Spontaneous locale change on Bookworm

What about the century containing the Big Bang?

I dont think anyone was counting then

What year is it anyway? Assyrian-6,772 Hebrew-5,784 Chinese-4,721 Julian-2,777 Buddhist-2,564 Gregorian-2,024 Hindu-1,945 Islamic-1,445 Persian-1,402 French Revolutionary-231

stolen from

Which century was that, then?

David

Nobody looked around and said “let’s count this as 1 A.D.”, either.

I always thought the Big Bang was a much more rational basis for a time reference point than some ill-defined mythological/religious not-quite- sure-when-it-was-supposed-to-have-happened-anyway fictional event.

Astronomers already use Julian days. Go back to Julian day zero, and set your Big Bang zero point exactly, say, 13.7 billion years before that. Doesn’t matter if future measurements cause some adjustments to the actual moment of the Big Bang: this is just meant as an arbitrary reference point anyway, meant to get rid of awkward “B.C.” dates.

One assumes time is well ordered, so even if I don't know what the least century is, I know there was one.

Nonsense, lots going on in that first century. Particularly the first few minutes.

Integers are well ordered, but there is no least integer.

All we want, I think, is a zero point far enough back that there is less real-world need to deal with negative time points.

Some think time may have started with the Big Bang, but there are hints that there may be, or have been, other Bangs, before, since, elsewhere, elsewhen.

One thing is true: our Big Bang is the biggest single event to have happened in our little observable corner of the Universe over the entire timespan that we’re aware of. So it makes sense to use that, more than anything else, as our calendar reference for measuring all of time -- certainly more sense than some fictional religious event that only has significance to one small part of our species. At least until we come up with a better one.

Arr. That be Metaphysics them, that be

What has that got to do with the fact that no one was counting, then?

Well, no one was counting in year zero either, when baby Jesus was born. Otherwise they wouldn't have forgotten to put that year in a century. AD was devised in AD 525, I just looked it up.

Hindu-Arabic numerals didn't make 0 explicit until much later, maybe

Let’s just say, we have more evidence for what happened in the first few minutes of the Big Bang, then we have for any religious creation myth.