There can be no better time than the beginning of a new millennium to reflect on the nature of time. While anyone with a correctly set watch can answer the question "what is the time?", take out the "the" and we have a fundamental conundrum; one that scholars spend years pondering without coming to any satisfactory conclusions.
After quoting a few circular definitions from history's most outstanding thinkers, the respected Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy tells us that "time might be too basic to admit of a definition". Some intellectuals are even convinced that time does not really exist; which is rather a pity given that we spend so much time talking about it and measuring its passage.
Nevertheless, the great scientist Albert Einstein, anointed this week as the Person of the Century by no less an authority than Time Magazine, did argue that time could not be considered independently of space. According to his theory of relativity, as the speed of an object increases time slows down, until it comes to a complete halt at the speed of light. A clock in a space craft travelling at 90 per cent of the speed of light, for instance, would take the equivalent of about 138 Earth minutes to record 1 hour, and a person on board the craft would likewise age at less than half the rate of someone who had remained on the Earth.
As unlikely as the theory of relativity may seem, it has been confirmed by scientific experiment. A few years ago, an ultra-precise atomic clock, accurate to one billionth of a second, was taken by jet from London to Washington and back. The difference between the elapsed time it recorded and that measured on the ground was exactly as Einstein predicted.
Yet the most convincing answer I have seen to the question "what is time?" was graffiti at a university many years ago: "Time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once". Although Einstein's theory suggests that this insight would not apply at the speed of light, this graffiti has the distinct advantage of ringing true with our everyday perceptions, which many other definitions and explanations do not.
While all this suggests that us ordinary folk are well advised to trust in our common sense and leave the philosophising to the denizens of ivory towers, there are many questions about time that we can get our minds around without too much difficulty.
For some people the most pressing issue relating to time is whether the new millennium really begins today, or in January next year. In an article in one of the southern newspapers this week, the nation's most-admired pedant, the Federal ALP president and former quiz king Barry Jones, was quoted as plumping for the latter. This was despite the fact that all his party's premiers were busy hosting millennium celebrations last night.
The problem about the commencement of the millennium arises because our forebears did not have the benefits of globalisation. The system of counting years from the supposed date of Christ's birth was devised by a sixth century English cleric called Dionysius Exiguus, or Dennis the Small. Although by this time Indian mathematicians had already developed the concept of zero as a number, it was many centuries later before scholars in Western Europe learnt about it. So Dennis made the year of Christ's birth AD 1, (Anno Domini, "the year of our Lord") rather than Year Zero as an informed Indian would have done. In any case, Dennis also got the year wrong, as Christ was born during the reign of the Judean king Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC.
So strictly speaking, Barry Jones is right. But he and all the other "the millennium begins in 2001" dogmatists are wrong psychologically, and as good feelings usually take first priority these days, this is what matters. A year with three noughts at the end of it is much more compelling and gratifying as the turning point for the millennium than a year that ends with two noughts and a one.
However, if it is really important to bring feelings into line with logic, the solution would be to change 1 BC to 0 AD, and adjust all the other BC dates accordingly. As few influential people take much interest in antiquity anymore, inconvenience would only be suffered by the declining number of classical scholars. This dating change could be presented as a nice multicultural gesture, finally giving Indian civilisation its due for the contributions it has made towards our own. And it would be a wonderful gift to our descendants, who would obtain the benefits as early as the year 2100, when they would be spared all the earnest debates about whether or not a new century had really begun.
Surprisingly perhaps, given the piety of the early Middle Ages, it took a very long time before Dennis the Small's innovation of taking Christ's birth as the starting point of the Western calendar was generally adopted. The first person to popularise his system was another English cleric, the Venerable Bede, who used it two centuries later to date events in his widely read work, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. But even so, as late as the year 1000 the Anno Domini system was not particularly widespread in Christendom.
So even in Europe the great majority of people lived through the first millennium without actually being aware of it. We are the first generation in human history to have experienced a millennium change that has been broadly acknowledged. And that surely, has been something worth celebrating.
One of the other pressing questions exercising some minds is what to call the new decade that begins today. Even the pedants have to recognise that the nineties are over. Most of the possibilities suggested so far are pretty ordinary -- the ohs, the zeroes, the uh-ohs, the earlies. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, living up to its dreary auntie image, asked a professor of linguistics at Macquarie University to advise on the correct usage. The good professor offered up "the two thousands", "the twenty-hundreds", and "the twenty-ohs". Stolid and worthy perhaps, but most unlikely to take off on talkback radio.
In its current issue, the more adventurous British newsmagazine, The Economist, editorialises that "the naughties" captures "the right tone, rhythm and sense of fun", thus giving influential support to the grass-roots campaign launched on the Internet by Sydney artist David Wales. (Churlishly, The Economist gives no credit to Wales; continuing a long Pommie tradition of appropriating to itself the results of Australian creativity.) "Noughties" would be the more preferable spelling however, if only to head off the inevitable complaints from wowsers that the other spelling sets an unfortunate example to impressionable young children.
To me, the most surprising aspect of the change to the new millennium is the lack of protest from the "West is wicked" crew. After all, there is little that better represents the ascendancy of our civilisation than the near universal triumph of our Gregorian calendar -- named after the pope who introduced it in the sixteenth century. At the very least, we could have expected demands that we apologise to the world for our calendrical imperialism, which has effectively overwhelmed the thousands of other systems of reckoning dates and times that have been developed by human cultures over the ages. Why aren't the usual suspects telling us that we are all timeists, complicit in chronocide?
Even many Islamic countries, such as Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria and Indonesia, have adopted the Gregorian calendar, although some of these countries use the Muslim calendar as well. Unlike our calendar, which is based on the earth's orbit around the sun, this calendar is based on the lunar cycle, consisting of twelve months of either twenty nine or thirty days long with a 354 day year (sometimes 355 days). As a result, the months do not keep up with the seasons. The starting date for the Muslim calendar is the Hegira, Mohammed's move from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, making today the 24th day of Ramadan, 1420.
In fact however, even in Europe the triumph of the Gregorian calendar was no lay down misère. As David Ewing Duncan recounts in his engaging book, The Calendar, scholars had long known that the solar year was over eleven minutes shorter than the calendar year, the duration of which had been established by astronomers in ancient Roman times during the rule of Julius Caesar. Over the centuries the steady accumulation of error meant that the calendar was becoming increasingly out of phase with the seasons, and Christian holy days were being celebrated on the wrong dates.
In 1267 the brilliant English friar Roger Bacon wrote to Pope Clement IV warning that something had to be done about this scandalous situation, but it took another three centuries for the church to act. In the 1570s Pope Gregory XIII established a commission to investigate the necessary reforms, and as a result of the commission's work, ten days were dropped from the calendar in October 1582. In order to bring the calendar and solar years into closer alignment, it was also determined that only centuries which were exactly divisible by 400 would be leap years. This is why this year is a leap year, whereas 1900 was not.
Unfortunately, a lot of people felt that they had lost ten days from their lives, and in some places there were violent demonstrations. Even worse, Protestant countries such as England and Sweden, and those following the Orthodox faith saw the whole thing as a Popish plot and refused to adopt the Gregorian calendar. Britain relented in 1752, by which time it had to drop eleven days to bring it in line with other countries in Western Europe. Under the slogan "give us back our eleven days", mobs rioted in London and other centres, with some people being killed. Most Balkan countries held out until the 20th century, and ironically, it took the Bolshevik Revolution to make Russia adopt Pope Gregory's calendar.
The Gregorian calendar is not totally accurate however, as it still runs fast by one day every 3,300 years. This will be rectified by the rule that a year which can be exactly divided by 4,000 is not to be a leap year, which will kick in two thousand years from now.
This should be enough to satisfy everyone, and allow the world to turn its attention to more urgent problems. But the fires of time reform still burn strong in some people's bellies. The Swatch watch company wants us to adopt a system that divides the day into a thousand units and abandons time zones so that it is always exactly the same time in any part of the world. In the hope of making it appealing, they are calling it "Internet time". But it seems like a none-too-subtle attempt to force us to throw away our existing watches and buy new ones, preferably Swatches.
And then there is the Long Now Foundation, the brain child of that fervent visionary Stewart Brand, who initiated the Whole Earth Catalog in the late 1960s. The foundation believes we are too focused on the present, and wants us to start thinking about the next ten thousand years. To help facilitate this long term perspective, Brand and his followers use 5 digit numbers for dates -- so 01999 has just concluded and 02000 has now begun. It does mean that there will be plenty of time to solve any Y10K problems. But somehow I can't see it ever becoming a mass movement in my lifetime.
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