About Sothic
Scope, sourcing standard, corrections policy, and what is promised about permanence.
The name
The Sothic cycle is the period of roughly 1,460 years over which the ancient Egyptian civil calendar — 365 days, with no leap day — drifts through the entire solar year and returns to alignment with the heliacal rising of Sirius. It is the oldest recorded instance of a timekeeping system diverging from the world it measures, and being reconciled with it.
That is the subject of this publication.
Scope
Sothic covers how time is decided: the standards bodies and their resolutions, the scheduled changes and their deadlines, the physics that forces them, and the corrections that get published in the primary literature and nowhere else.
In practice that means the General Conference on Weights and Measures and its consultative committees; the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service; the International Astronomical Union where it defines reference systems; national metrology institutes; and the standards and space agencies that implement what those bodies decide.
It does not cover the physics of time as a popular subject. That is well served elsewhere.
Sourcing standard
Every factual claim in a Sothic brief is traceable to a primary document — a resolution, a committee report, a peer-reviewed paper, a government policy, a filing — and that document is linked.
Quotations are read from the source document itself, not from an abstract, a search snippet, a press release or a secondary summary. Where a source's abstract and body differ materially, the brief says so and cites the section.
Where a claim could not be verified against a primary document, the brief states that it could not be verified and excludes it from the argument. Anything resting on a single uncorroborated source is identified as such.
Figures produced by trade associations, vendors and market-research firms are flagged as such wherever they appear, because their methods are usually unauditable and their interests are rarely neutral.
Corrections
Briefs carry a version number and a publication date. Corrections are made in place, the version number is incremented, and a dated note at the foot of the brief records what changed and why. Nothing is silently amended.
Substantive corrections — anything that changes a conclusion, a figure or an attribution — are also listed in the corrections log.
Corrections are welcome and are the most useful thing a reader can send. Write to editor@sothic.org, ideally with the primary document that shows the error.
The full log is at sothic.org/corrections. Both briefs were corrected on 26 September 2026 (Version 1.1); every change is listed there.
Correspondence reaches the publisher. Sothic carries no personal byline: briefs are published in the name of Sothic Press, LLC, which is answerable for every claim in them. Mail to editor@sothic.org is read by the editor of the publication, and a correction issued in response is issued by the publisher, not by an individual.
Permanence
A reference is worth nothing if its links break. Sothic makes three commitments about that.
URLs do not change. A brief published at an address stays at that address. If a brief is ever withdrawn, the address returns an explanation rather than an error.
Each brief is deposited with Zenodo, which issues a permanent DOI and is operated by CERN. That deposit survives this publication.
Each brief is submitted to the Internet Archive on publication.
Independence
Sothic is published by Sothic Press, LLC. It carries no advertising, accepts no sponsorship, and has no commercial relationship with any body it covers.