Questioning the Millennium by Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathan Cape, $220 One of humankind's odder idiosyncrasies is an irrational fascination with round numbers. One event that will prove this will be the moment when the present millennium ends and the next one begins.
Not only are authors busily crafting books about this supposedly momentous event. Governments are lavishing huge sums of taxpayers' money on grand 'millennium experiences' and an entire industry is gearing up to meet the anticipated vast worldwide demand for millennium knick-knacks. For example, the British Government is spending more than HK$9 billion on a Millennium Dome at the Greenwich meridian in East London.
But why, asks Harvard zoologist Stephen Jay Gould, are we so entranced by calendrical moments such as midnight, December 31, 1999? In what meaningful manner will December 31, 1999, differ from January 1, 2000? This short, informative, amusing book contains Gould's answer and is likely to be a huge publishing success, as are his natural history titles such as The Panda's Thumb and Dinosaur in a Haystack.
Part of the attraction of Questioning the Millennium is that Gould steers clear of an erudite history of previous millennia and shows no interest in forecasting events in the next millennium. Instead, he sticks to our fascination with the numbers.
A prime example comes from the 17th century with the idiosyncratic reasoning of Archbishop Ussher. Because God created the world in six days and because one day is akin to 1,000 years in God's calendar, the world must be 6,000 years old before Christ's 1,000-year rule (the seventh day) begins.
Ussher said the Bible indicates that the world began on October 23, 4004 BC, which means that Christ's 1,000-year rule should, mathematically, have begun on October 23, 1996.
Unfortunately, a monk in the sixth century called Dionysius Exiguus, who created the Before Christ/Anno Domini (Year of our Lord) system of dates, labelled the first year of the Christian era AD1 instead of AD0. Though no blame should attach to him for the error (the zero was unknown at the time), the mistake means that one must be added to Ussher's otherwise faultless calculation. So Christ's reign began on October 23, 1997. Or did it? Nearly 200 years earlier Pope Gregory XIII, in scrapping the Julian system in favour of his more accurate version, had deducted 10 days from the calendar - removing October 4 to October 15, 1582.