This another article written years ago, that recently showed up. Before dismissing this subject as seriously moot (the turn of the century happened years ago by any measure), remember that the same problem occurs every decade, but is usually ignored. Perhaps here you will find relief from all that guilt!

On the coming of the Third Millennium
Richard F. Denning
January 7, 1999
All Rights Reserved

Many, many words have been spent in the old debate as to whether centuries begin on even hundreds (i.e. 1900, 2000, etc.) or in "01" years. Most people in the past have chosen to celebrate the centuries on the "roll-over" or "00" dates. The human mind generally prefers the round numbers for such events, as attested to by the "millennialist" views of the coming end of the world in 2000. At the same time, others, often the more learned among us, have pointed out that since the calendar we use "started" with the year 1, 2000 years will not have passed until the year 2001.

I would like to argue against any such silliness that would, by extension, say that 1960 is not one of "the sixties", or that 2000 is in a different millennium than 2001 and all the other "2XXX" years ahead.

I will argue the point from three directions.

First our calendar did not start in the year 1. The first reference to counting years from the birth of Christ is probably by Dionysius Exiguus, over 500 years after the event, in creating a table of dates for Easter (which is quite an accomplishment in itself, considering the liturgical definition). He designated the numbering system he came up with as "Anni Domini Nostri Jesu Christi" or "Years of Our Lord Jesus Christ" now abbreviated as "A.D."

As was normal for the time, (and even today), not having a good handle on zero or negative numbers, he ignored the years before the year 1. This oversight was compounded by Bede in the Eighth century, Who named the year before the year 1 as 1 “B.C.”, an abbreviation of the English words “Before Christ”. It has always grated on me that he didn't at least come up with a Latin phrase to be consistent with “Anni Domini”, but the English have never put much stock in other languages. The creation of a counting system that has positive and negative numbers but doesn't allow for Zero produced a mathematical discontinuity that at the least has been an annoyance to people of science.

In addition, there were significant errors in estimating the year of the birth of Christ, so that the actual year was probably a few years prior to the year 1. We have in all likelihood already passed the 2000^th year since the birth of Christ.

The calendar we use today follows closely the calendar of Dionysius and Bede, at least as far as it deals with years, but includes a complex formula to compensate for the fact that the physical year is not an integer number of days. It was designed for and formalized by Pope Gregory on October 15, 1582. This date, to me is when our civil calendar started ticking. It wasn't even accepted outside the church for centuries.

In this first of my arguments, January 1, 2000 is the first day of the third millennium following the year 0, which is called 1 B.C. in our civil calendar. It might be mentioned that there is another form of the Gregorian calendar in use in astronomy, which follows the civil calendar exactly back to the year 1, and then has a year 0 and years -1, -2, etc. Since years are inherently an astronomical construct, connected to immutable physical events, I suggest that millennia, (thousands of years) are also, and thus should be tied to the astronomical calendar.

As my second argument, I bring up what might seem to be an argument from authority, and trivial at that. Several years ago, I heard a discussion of the millennium problem on the radio. The arguments were the standard points we have been over so often lately, but near the end, a different approach popped up. It seems that a savant who was very accurate at calendrical calculations, such as determining the day of the week on which a certain date fell, was being tested. One of the questions given him was the one of when the millennium would start. He answered immediately that it would start in the year 2000. When pressed about the problem that the beginning of 2000 marks only the 1999^th year since the year 1, he responded “the first century only had 99 years”.

This simple thought came as a revelation, cutting to the core of the problem so nicely that it settled the question for me then and there. A mistake had been made in setting up our calendar, and we science guys keep on perpetuating it every century, every decade, while those of a less technical bent are free to celebrate the coming of every “00” year as a new century.

Thirdly and lastly, I would argue that the problem may be one of semantics rather than science. We (in the Western cultures, at least), celebrate birthdays counting from zero on the day of birth. We are zero on the day we are born, and are one year old on our “first” birthday a year later. In like manner, one might say that our calendar was one year old on January 1 of the year 1.

I will celebrate the coming of the next century on the night of December 31, 1999, with a clear conscience. As a minimum, I hope I have shown that the calendar is a product of human labor, and as such has numerous flaws. Nevertheless, it meets our needs about as well as as is practical considering that about 365.242199... rotations of the earth occur in each revolution of the earth around the sun.

There is a unique quality to a date like January 1, 2000, and indeed no other would serve better to mark either the beginning or the end of the last year of the second millennium.

See you on the other side,
Richard F. Denning
January 7, 1999

Note: Most of the particulars here were gleaned from L.E. Doggett in “Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac”, P. Kenneth Seidelmann, editor, University Science Books. A debt is also owed to Lyle Huber (lhuber@nmsu.edu) for presenting the “Calendar” chapter of that book on his website: (http://astro.nmsu.edu/~lhuber/leaphist.html)