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to COSMOS Home Page The following essay is a response to the somewhat pedantic argument that the year 2001, rather than the year 2000, is the beginning of the twenty-first century and of the next millennium.
That argument is based on the assertion that there never was a year zero and that the first year of the calendar was numbered one, so each century must end in a year ending with a zero. This argument ignores the fact that the Gregorian calendar did not begin with a year numbered one, nor with any year numbered in single or double digits. The numbers assigned to years in the Gregorian calendar are based on the year then thought to be that of Christ's birth which was probably three years late.
By the time the present
numeration of years was generally accepted, it was late in the first millennium.
If the western Europeans then using the Julian predecessor to the Gregorian
calendar thought about the matter at all, they probably regarded the year 1000
as the beginning of a new
century and a new millennium. The transition from a three-digit to a four-digit
designation of a year would have suggested such a view. Whether it was so regarded
contemporaneously or not, it is reasonable to regard the year 1000 as beginning
the eleventh century and the second Christian millennium; the year 1900 as beginning
the twentieth century; and the year 2000 as beginning the twenty-first century
and the new millennium.
This view provides the ''zero years" sought by those inclined to argue the matter. Considering the basis for beginning the numbering of years in the Gregorian calendar, if there is any error in celebrating the beginning of a new century and millennium in the year 2000, it is probably in celebrating three years too late rather than a year too early.
Despite the beliefs of some religious cults, press warnings of more mass suicides, and obsessive commercialization of the event by hotels, restaurants, champagne producers, and cruise lines, my research on the development of our calender leads to two conclusions about the coming millennium which can be stated quite simply:
The basic units of a calendar are the natural cycles of days, months, and years. The problem for calendar makers is that these units are all incommensurable with each other. The "day" is based on rotation of the earth on its axis. Although we commonly regard a day as the period between sunsets or passage of the sun past a meridian, no two in the year are exactly alike. Accurately measured, the length of a day varies by as much as 16 minutes during the year, so for scientific purposes, the calendar is based on a hypothetical sun that moves across the sky at an even rate, called the mean solar day, which is 24 hours, 3 minutes, and 56.55 seconds of sidereal time.
The "month" is based on the orbiting of the moon around the earth, which also varies throughout the year; and is established for scientific purposes as 29.53059 days.
The "year" is based on transit of the earth through its orbit about the sun. Accurate measurement of this establishes that it is very gradually slowing and a year is now 365.242190 mean solar days.
The difficulty in drafting a schedule of days, months, and years that consistently approximates the seasons has plagued priests, monarchs, and governors since the invention of writing, some five thousand years ago. Throughout history there have been divergent calendars in different regions and countries.
In all ancient calendars the only unit of time longer than one year was the reign of a king or priest. The usual method of distinguishing years was to name them according to a sequence in a regnal reign. (I am convinced this is equally true of both western and Chinese calenders and insofar as we can understand, probably of Mayan too.)
Then in the 6th century a monk named Dionysius Exiguus suggested that years be numbered consecutively, starting with the year after Christ's birth, to signify the Christian era, indicated by AD for Anno Domini. This suggestion was welcomed by Christian scholars; and during the period from the 6th to the 16th centuries AD, the Catholic countries of western Europe gradually adopted a numerical designation of years. But there continued to be divergence as to the beginning of the year and the calendars did not accurately track seasons or such events as the vernal equinox.
In 1572 when Gregory XIII became Pope he found proposals for reforming the calendar awaiting action. He referred these to a Jesuit astronomer, Christopher Clavius, who drafted a papal bull to establish a calendar calculated to coincide with the seasons and provide for determination of religious holidays on a consistent basis.
Pope Gregory issued his papal bull in 1572 promulgating the Gregorian calendar. It decreed that the day after Thursday, October 4, 1582, should be called Friday, October 15, and established the length of the year as 365.2422 days. It also specified the years that should be leap years, and established January 1 as the beginning of the year.
The Gregorian calendar was immediately adopted in all Catholic countries but was opposed at first in Protestant countries. The British Empire and American colonies did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752. Other countries gradually accepted the Gregorian calendar throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. The Soviet Union became Gregorian in 1918, and Greece in 1923. Today it is in official use for lay purposes worldwide, although some other calendars are used for religious purposes, such as the Greek Orthodox, the Jewish, the Hindu, the Maya, and the Muslim calendars.
Thus what we call a decade, a century, and a millennium represent only units on a calendar, and are simply artifacts of human invention and convention. So the millennium has no cosmic, sidereal, or terrestrial significance.
Nevertheless, the millennium does have social significance. The current millennium is the first in human history to be established by a widely accepted calendar. The idea of serially numbering years was not even considered until the latter half of what we now call the first millennium, and the practice was not widely adopted until the present millennium. Indeed, one of the important early events of our current millennium was the adoption of the decimal system of numeration, first established in western Europe in the 13th century.
Thus the last years of the 20th century are the first in human history in which there has been worldwide recognition that a millennium measured by a universally accepted calendar is about to end and a new one to begin. The current millennium clearly has encompassed a period of more and greater social and cultural achievement than any other comparable period. It is impossible even to begin to list the contributions of the second millennium. Our faith in progress is so strong and our fixation on the calender is such that we now endow the term "millennium," as in "come the millennium," with the symbolic secondary meaning of "utopian." Although a few cultists may regard the advent of a millennium as an occasion for suicide in quest of a higher life, the great majority of us will welcome with optimism the beginning of the third millennium as a time to celebrate progress in achieving the values we esteem as civilized with "utopia" as our ideal.
LEE LOEVINGER ('84) is a lawyer and a writer specializing in science. He has been chairman of the science and technology section of the American Bar Association and the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists.
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