Posted on 10/22/2004 7:22:56 AM PDT by Publius Valerius
Universe's 6,000th birthday ...
Tim Radford Friday October 22, 2004 The Guardian
Britain's geologists are about to celebrate the fact that the universe is exactly 6,000 years old.
At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (below), who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation.
Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated that it began at 6pm on Saturday October 22, 4004 BC.
Actually, he put the date at October 23, and then pedantically realised that time must have begun the night before, because the Bible said that "the evening and the morning were the first day."
The geologists selected the anniversary for a day-long conference on some of the fakes, frauds and hoaxes that have plagued geological and palaeontological research for centuries. "It's not that we think Archbishop Ussher's date was a fraud," said Ted Nield, the society's communications officer. "It's just that it was spectacularly wrong."
Dr Nield conceded, too, that in toasting the archbishop's calculations the geologists were committing another error. More than 6,000 years have passed since 4004 BC. The symmetry is only apparent. The date is a mere numerological reflection. The real anniversary passed unnoticed, in 1997.
I love that LOL! I need to learn how to post that.
Didn't Augustine skip some time too ?
6,000 years???? lol ,what drugs are they on?
When we find fossils on this planet alone dating millions of years in age, and this planet is a mighty young one compared to the universe.
Wow, I turned 37 today! Amazing I share the same birthday as the universe!
You mean like for 6,000 years, or maybe 11 billion if the scientific theory crowd gets warmed up? ;>)
I took that into account, I thought. Count backwards from 4004 and the forward to 2004. 4004 + 2004 = 6008. Doesn't it?
Way cool! :-)
Ah, if life only contained more references to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps it wouldn't be considered such a bad move.
Actually, he put the date at October 23, and then pedantically realised that time must have begun the night before, because the Bible said that "the evening and the morning were the first day."
Yes, but did he account for daylight savings time?
Nope. You cannot add them together that way. See:
http://webexhibits.org/calendars/year-history.html
In related news Charlotte Nield, wife of Ted Nield, the communications officer for the Geological Society of London, has put in a missing persons report for her husband. She was quoted as saying, "He drank too much at Earth's 6000 year birthday party and wandered off... we think he may have walked off the side of the earth."
Whoops, I meant to ping you to my link as well.
At the time when this web page was written, the current year in the Hebrew calendar is 5763 (2003 in the Gregorian or Christian calendar). The big question is (drum roll please!): what is the origin of the numbering of years in the Hebrew calendar? The answer is that the year number in the Hebrew calendar represents in the number of years since the beginning of the Creation of the world (Genesis 1:1). This number is determined by adding up the ages of people in the Hebrew Bible since Creation. More specifically, the birth of Adam on the 6th day of Creation is the actual starting point for counting the years in the Hebrew calendar. At first glance, given the year 5763, this would mean that the world began in 3760 B.C.E. in the Christian calendar (3760 + 2003 = 5763), and that this was Year 1 in the Hebrew calendar. However, the meaning of what a "day" is in the Hebrew bible is not what we think a day means in the sense of a 24-hour day. Even the concept of a "day" in the seven days of creation does not represent a 24-hour day according to Orthodox Jews since they point out that the Sun did not appear until the 4th "day". Until the 4th "day", they reason, the idea of a 24-hour "day" would be meaningless. Therefore, the Hebrew year number is not necessarily supposed to represent a scientific fact.
http://www.angelfire.com/pa2/passover/jewishcalendar.html
BTW! HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Whoohoo! :-)
Well, not in any sort of attempt to start a flame war, but I don't see why the two aren't compatible. For instance, I subscribe to the Aristotle/Aquinas Prime Mover theory of the universe, but I also happen to think that to say that the world is a mere 6000 years old is utter hogwash.
Crap. The old 'tripped up by the Julian/Gregorian calender converson' gets me every time.
Try this one on for size (only one of many possibilities). Since God created time along with everything else, why then would God be constrained to start at what we linear time thinking creature see as the beginning. Like the ripples that leave the point of a rock thrown in a lake, God could have created Adam first and all of creation ripple forth from that point. It makes a billion years backward just as real as a billion years forward. Again, since God wants us to believe by faith alone, He may not have felt the need to provide proof. Other possibilities include the facts that since time is warped at speeds approaching that of light, who is to say that time has acted linearly. It is a much higher probability that time has not. Most cosmologist would concede this point, the real arguement is how much. Todays science uses assumptions based quickly on our biases.
How about 4004 B.C. to 1 B.C. = 4,003 years. Plus, from 1 A.D. to 2004 A.D. = 2,003 years, so it could be 6,006. But who's quibbling? 6,006, 6,007, 6,008, 12,000,000,000 - its all relative...
2.13 How does one count years?
In about AD 523, the papal chancellor, Bonifatius, asked a monk by the name of Dionysius Exiguus to devise a way to implement the rules from the Nicean council (the so-called ``Alexandrine Rules'') for general use.
Dionysius Exiguus (in English known as Denis the Little) was a monk from Scythia, he was a canon in the Roman curia, and his assignment was to prepare calculations of the dates of Easter. At that time it was customary to count years since the reign of emperor Diocletian; but in his calculations Dionysius chose to number the years since the birth of Christ, rather than honour the persecutor Diocletian.
Dionysius (wrongly) fixed Jesus' birth with respect to Diocletian's reign in such a manner that it falls on 25 December 753 AUC (ab urbe condita, i.e. since the founding of Rome), thus making the current era start with AD 1 on 1 January 754 AUC.
How Dionysius established the year of Christ's birth is not known (see section 2.13.1 for a couple of theories). Jesus was born under the reign of king Herod the Great, who died in 750 AUC, which means that Jesus could have been born no later than that year. Dionysius' calculations were disputed at a very early stage.
When people started dating years before 754 AUC using the term ``Before Christ'', they let the year 1 BC immediately precede AD 1 with no intervening year zero.
Note, however, that astronomers frequently use another way of numbering the years BC. Instead of 1 BC they use 0, instead of 2 BC they use -1, instead of 3 BC they use -2, etc.
See also section 2.13.2.
It is frequently claimed that it was the venerable Bede (673-735) who introduced BC dating. Although Bede seems to have used the term on at least one occasion, it is generally believed that BC dates were not used until the middle of the 17th century.
In this section I have used AD 1 = 754 AUC. This is the most likely equivalence between the two systems. However, some authorities state that AD 1 = 753 AUC or 755 AUC. This confusion is not a modern one, it appears that even the Romans were in some doubt about how to count the years since the founding of Rome.
http://www.tondering.dk/claus/cal/node3.html
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