Please explain my confused me like I’m 5 (0r 4 or 6).
It depends which calendar you use! Every calendar picks a basically arbitrary system to uniquely identify each year, and in some of them “year 0” doesn’t refer to any year.
The Gregorian, for example, goes directly from 1 BC to 1 AD, since 1 BC is “the first year before Christ” and 1 AD is “the first in the years of our lord.” This doesn’t make much mathematical sense, but it’s not like there was a year that didn’t happen–they just called one year 1 BC, and the next year 1 AD.
ISO 8601 is based on the Gregorian calendar, but it includes a year 0. 1 BC is the same year as +0000; thus 2 BC is -0001, and all earlier years are likewise offset by 1 between the two calendars.
If ISO says there was a year 0, there was. There’s only one thing better than perfect : standardized !
I need my standardized fixed calendar now dammit
Yes. They skipped right over. It confused many people at the time: a whole year of their lives, gone. Many centuries later when zero was invented, an explanation was finally offered as to why that happened.
😂
For those who don’t know, the concept of zero wasn’t discovered until the sixth century in India, and then either transferred or rediscovered in about the eighth century in Arabia.
Years exist. We decide what to call them. You and I agree to call this year 2024, but that’s only an agreement. Some people call this year 5784.
We call the system we use “The Gregorian Calendar”, because of a Pope named Gregory. That system is mostly the same as “The Julian Calendar”, with some important changes to make the calendar match the changing of the seasons better. In the Julian calendar, they decided to count the years starting from when they thought Jesus was born. They chose his birth year to be “The first year of our Lord”. We call that “year 1” for short.
The people who created that system (the Julian Calendar) didn’t understand 0. The year before “The first year of our Lord” was called “The first year before the birth of Christ”. We now call these “AD 1” (“anno domini”, because Latin) and “1 BC” (“before Christ”). Since they didn’t understand 0, they didn’t call any year “0”. We have kept the tradition, because reasons.
Some other systems have relabeled the year before “AD 1” as year 0, but that’s not how the Gregorian Calendar works, and that’s the calendar that you and I have been taught to use.
“They,” i.e. the catholic church, or whoever was tasked with coming up with a calendar, absolutely understood the concept of zero in the 1500’s. Yes, Zero took a bit longer to formalize and enter the zeitgeist of the public consciousness, but this myth of zero being some kind of unknowable thing for thousands of millennia is naive.
I’d go so far as to say that a year zero in a calendar is useless. There should be a starting point of course, but calling it yero zero instead of year 1 is dumb.
By that part, I was referring to the people establishing the Julian Calendar, not the Gregorian. I’ve edited my comment to clarify that.
But you are missing the point,. There is no reason to ever start a calendar at year zero. The starting point can be zero, fine, but once the first day goes by, you are in the first day of year 1, not year zero and that is logical and has nothing to do with smart astronomers etc, “not understanding the number zero.”
At this point I’d say the only person who doesn’t understand zero is you.
It makes sense to start with the year zero when you want to do any calculations that involve dates that where before and after year one. If an empire was founded in 50 BC and dissolved in 50 CE to calculate its age when it was dissolved you have to acknowledge that there is no year zero so instead of just calculating 50 - (-50) = 100 you have to substract one which is counter intuitive. Because it went from year 1 BC straight to 1 CE.
The length of time an empire existed isn’t really important in the study of history. You need to describe the contextual existence of the empire within history, and you do that by specifying the start and end dates (in whatever calendar system you want to use). Using your example, if you say that empire existed for 101 years, why is that significant? It’s not. But if I say that empire existed in the middle east during the time of Christ and Roman occupation of Palestine, THAT provides the important historical context for why that empire was significant, and what kind of importance it may have had.
ELI5 answer?
In the conventional calendar, there wasn’t a year zero and it wasn’t skipped. Zero is the moment in time that we use to begin counting time.
Think of an elementary school style number line:
…-3_-2_-1_0_1_2_3…Each number is one year apart. This makes the numbers measure something like Age. If you are 3 years old, you can count 3 years between 0 and 3.But a year is not an Age. It is the span of time between ages, and the years we name are actually the spaces between the numbers on the number line. So the first year (1 AD/CE) is the first space after zero (between 0 and 1), and the first negative year (1 BC/BCE) is the first space before the 0 (between -1 and 0).
Then there is the astronomical calendar, which does have a year zero. They get this by naming the year (the space on the number line) after the number to the right side of the space on the number line.
By this description, year zero is the time between the 0 and the 1 for the same reason the time between 10 and 11 is the year 10.
Your logic is correct, but you are off by 1.
0-1 is year 1
10-11 is year 11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero
The year of Jesus’ supposed birth was counted as year 1 AD/CE. The year before that is considered year 1 BC/BCE. It’s worth noting that the concept of zero didn’t yet exist back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0#History
Probably worth noting that the Gregorian Calendar was an invention of the 16th Century. It was invented to deal with the problems of the Julian Calendar and the creators would have had a firm understanding of the concept of zero. The AD/BC split was all about the assumed year of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth (according to Christian mythology). The year of his birth was set as the first year Anno Domini or “The year of the Lord”. Or the first year where Jesus was kicking about. The year prior to that would therefore be the first year before “Before Christ” was alive, and therefore the year 1 BC.
Especially weird considering that Christmas has been set to December for a long time, so 98% of year 1 AD was actually before the ostensible birth of Christ (I know that scholars now think he was born in April or something, but they probably didn’t always)
Ultimately, they had to set the calendar’s dates based on something. Given the vast hold on Europe which Christianity had at the time, it’s not surprising that the starting date was based on such an important event in the mythology. However, trying to deviate too far from the currently understood order (the Julian Calendar) was likely to end in failure. So, they could either fight the tide of history or just accept a logical oddity. Given all the other logical oddities one must accept for supernatural belief, who’s going to complain about having a holy reason to eat, drink and be merry during one of the most terrible parts of the year?
i hope all these conflicting answers in the comments have made you less confused, OP.
😁
The anno domini (AD) dating system started in 525. The concept of zero did not make it to Europe until the 11th century.
Years are ordinal numbers, the kind of number that tells you which place you finished in a race, and as such cannot have zeroes or negatives. You’re living in the 2,024th year since the instant that began the Common Era. “0th” and “-1st” are not valid expressions for years for the same reason that you can’t place 0th in the Olympics
Arbitrary decision is arbitrary.
like I’m 5 (0r 4 or 6).
Okay then.
Before dawn of technology advancements that we have today, people did stuff in a very different manner, for the sake of this explanation, I will call it “primitive”
As brilliant as human beings are, they often forget little things (little because may not have higher priority at that particular time) and dates is one of them.
Even now, if you happen to forget today’s date, and do not have means for referring that (like looking at your smartphone or watch, some digital billboards and whatnot),
what you would naturally do is refer back/forward, to the closest (recent/upcoming) date and day where a memorable event occurred/will occur. Events like your cousin’s birthday, trump impeachment, the coming football derby or the coming elections date. then you start counting with your fingers towards/backwards to the current day. This is “primitive”
These variations of calendars that currently exist today have their own sort of “memorable event”.
The most widely used today is AFTER CHRIST (AD). (Of which, to go back past that, they should have used count backwards tactic, i.e. -1, -2, -3, -4; Eg: -4AD; but instead, -4AD becomes 4BC which is BEFORE CHRIST. That is why counting forwards in BC, number decreases 😏 )
To answer your question;
“Year zero” is the year where that particular memorable event occurred.
But as I demonstrated above, we use that year as a reference to count forward/backwards the following/past years.
The switch to the current system of using the theoretical birth of Jesus as the start of our calendar occurred in the 6th century, 500 years after the fact. They picked a year based on what evidence they had for when the birth of Jesus occurred with a margin of error of about ~30 years.
When this occurred and we started observing years in Anno Domini, whatever local calendar was being used was immediately replaced by the year 525, and retroactively everything before that was assigned it’s proper year. This ends with AD 1 and directly starts with BC 1 going the other direction. No year 0 was observed in this switch.Also note that before this switch, years were often designated in relation to the founding of a city or by the start of a ruler’s reign. There were always ordinal numbers, so the first year of a reign would be year 1, and there was never a zero, because it was year X of a previous reign.
They left out 0 from the list. It basically jumps from -1 to 1.
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CE/BCE isn’t strictly astronomical year terminology, it can be applied to the Gregorian calendar and AD/BC can be used for astronomical years. If you see BCE outside of an astronomy context, it probably does not include a year zero
No, in our calendar system there was year 1 BC followed by year 1 AD. So no zero. It’s just how they set it up, they’re human made ideas anyway. Many countries do not even use this system, for example it is currently year 2567 in Thailand and year 113 in North Korea.
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