2000 or 2001?

The Millennium : 2000 or 2001? Our misunderstanding of the void

The facts:

-A millennium is 1000 years.
-The first millennium began in 1AD.
-1 plus 1000 plus 1000 equals 2001
-The year 2001 is the beginning of the new millennium, not the year 2000.

I don’t think I will be venturing out this New Years Eve, for fear that after a few sociable drinks I may get into a heated discussion over how it is not the end of the millennium. This would no doubt be seen as extremely unpopular behaviour.

Do people actually realise that the millennium doesn’t end until midnight of December 31 2000? You could say I am being a tad pedantic about this; it’s not really about the millennium per se, its about all those zeros rolling over. But there are some things about this situation which concern me.

If enough people say the year 2000 is the beginning of the new millennium often enough, it starts to become true. Even if it is undeniably false.

Even the religious aspect cannot hold water against this obvious truth. Who really cares if it is 1999 years (or 2000 if you want to believe blatantly false propaganda) since 1AD? Even if you are a Christian, most historians now agree Christ was more likely to have been born around 6 or 7BC rather than 1AD (Eliade, 1987). In fact , if the significance of the millennium is based on the birth Christ, the third millennium began either 1996 or 1997. Otherwise, the timing of the millennium is based on Pope Gregory’s calender.

This “false millennium” does raise some interesting issues about our society. In the age of mass media, an untruth is peddled until it becomes the truth. If you deny this, you are a spoil sport. And there is not even any conspiratorial agenda behind this. It is just blatant ignorance. How easy would it be to sell a lie as the truth in this environment? Well, that is done each time we or our allies go to war. We are suckers for a good jingle, and good punch line. Yes, “millennium” does sound better than “the year 2000”, just like “military operations” and “casualties” sound better than “war” and “massacres”.

The other interesting thing this says about us, in particular as a western society, is our lack of understanding of the mathematical concept of zero. This is at the heart of the the confusion over the timing of the millennium. For 2000 to be the beginning of the new millennium, there would have to have been a year zero AD (0+1000+1000=2000).

Obviously, there was no year zero, but our linear concept of numbers invites this mistake of logic. Does anyone remember the number lines encouraged in primary school, with zero occupying its own position in the middle of the line, equal to that of the other numbers on the line. This thinking implies that zero possesses a value equal to other whole numbers.

Wrong.

It is instructive to look at the history of the concept of zero. It was originally used by the Babylonians in the third millennium BC to avoid confusion with place values. For example, it allows us to distinguish between numbers like 52 and 502, by signalling the empty place value for the “tens” in the number. The Greeks adopted this idea and used it in a similar way (Singh, 1997), yet denied zero the status of a number. Aristotle defined a number as an accumulation, excluding zero (and, interestingly, the number one) from this category (McLeish, 1991). Yet zero possesses a much more subtle and deeper significance overlooked by the Greeks, and arguably western mainstream civilisation as a whole today. Several centuries later in India, Hindu mathematicians recognised zero as a number in its own right. It represented a quantity of nothing.

Indian religion and philosophy, both modern and classical, is littered with references to the concept of nothingness (see Krishnamurti, 1980, and Eliade). In Sanskrit (the scholarly language of the Hindus), the word for the zero is "sunya", meaning "void", and the idea of emptiness is central to Buddhist thought.

We westerners seem to have some difficulty with the concept of nothingness. We cling to the material. Our monotheistic religions personify our spiritual ideals, while emptiness is central to the East ( although, paradoxically, personification is rampant in religions such as Hinduism.

The west’s confusion and downright mistrust of the zero is by no means anything new. Aristotle argued it should be outlawed because it disrupted the consistency of other numbers; dividing any ordinary number by it led to a incomprehensible result . Further evidence that the Ancient Greeks misunderstood the deeper significance of zero. Seventh century Indian mathematician Brahmagupta used division by zero as the definition of infinity (Singh).

In society built around material accumulation, is it really surprising we don’t understand nothingness? Or even wholeness, for that matter.

Note on personification in east and west : The pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses is practically immeasurable, yet central to Hinduism is Brahman; the void characterised by the refusal of any positive attributes(seewww.comparativereligion.com). As a westerner, the concept of personified gods existing alongside a supreme reality of nothingness can be confusing, even nonsensical. The western religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) personify their God, denying all others. But similarities can be drawn between east and west. Christianity has just as many saints as Hinduism has gods, many who are worshipped individually and responsible for various aspects of life through their patronage. And with dogma aside, could we see the Christian God as ultimately the symbol of wholeness - the other side of the nothingness coin.

SOURCES

Eliade, Mircea (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Religion, Macmillan, New York: 1987 (see entries under “Christ” and “Number”)
Krishnamurti, J Truth and Actuality, Harper & Row, San Francisco: 1980 (chapter 2)
McLeish, John 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Number, Bloomsbury, London: 1991
Singh, Simon Fermat’s Last Theorem: the story of a riddle that confounded the world’s greatest minds for 358 years, Fourth Estate, London: 1997 (pages 58-59).