Sky & Telescope December 1999 [antikvár]

How many times have we been flogged by hoopla concerning the Y2K computer bug? A couple of years ago we were told that when the year flipped to zeros planes would crash wholesale, financial institutions would run amuck, and PCs wouldn't fire up. Now it seems that only ripples are likely to blemish the cyberpond."Y2K" should have been mentioned in James Gleick's book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. The acronym made it into everyday usage ahead of the expression it represents! It's also a really ugly term: an Arabic numeral sandwiched between two Roman-letter abbreviations. Yuck!But Y2K really bugs me because it has fostered the idea that the third millennium starts in the year 2000. This is outright dumb, yet no one seems to give a hoot. The Gregorian calendar marched directly from 1 B.C. to A.D. 1. Along the way it didn't pass 0; it didn't collect an extra year. If you believe dictionaries that say a century equals 100 years, then our next century/millennium year must end in a 1. Straight thinking was even muddied by Pope John Paul II. In his Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente he declared, "The year 2000 will be celebrated as the Great Jubilee." Ironically, the world's calendar is a papal invention.It seems silly to contest the obvious. Yet people do so time and again. As Ruth Freitag quips in The Battle of the Centuries (Library of Congress, 1995), "When the encyclopedia of human folly comes to be written, a page must be reserved for [this] minor imbecility."So why are we going to celebrate the forthcoming century/millennium a year early? I believe today's accelerated lifestyle is partly to blame. The turn of the millennium wheel is a big deal, and people simply don't want to wait an extra year. But the biggest driver must be the world's corporations and Madison Avenue. What business would shun profit today for profit tomorrow, especially when there's a chance for a double play? (I predict 2001 will be hyped just as much as 2000 that's when we'll hear about the real millennium!)Yet, if anyone has the right to break out the champagne in both years, it's the astronomers. There is so much to celebrate. In the 20th century we have come to understand the dimensions of the cosmos, from that of the atom to the edge of whatever. And we've moved beyond Newton's clockwork universe to one governed by relativity, probability, and chaos disquieting, perhaps, but a huge intellectual leap. Most important, we've surrounded myriad observational facts with theoretical scaffolding that may be so robust it'll embrace tomorrow's unexpected revelations. It's remarkable that the cosmic vision of Homo sapiens has broadened so profoundly during the last 0.08 percent of our tenure on planet Earth.8 December 1999 I Sky & Telescope