Millennium Time
millennium timeSo when does the new millennium begin? There are those who say that it is 1 January 2000 and others say 1 January 2001? Who' s right?
The years of today's most famous Calendars, the Grigorian Calendars, are numbered from the year 1 AD. Before A. D. 1 came the year B. C. 1. Thus the first 100 years of A.D.1 lasted until the end of the year 100, the first millennium of A.D.1 until the end of the year 1000 and so the present millennium will not end until 31 December 2000.
Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Short), a scholars of the sixth millennium, defined the greater Gorian calender in 532 AD by defining A.D. (Anno Domini)1 as the time of the Nativity of Jesus Christ. At Dionysius' time, the concept of zero count had not yet been imported into Europe from the Middle East. However, there are about 40 other calendaring sys-tems in use, all of which are located in different years and are changing at different times.
The new millennium begins on January 1, 2001 at zero o'clock, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), also known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), according to the regulations adopted at an October 1884 global meeting. However, the same meeting also agreed that this bill "should not disrupt the use of default time, whether locally or otherwise, where desirable".
" So in other words, everyone eastwards of Greenwich will not move their party past the middle of the night, and every vest will not party early. 2000 is something peculiar - even if it is not the beginning of the twenty-first millennium - because it is a leaning year. In 1582, a fairly exact revision of the Grigorian calender was introduced, stating that a centennial year will only be a lean year if it is equally dividable by 400 - which applies to the year 2000.
The DAWN OF A NEW MILLENIUM on January 1, 2001 will first glow in Antarctica and look like the Rawn. Ruthless mathematic reasoning is that the millennium does not begin until 2001. First 2000 years end with the year 2000 and the next thousand years begin with 2001, the first year of the third millennium.
In the first year you work 1 to 1,000 workinghours, in the second year 1,001 to 2,000 and the third year begins with your 2,001. We should therefore be celebrating the Millennium on 1 January 2001. However, there is another millennium to celebrate: the millennium of the 2000', the years beginning with a 2 This amendment concerns every cheque we are writing, every note we are dating.
It' s thrilling to see all the numbers rolling over to 100,000 in my Ferrari from 99,999 to 100,000 or the whole Senate to 100 new members for the first time since the year that moved from 999 to 1000 when Ethelred II was Britain's number one.
So, perhaps it is more secure to await the 2001 deadline to party. Maybe on New Year's Eve you saw the early New Year celebrations on TV in other time zone. Greenwich, England, on the zero-meridian, the point of origin of all time zone, is the most frequent of these.
In fact, a panel at the Greenwich Old Royal Observatory proclaims "The Millennium begins here. 2001, which marks the third millennium, will reach England sooner than America, but even sooner in Moscow in the West, even sooner in Japan (which is why it is known as the "Land of the Arising Sun") and so on, until we reach the International Date Line and fall back to the preceding morning.
It has long since had an eastern protrusion beyond the 180 degree line, which includes the South Pacific Isle of Tonga, which is in a later time area. Kiribati's Christmas Isle will now see the new millennium an hour before Tonga. I myself am hoping to go to sleep early and find a new millennium awaiting me when I wake up.