By William Allan MA
This was published in the 1999 special Millennium edition of the Diary. William was a dear friend of Caroline’s, and she missed him greatly. I can’t find out if he wrote anything else for the Diary, but it was apparently the last thing he wrote before his untimely death, so I’ve included it. It’s also of historical interest – there was a certain amount of real panic at the approach of the year 2000, on account of many older computer systems not being programmed for it.
What is the ‘millennium’?
Quite simply it is a thousand year period (mille, one thousand + annus, years). With a capital “M”, Millennium refers to the belief in the dawning of a new age, a ‘heaven on Earth’, during which time all conflict and suffering will be abolished and peace, justice and harmony will reign. In Christian theology it is the 1000-year period when Jesus Christ will return and establish his kingdom on Earth, as described in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation; Satan was thrown into a pit and martyrs were resurrected and reigned with Christ for the millennium, at the end of which all the dead were gathered for the final judgement.
When does the next millennium begin?
On January 1st, 2001! This date relates to the Gregorian calendar, which used Roman numerals and had no zero – 2001 would have been written as MMI. In the sixth century, when Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk, introduced the AD (Anno Domini) system, he dated Christ’s birth as AD1 (not as AD 0). During the following century, the Venerable Bede, a Northumbrian monk, extended Dionysius’ system backwards to the years before Christ (BC). Bede didn’t use a zero either and his calendar went back from AD 1 to 1 BC. So, in this system, the first year of the first millennium lasted from January 1st AD 1 until December 31st AD 1 and the 1000-year period went from January 1st AD 1 to December 31st AD 1000, making the first day of the second millennium January 1st 1001 – so the start of the third millennium is on January 1st 2001.
Most people will, however, celebrate the eve of the new millennium on December 31st 1999 and even the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, while holding that 2001 is the start of the next millennium, is planning to celebrate in 2000.
Why do some say that the Millennium has already happened?
It is because of the confusion over Christ’s date of birth. Most scholars hold that if Jesus was born during Herod’s reign, then his birth must have been in 4 BC or earlier. Johannes Kepler, the 17th century astronomer, believed Jesus was born seven years earlier because of cumulative errors made by Dionysius, who failed to account for the four-year rule of the Emperor Augustus under his name Octavian (31-27 BC) and left out the first two years of his stepson Tiberius’ rule after Augustus died. Added to the gap due to the missing zero, this seven-year error coincided with the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC, which St. Mathew identified as the Star of Bethlehem.
Recently it has been claimed, by an Italian astronomer – Giovanni Baratta – that Kepler also got it wrong and that Jesus was born in 12 BC when an unusually bright ‘travelling star’ was observed between the constellations of Leo and Gemini. In fact Halley’s comet was visible in 12 and 11 BC.
So, depending on which theory is accepted, the two-thousand-year anniversary of Jesus’ birth could have been 1988, 1993 or 1996.
Why do we use calendars?
They are needed to allow us to impose order on the astronomical clock of the universe. Cosmically, time is defined by:
a) the rotation of the Earth on its axis, which gives us the 24-hour day;
b) the rotation of the Moon around the Earth, which defines the lunar month,
c) the rotation of the Earth around the Sun which is our year.
The week is an artificial construction based on the biblical story of creation.
The Egyptians were thought to have invented the first calendars, based on the inundation of the Nile, which occurred every 12 moonths or months. At flood-time they also observed a bright star (Sirius) that rose before the sun and, counting the days between, arrived at a 365 days year.
Leap Years and other calendar changes
In fact a solar year is 365.25 days, which created confusion. By the time of the Roman Emperor, Julius Caesar, the calendar was 80 days behind the solar year; in 46 BC he ordered that the year should have 445 days and that subsequently every fourth year should have 366 days.
This ‘Julian’ calendar lasted until the 16th century, when it became apparent that ‘extra’ days were accumulating and Easter was getting closer and closer to Christmas. The reason for this was that while the solar year was 365.25 days the tropical year (the true length of the cycle of seasons) is 365.24219 days. Pope Gregory came up with the solution: century years would only be leap years if they were divisible by 400. Thus creating an adopted average of 365.2425 days per year, an approximation that is within 30 seconds of the length of the tropical year and, as calculated by the Royal Greenwich Observatory, amounts to an error of one day every 4,000 years.
Italy adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, when 10 days were ‘dropped’ from the year (i.e. the clocks were put forward 10 days!) to make up the difference.
In 1751, the second Lord Macclesfield, introduced a bill in Parliament to harmonise the English calendar with the continental Gregorian system – this required that eleven days of September 1752 had to be obliterated. During that year diaries would have gone from September 2nd to September 14th, and for some time the popular cry in the country was ‘give us back our eleven days’.
The French Revolutionaries who imposed on Europe metrication and decimalisation of the currency also, less successfully introduced a decimal calendar. The year, fixed at 365 days, was divided into 12 months of 30 days, each containing three “weeks” of ten days. The remaining five days being devoted to festivals, in a leap year an extra day was added – the festival of the Revolution. The day was also to be decimalised but this proved even more unpopular than the rest of the new system and was abandoned earlier.
Is the year 2000 a leap year?
Yes and the rule is: every year that is divisible by 4 is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100. These centurial years are leap years only if they are divisible by 400. So the year 2000 is a leap year, while 1900 and 2100 are not. Those with the misfortune to be born on 29th February will actually lose a birthday in 2100 and because of a further refinement – years evenly divisible by 4,000 will not be leap years – they will lose another in the year 4000.
Where will the sun rise first on January 1st, 2000?
The main contenders for the title are:
a) the Chatham Islands, 500 miles east of Christchurch in New Zealand and 155 miles from the international date line. They claim that the sun will rise at 3:59 (15:59 GMT) on Pitt Island.
b) From January 1st, 1995, the Republic of Kiribati decided to move the international date line forward for its easternmost islands. In 1997 Caroline Island (sunrise 15:43 GMT) was renamed Millennium Island accordingly.
But doesn’t the New Year begin at midnight in Greenwich?
According to the International Meridian Conference, the universal day begins when it is ‘mean midnight at the cross-hairs of the Airy transit circle in the Old Royal Observatory’ at Greenwich. As the sun rises over the Pacific, technically the New Year has not yet started as it is still around noon on December 31st in Greenwich.
Therefore when it’s midnight on December 31st in Greenwich, where is the sun rising at that moment? Despite all the rival claims it is over Katchall Island in the Nicobar group, which is in Indian territorial waters.
Millennium clocks and the leap year second
Millennium countdown clocks that claim to measure the time at midnight, December 31st 1999 to the nearest fraction of a second, are all now incorrect! This is because of the differences in time as measured by atomic clocks and the rotation of the Earth.
The caesium atoms that control atomic clocks are not stationary and small errors occur when their firing-frequency is altered. Additionally the Earth is a poor timekeeper. The varying effects of the oceans and the molten core on its rate of spin cause it to slow down or speed up fractionally year on year.
So the time measured by atomic clocks gradually gets out of synchronisation with the time measured by the Earth’s rotation, known as Universal Time (UT). It is for this reason that leap year seconds are added as necessary into atomic time to create Universal Time Co-ordinated (UTC).
While the last second was added in June 1997, it is impossible to know how many more seconds will be added before December 31st 1999.
What about the Millennium Bug?
This is also known as the Y2K (Year 2000) problem (“MM problem” for traditionalists?) and refers to the fact that computers, worldwide, may crash as their date systems turn over from 1999 to 2000.
Things that might go haywire on January 1st 2000
Air conditioners, aeroplanes, air traffic control systems, automatic doors, bar code readers, cafeteria equipment cameras, cash registers, clocks, credit card scanners, electronic vaults, emergency lighting, escalators, fax machines, fire alarms, fridge/freezers, heating systems helicopters, hospital equipment, lifts, lighting systems, medical equipment, microwaves, military hardware, missile systems, motorised wheelchairs, optical readers, pagers, photocopiers, postage meters, power management systems, printers, satellite receivers, scanners, security gates, telephones, thermostats, time clocks, traffic lights, vending machines, video recorders, water heaters.
The problem arises because early computer programs shortened the year to two numbers (83 instead of 1983) to save valuable memory. So as 1999 becomes 2000 the computer will register only “00”, recognising the year as 1900 rather than 2000. It may, as a result, shut down or go haywire.
Will the Bug really bite?
Software solutions have been developed to overcome the problem by checking computer code systems automatically but they are not infallible. The only certain solution is a manual check of each computer’s code, line by line. It has been estimated in the USA that 300 to 600 billion lines of computer code will have to be analysed. Taskforce 2000, the UK government agency established to deal with the Bug, says that 80-90% of computer systems will need to be changed but that many companies are ignoring the problem. Information Week has estimated that 50% of businesses world-wide will not be converted in time for the millennium. Those that aren’t can expect lawsuits from shareholders, clients and customers. Experts warn of worldwide disruption as malfunctions affect almost everything containing a microchip – a scenario worthy of a science fiction novel.
Will your computer be affected?
IBM-compatible PCs running Windows 98 have a built-in millennium safeguard – the Year 2000 feature has a 100-year span, the default span is 1930 to 2029, i.e. when a two digit year is entered it is interpreted as a year between 1930 to 2029. Windows 95 and Windows NT can deal with dates up to 2099. In addition, PCs built after 1997 are unlikely to be affected, as most companies manufacturing motherboards (the ‘brain’ of a computer) were aware of the 2YK problem by then and had started inserting special chips to overcome it. Older PCs using 16-bit DOS and Windows applications are not millennium proof. Apple Mac operating systems will apparently not be affected.
To test your system:
exit Windows and go into DOS. At the C:\ (or C:\WINDOWS) prompt, type DATE
This will give you the current date followed by “enter new date:”. Type “31/12/99” and hit Enter.
Then type TIME and hit Enter. You will then see the current time followed by “enter new time:”. Type “23.59” and hit Enter.
Then switch off the machine for a couple of minutes, switch it back on and see what it now thinks the date is.
If it doesn’t show the date as 01/01/00, don’t panic! Your PC will not explode, melt down or indeed, do anything at all at midnight on New Year’s Eve. It will simply carry on as normal, except that it will think that the year is 1987 (or whenever it was built). All you have to do is to adjust the date – with some machines, this will have to be every time you switch it on. If this is what your PC does, then you have a really old machine that should be retired anyway!
What about the other 2YK problem?
Until about 1997, most people were unaware that 2000 is an exception to the no-century-year-is-a-leap-year rule. As a result, some computers, and some programs, will click straight over from February 28th to March 1st. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem – Leap Day falls on a Tuesday, so there won’t be a general shut-down. The main problems are likely to occur in the financial area, and with routines and programs that depend on specific forecasted time intervals. So, some people may lose a day’s interest on their money, others might get their wages or pensions a day early. Some workers could temporarily be deprived of a day’s pay; automatic payments due on February 29th could fail to arrive. Accountants may have a busy time! As before, it will only be older computers and programs that are affected anyway.
Is fin de siecle (malaise) infectious?
This French phrase (end of an age, rather than a century) refers to general sense of fatigue, self-doubt, disenchantment and weariness as the age (during the 1890s) came to a close. As the French for age and century is the same, it was no doubt inevitable that commentators should assume that the end of a century should mark the end of an age. It does not of course and the end of an age can occur at anytime depending on: of what it is the age.
The ages of the world
A fascinating mythical theme in the New Testament is that time consists of a series of ages. Each age of the world (or kingdom) is dominated by a powerful force or figure. This motif exists throughout the globe with a range of specific cultural meanings.
Drawing on Jewish apocalyptic literature (exemplified in the Book of Daniel), early Christian apocalypse (exemplified in the Book of Revelation) elaborated the theme of the ages of the world as a series of historical periods in which good struggles against evil: (1) from the creation of the world and of humanity to the Fall into sin and out of Eden; (2) from the Fall to the first coming of Christ; (3) from the first to the second advent of Christ, which includes the 1,000-year reign of Christ and his saints and the Last Judgement; and (4) the creation of a new heaven and a new earth in which those who have chosen the good (i.e., Christ) will live in eternity.
What is millenarianism?
It is a set of beliefs foreseeing imminent salvation for the faithful – on Earth, suddenly, totally and miraculously. It is a pervasive myth and has appeared over the centuries in all cultures: medieval and Reformation Europe, 18th century China; from Melanesia to 20th century USA. It encompasses UFO-believers, the New Age movement and the environmental movement. The great revivalist Jonathan Edwards’ (1703-58), History of the Work of Redemption, anticipated the establishment of Christ’s kingdom sometime near the end of the 20th century and associated the millennium with the role of the USA.
Apocalypse 2000?
Apocalypses (from the Greek apokalypsis: “revelation”) describe in cryptic language, understood by believers, the sudden, dramatic intervention of God in history on behalf of the faithful elect. Accompanying or heralding God’s dramatic intervention in human affairs will be cataclysmic events of cosmic proportions, such as a temporary rule of the world by Satan, signs in the heavens, persecutions, wars, famines, and plagues.
Apocalyptic writers generally concentrated on the future – on the future overthrow of evil, on the coming of a messianic figure, and on the establishment of the Kingdom of God and of eternal peace and righteousness. The wicked are described as consigned to hell and the righteous or elect as reigning with God or a messiah in a renewed earth or heaven. Apocalyptic themes have been revived in modern literature and frequently appear in science fiction.
Book Of Revelation, or Apocalypse Of John, the last book of the New Testament, is the only book of the New Testament classified as apocalyptic literature indicating thereby its extensive use of visions, symbols, and allegory, especially in connection with future events. The victory of God over Satan (in this case, the perseverance of Christians in the face of Roman persecution) typifies similar victories over evil in ages still to come and God’s final victory at the end of time.
Although Christ is clearly the central figure of Revelation, an understanding of the text presupposes familiarity with Old Testament language and concepts, especially those taken from the books of Daniel and Ezekiel. References to “a thousand years” (chapter 20) have led some to expect that the final victory over evil will come after the completion of some millennium.
Armageddon
Is, in the New Testament, the place where the kings of the Earth under demonic leadership will wage war on the forces of God at the end of world history. ‘Har-Magedon’ is mentioned in the Bible only once, in Revelations (16:16). Armageddon has become a symbol of the final battlefield where God’s heavenly armies will defeat the demon-led forces of evil.
Do you want to celebrate the Millennium twice?
If so you should start celebrating New Year’s Eve in a country west of the International Date Line then catch a flight on January 1st, 2000 eastwards, thereby losing a day and arriving in time to celebrate New Year’s Eve all over again. Party destinations favoured by dual revellers include Tonga, Kiribati, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Fiji and Tokyo for the first New Year’s Eve and Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tahiti or the USA for the second.
Where can the Millennium be avoided?
In China it will be the year 4698 on January 1st, and their new year’s celebrations last for a month, beginning in late January or early February. As the Chinese have also dispatched TV crews to New Zealand to film the millennium preparations, chances are that escape lies elsewhere.
In Islamic countries the Muslim era begins 579 years later than the Christian and there it will be the year 1421 but not until March. Yet most Muslim countries have adopted the Christian era as official usage.
Israel, at first sight, looks like the safest bet – it will be the year 5760 in the Jewish calendar. However, the whole country will be heaving with excitable Christian pilgrims, all expecting to see the Messiah’s return!
So, unless you have a garden bunker or a private country estate to hide out in, or can wangle a trip to the heart of Antarctica, it looks like you’ll have to put up with the Millennium!
William Allan died on 14th May 1999.
He was a tortured soul, and this Elfin Diary is dedicated to him.