Obviously, for the vast majority, it won’t be a problem at all.
Because these things have a connotation in the human mind.
When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia during the Viet Nam war, they declared it to be The Year Zero. Why bother? Because they knew that if you can fix in people’s minds that a certain year marks “the beginning”, there is a tendency to discount what ever came before as less significant.
I am in favor of a system in which we start the dating system at a time when dats begin to matter, hence my support of a year during The Great Thaw or The Agricultural Revolution as the Year Zero. Before this time, civilization really didn’t exst to any great extent, so dates are less important. If a student natrually tends to ignore or lump together specific dates prior to this, it hardly matters, unlike doing so under the current system.
Doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. Whichever system you prefer, most everybody knows what you’re talking about. I prefer BC and AD, but if the other floats your boat that suits me fine. Since the world’s business goes by what began as the Christian calendar, to purge the dates of the reference to its origin (whether accurate to the year or not) seems a little silly.
The second is indeed based on a resonance of the Cesium atom, but the calendar is still based on the rotation & revolution of the Earth. The wobbliness of the Earth is adjusted for in the calendar by throwing in leap seconds.
Cesium atoms notwithstanding, UTC is still based on the measured wobbly rotation of that utterly insignificant planet in the unfashionable backwaters of the galaxy, as explained here.
Suppose I’m planning a meeting with one of my customers on September 20 of the year 2,600,004 at 1pm. I wanna know how many milliseconds I have left to prepare for that meeting, not whether it’ll be day or night at that time
IIRC, the BCE/CE dating system was widely used by Jewish scholars, and then caught on with other academics. It is now, as Diogenes points out, the standard dating system for scholars of all fields.
My only real complaint is that the abbreviations look too similar. I rather like “Common Era” as a designation, but “Before Common Era” seems a bit clumsy to me–I’d prefer a snazzier term (“The Not-so-common Era”?).
On the plus side, it does remove some of the Christian bias from the system. Why should a scholar of ancient Greek history and art (for example) use the terms “Before Christ” when describing artifacts that have nothing to do with Christian culture? And while the dividing point between the eras is still based on an erroneous idea of Christ’s birthdate, it’s still pretty close to the beginning of the Roman Empire (27 BCE)–a phenomenon that tremendously changed the face of the Western world, to the point that one could point to its foundation as a watershed in world history.
Best answer yet. Honestly, any concern for this matter is just about arbitrary designations for arbitrary numbers. It is really not of any concern, since there is no real need to use BCE/BC/AD/CE anywhere but in history books, and so long as it’s explained there then everyone can be content. No one uses these abbreviations in daily life, since there is no need to reference the past before Christ or the common era when one is planning a meeting at work or booking plane tickets.
As for changing the system, I have to say why? What’s so wrong with the system we have that will be vastly improved for daily life? That’s what really matters, isn’t it? Any starting date is arbitrary, and so will have the same arguments for or against it that the current system has. So how could that possibly be worth the monumental task of changing every god-damned calender and watch and computer program and so on everywhere just to have a new system. We’ve gotten along quite fine with the system we have, no need to change.
Also, I highly doubt that history students discredit or lump together events occuring before Christ or common era as being less significant because they occured before year 1, because they will be interested in whatever strikes their fancy regardless of when it occured. And let’s be honest, the farther back in time we go, the less certain dates are and the less accurate they become. Pinning year 1 down as the end of the last ice age may sound nice, but when is that? Same with the beginning of agriculture, when exactly do you begin? Jericho is supposedly about 10,000 years old or so, should that be the start? It’s all arbitrary, and what we have in place now works just fine.
Actually, the year 1 CE isn’t right in the middle of the Roman Empire–it’s pretty close to its beginnings. It is right in the middle of Augustus’s reign, as the first emperor of Rome. The empire would live on until approximately 576 CE (when the last Western emperor was deposed), or 1453 (when Constantinople–which had been the real capital of the empire since the fourth century CE–fell).
The year 1 CE is about 25 years off the real starting date for the Empire, but it still refers to the historical moment (Augustus’s reign) during which the Empire started. It’s still an arbitrary date, to be sure, but history isn’t an exact science. And it’s close enough to 27 BCE that it’s not worth reworking all of our dates–to my modernist mind, the year “100 CE,” for instance, is close enough to “73 CE” (dating from Augustus’s reign) that I’m not going to get too worked up about it–just as long as we’re consistent with whichever arbitrary dating system we use.
This is actually an interesting question and maybe kindof in the spirit of this thread.
Outside of Daily Life certainly, the “system we have” is hopeless and absolutely unusable, and already long abandoned. Computers internally use a much better and simpler calendar: number of seconds (or milliseconds) since an agreed-on point in time. (Computers convert dates to a familiar calendar only when displaying them to humans.) Spacecraft also use a different calendar (year plus Day-Of-Year, often called Julian date) for good reason.
Now consider how many people (?) fumble with dates all the time in Daily Life. Gosh, is it July already? Next meeting in 50 days, what date would that be? Jokes aside, I for one would absolutely prefer a Julian style notation for my Daily Life.
I was also thinking of parallels with the metric system. People have resisted it in daily life, but companies have saved a lot of money using it. Cite also proves that conversion costs were negligible, and gives a good impression where the concrete savings come from.
Quite right, and even academic history books only use them when it is necessary to avoid confusion. Which usually means for BCE/BC dates. Most never use AD/CE.
It is also a bit naïve for some of you to assume that this is all just a matter for the personal preference of the individual writer. Most publishers, whether of books or journals, will insist on a specific style.
How have we managed to get through over 50 posts in this thread without some Trekkie proposing that we adopt Stardates? (I enjoyed the show, but no, I’m not one!)
I’m not quite sure what you mean. Are you saying that our current system of time reckoning is hopeless and unuseable? If so why? I have never had a problem with it, and know noone who does. I’ve never seen it discussed as something that should be fixed at all. In fact, thinking about dates and times in terms of a calender really helps me to visualize when things occur. I see everything (date-wise) in terms of the 7-day week and calculate from there. Real simple.
Of course, I know nothing about programming, so I won’t argue with you about computer useage. But I don’t think it completely compares to the metric system (which we use here anyway). Measuring distances and weights is different from planning meetings and doctor appointments.
Our calendar uses many different units to measure points in time and durations of time. Years, months, hours, seconds, etc. The length of each of them is not a nice round-number multiple of the other. Also, not all months is equally long. I’m just stating obvious facts here. (The number of seconds in a day is not even fixed upfront. Although that factoid is getting into nerd territory.)
When I said “hopeless and unuseable”, I was referring to outside of daily life. I gave two examples from the field of engineering. Those different units of time, if you tried to use them to perform technical calculations involving time, would make your calculations very complex.
The rest is speculation on my part.
I do have problems visualizing dates. I could give more examples, but I guess all of that is just subjective.
What I meant with my comparison to the metric system is that, even though people subjectively may have no problem with “the current system”, there might be actually huge benefits lurking in something different, without people realizing.
Not that I’m into stirring tempests in teapots. Unlike the metric system, no one is proposing to use a different calendar in daily life. Also unlike the metric system, engineers can and do use better calendars “behind the scenes” without anybody having to push different calendars on anybody else.
My figuring (perhaps silly) is that if the second is based on the cesium vibrations, then the minute, hour, day, week, month and year would also be, since those are all composed of pre-designated quantities of seconds. Granted that there are some quirks like leap years in there.
Insignificant as the planet may happen to be, it’s the one we’re living on, so I don’t see the need for a time system that is accurate for the folks near Proxima Centauri, assuming there are any folks over there. What are we, the Galactic equivalent of the Swiss?
Gotcha. Makes perfect sense in that context, and I have to agree, from an engineering or other technical standpoint our calender is simply arbitrary and not too useful. So I guess it behooves engineers and the like to use a better system, I just hope I don’t have to learn something new because I’ll probably forget something useful in the process.
(Homer: Remember when I took that home wine-making class and forgot how to drive?
Marge: That’s because you were drunk!
Homer: And how.)
As for the metric system, I really have never understood why the US still uses the imperial system. Base 10 measurements are sooooo much easier to calculate than the retarded system the English standardized.
The reason our calendar sucks is that the Earth did not have the good sense to assume an orbit of a reasonable number of days. (Another argument against god - why didn’t he make the year 360 days and simplify matters!) Even weeks don’t work, since you have a broken week at the beginning and end of each year. (I’ve used work week systems and they are a pain to correlate to real dates.)
Any system with equally sized months will have lots of leap days left over. Now if we made them a short party month, we’d be talking.
