Please explain my confused me like I’m 5 (0r 4 or 6).

  • nudny ekscentryk@szmer.info
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    7 months ago

    When you consider the time as a number line, years are not points at integers (which would in some way warrant a year 0), but rather periods between them. Year 1 is the period between 0 and 1, and before that was -1 to 0, or year -1. There is no year 0, because there isn’t anything between 0 and 0

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      This explanation is unclear to me. Why do we choose the later of the two endpoints of the year for (0, 1) but the earlier of the two for (-1, 0)?

  • lyth@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    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

  • governorkeagan@lemdro.id
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    7 months ago

    I’m no expert but I assume that the year Christ died would be “year zero” (assuming you’re talking about anno Domini (AD) and before Christ (BC)) since we started counting after that.

    EDIT: reading more on the topic I might be completely incorrect with my above statement. If someone else knows, please do correct me

    EDIT 2: I found this on Wikipedia which talks about a “year zero”

  • Platypus@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    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.