them, scientifically? It's based on hold-overs of roman religion, not based on science or accurate measurements.