Astronomers use Julian Days, which start at Noon GMT. Today is about JD 4,380,000,000,000 under current theory, though I suspect it’s more like JD 365,000,000,000,000. I don’t personally know why the Big Bang occurred at Noon, something to do with the constant of tensor integration I guess.
– Russ, still raining in Western Oregon
Welcome to the Straight Dope boards. The universe is estimated to be around 13.7 billion years old, and the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. So unless those numbers are wrong by several orders of magnitude, it’s nothing like JD 365 trillion.
Thanx for the welcome, it’s taken me a few years to pour over the SD website. Great stuff, but I can’t find why there is no year zero?
That estimate of 13.7 billion years assumes that Planck’s Constant is indeed constant. Frankly I’m not convinced completely. I’m not saying it can never be constant, but we really don’t have any proof it is. The appearance of an expanding universe may simply mean the speed of light is actually decreasing over time.
It may be more correct to say dE = 2mc dt or some such.
– Russ, will this rain ever stop.
This is a constant refrain with you. If you seriously contend I’ve never gotten math or science right, this doesn’t seem like a basis for fruitful discussion. However, I concede there are matters I might have put more precisely. Would you care to elucidate, perhaps in a separate thread?
The Julian Date that astronomers use has its zero point on January 1, 4713 BC – not the Big Bang, whose precise distance in the past we can’t possibly pinpoint to the nearest day. The current Julian Date, as I’m posting this, is about 2,455,197.25.
Per your 1996 instructions, I was all ready to wake you up tonight, but it looks like you’re already awake. Oh well, I’ll have to find another use for these firecrackers. Anyway, we still need your leadership. There are people alive today – admittedly, mostly very little people – who will live to see 2100. I just hope their generation is better prepared than we were.
So what are we going to call this decade?
The tens, the teens, the twenty-tens, the twenty-teens?
Here in the UK, the media enjoyed calling the last decade the “noughties”, but in everyday conversation it was simply the “two-thousands”.
Nice to see highbrow discussion on the dope 
Yes, yes, fine, fine. I’m still well within the margin of error, 2.5 million or 365 trillion, looks the same on tax forms.
The point was astronomers couldn’t cash their paychecks if they uses JD, 'cause you know some bank teller’s going to shell out a BIG pile of hundrets. But I disgress.
I’ve an idea: with a show of hands, who got stinking drunk on Jan 1, 2000, AND stinking drunk on Jan 1, 2001? <raises hand>. Who’s going to get stinking drunk tonight and again a year from tonight? <raises hand>. Debate over, both dates are great times for celebrating.
So …
Unca Cece ?
Why no year zero?
– Russ, thinking it’s time to buy a boat
Why would there have been a year zero? The year 1 AD/CE is supposed to be the first year of Jesus’s life. For Jesus to have been born in the zeroth year after his birth would have been odd. 1 BC/BCE is the last year before he was born, so renumbering it as the zeroth would make some more sense, but there’s still a logic to the current method.
I calls 'em as I sees 'em. 
Ooh, ooh, ooh. I got under Ed’s skin! He reads me! He reads me!
:)
:eek::mad::rolleyes:
:p;):D:o:dubious::(:smack:
Granted, this would be a bigger deal if getting under Ed’s skin weren’t just as easy as correcting him. In fact, they’re normally one and the same thing. Remember the brouhaha earlier this year over moderating when Ed said that this was his Message Board and threatened to pick it up and take it home?
For the record, I didn’t get involved in that one. Rightly or wrongly, I only speak up when a factual mistake gets made. (I kinda thought that was the point here. It used to be.) Those do seem to concentrate in math and science articles. (And are contagious, since I obeyed Gaudere’s Law and made a silly error of my own in the correction.) But a “constant refrain”? How many times have I said this? Twice? Maybe three times. Maybe. Constant? Seems like another math error to me.
Anyway, why start a separate thread for this? I’m not pitting you for getting it wrong. I’m stating as a fact in the appropriate thread that your column fell down in the details. Which is what I did to the OP of the thread. You don’t get any special treatment. Oh, wait. You do. You have a whole forum that is the correct place for Comments on Cecil’s Columns. (Can we start calling it Comments on Cecil’s and Una’s Columns since she’s now doing all the heavy lifting for you, Ed? You should try being all alone out here on the other side.)
I like it here, Ed. It’s my favorite Internet site. Thanks for starting it. Now if you want to go all intellectual macho on me, let’s go tête-à-tête. That’s my idea of a good time. Maybe we could work out rankings, like in chess. From Perfect Master to Grand Master.
P.S. Mijin, here’s some highbrow discussion from the original column.
It all comes down from the source.
I’m jumping into this discussion VERY late, but it’s not a new topic for me. I even sponsored a website on the subject just before the end of the second millennium, Dec. 31, 2000. As to WHO was “denying” this, of course, we had the media and the promoters for public events like the celebration at Times Square. The media hasn’t changed its position since. Just watch TV tonight. BUT, the undisputed authority in this matter is the official time-keeper for the United States, the United States Navy who maintains the atomic clock and the Naval Observatory. The third millennium started on January 1, 2001, and this first decade will not end until one year from now, i.e., at midnight, December 31, 2010.
Pope Gregory had nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Why does the DIMENSION statement in FORTRAN II define arrays indexed 1…size? What happened to Manhattan’s Zeroth Avenue? Why don’t we teach children:
Zero, one, fire a gun,
Two, three, collect a fee,
Four, five, take a dive,
Six, seven, find the leaven,
Eight, nine, draw the line.
?
I agree with you up to this point. Unfortunately I must insist that the current system is the very opposite of logic, at least in the 21st century. Consider the UNIX timestamp where midnight 1/1/70 is t=-1, the next second is t=1. Between these two points , the entirety of mathematical thought collapes, one could not perform even basic arithmatic.
But we are talking about logic in the 16th century. Did these people really want Our Lord and Savior to celebrate his first birthday in Year 2? Second birthday in Year 3? Come on, we’re they that stupid back then?
Maybe, maybe, I guess in the end I’m crackin’ open this bottle, if I’m wrong then I guess we’ll do it all again next year.
– Russ, and the rain keeps the drunks off the road
Umm … I thought in order to be a Papal Bull, the pope had to sign it. They used DIMENSION because ARRAY was already taken? Don’t know about Manhatten, but I think in San Francisco the zero line is where Father Junipro Sierra drove a brass spike. Springfield, Oregon, has Main St and streets are numbered from there. A simple math problem to calculate the number of blocks between two addresses. Here in cousin-marrying Eugene we skip a couple hundred addresses across the … umm … hundred line? No, I don’t know why the city fore-fathers thought Pres. Lawrence followed Lincoln but before Washington.
I certainly don’t know why someone would sing such a ditty to a child. I always sang Brokedown Palace.
I cut my teeth on FORTRAN II, you old geezer. Turned to hardware though, 931 can ring a bell? Company bought a robot, saw my days numbered there and took to swinging a hammer for a living.
I’m trying Uncle Cece, I’m trying. I really think you need to step in here and settle the matter once and for all. Am I flooding my body with alcohol right in vain?
– Russ, counting raindrops as kisses
No offense, but I’m more inclined to trust actual physicists, who have come up with equations based on actual science, than some random message board poster whose estimate of the universe’s age is closer to that of a Scientologist than the universally agreed-upon figure arrived at by the scientific community.
Hmmm, are you suggesting that there were NO “actual” physicists before 1905? Newton used science to derive his so called “laws” of motion, and for hundreds of years the world would suffer none to dispute him. Albert Einstein must not have been an actual physicist because he beleived Quantum Mechanics was bogus, in spite a sophistication set of equations that say QM is true.
And what equations do “actual” physicists have linking QM and Relativity? Which equation shows why z > 6.4 quasar’s FeII emission spectrum are shifted to longer wavelengths? Other than evolutionary biologists, what scientific disciple denouces those who would try and disprove universally accepted theory? These words still haunt my dreams “no, no, no, that’s a Reticulated Woodpecker”.
The “actual” physicists I’ve talked to readily admit they don’t know why there’s no Year Zero, and that they don’t use the Gregorian Calender in their calculations, except on payday.
Please don’t pick apart my examples of WHY there should be a Year Zero, unless it relates to the lack of usefulness of any t=0.
– Russ growing webbed feet
What utter nonsense. “The” millennium is one in a series counting from a particular point. By your logic, we may as well celebrate the beginning of a new year on August 22. After all, that’s a full year after the last August 22, right?
Unadorned with adjectives indicating a different meaning, “the” millennium can only reasonably be assumed to be one counting from the agreed-upon starting point, which is midnight on the morning of year 1.
As for “this millenium [sic] is the one where all dates start with 2,” are you suggesting that these same folks would call the years 1-999 a millennium where all dates start with “0” even though it’s only 999 years?
Powers &8^]
Physics has nothing to do with year 0. You brought physics into this by postulating a non-constant planck’s constant and decreasing c.
These are claims best evaluated by a physicist.
And you’re right: Einstein and Newton didn’t completely solve all the mysteries of the universe; some of their ideas have had to be challenged and/or built upon, as is the scientific way.
So I guess we can conclude that any person, no matter what level of physics knowledge, can come up with any theory, and it is as likely to be true as the tested theories that people who spend years studying physics produce.
:rolleyes:
No we’re not.