Too Many Millennia

Natural History, Dec, 1999 by Robert (American businessman and engineer) Anderson

I find it hard to get too excited about the new millennium, especially because of all the disagreement about when it should be celebrated. To get the lowdown on its timing, I went to the Internet site for the millennial celebrations to be held in Greenwich, England (Greenwich2000.com/millennium/info/ millennium-faq.htm). The home page announces that because there was no year zero, the new millennium actually starts on January 1, 2001. Yet even Greenwich 2000's organizers can't buck the tide of popular misconception: they have two countdowns running, one for 2000 and one for 2001.

Where exactly is the millennium's starting place? On this issue, the experts at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich are emphatic: the new millennium begins at midnight Universal Time--Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT--everywhere that falls on the prime meridian (0[degrees] longitude, the line from which all other lines of longitude are calculated). Back in 1884, at an international conference in Washington, D.C., delegates from twenty-five nations adopted a "universal day" that begins at 0[degrees] longitude, which runs through Greenwich and extends north and south to the Poles. According to this standard, anyone to the east of 0 [degree] who begins celebrating before midnight GMT (in the South Pacific near the international date line, it's nearly twelve hours earlier)--is jumping the gun.

The precise time and date for the new millennium is based on the Gregorian calendar, a reform of the Julian calendar dating back only to the sixteenth century. Had this calendar not triumphed over its predecessor, many around the world might be celebrating entirely different millennia. To calculate when these might occur, go to Calendars Through the Ages (www.webexhibits.com/calendars). In addition to a concise history of the Christian calendar, this site has information on the Jewish, Islamic, Chinese, Mayan, early Egyptian, Sumerian, Balinese, French, and Indian systems for marking time.

I found the French Revolutionary (or Republican) calendar the most interesting of all, given that it represents a fairly recent attempt to create an entirely new way to measure time and to de-Christianize the calendar. Year One began on September 22, 1792. Two mathematicians divided each of the twelve months into three decades of ten days; the last day of each decade was a day of rest. Two poets named the months so that they rhymed three by three, according to the "sonority" of the seasons (for example, January, February, and March are Vendemiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire); they also assigned the name of a plant, a domestic animal, or a tool to each of the 360 days of the year. If Napoleon hadn't scrapped this calendar on January 1, 1806, the second Republican millennium might have made for a great party in Paris in the Gregorian year 2792.

But if the arbitrary nature of the millennium celebrations doesn't bother you and you just want to watch the millennium arrive in Greenwich on the dot, go to the Atomic Web Clock, run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (www. bldrdoc.gov/timefreq/javaclck. htm). If you live in the United States, you should still have plenty of time to get to a party.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer based in Los Angeles.