There was a year 1 AD. Just because the dating system was not in use at that time makes the date no less real. A calendar is a system of measurement and the Gregorian calender begins at January 1, 1 AD.
When Celcius first applied his system of measurement to a thermometer and determined that 100 degrees would be he melting point of ice it no less meant that at 32 degrees Fahrenheit was the melting point of ice. Also, it isn't to say that the ice didn't melt prior to either system of measurement being invented, similarly the year 1 existed more than 1581 years prior to Friday, 15 October 1582 when the calendar was adopted by the Catholic Church.
It depends on your definition of "widespread use" but there was not much adoption prior to the 16th century.
Ryan
k5083 wrote:
rwdfresno wrote:
Since we use the Gregorian calendar which started on January 1, 1 that would mean that the first decade ended December 31, 10. Hence the same with year 2000. The 20th century ended on December 31, 2000 and the 21st began January 1, 2001. There was no year 0 in the Gregarian calendar.
Of course, there was also no year 1, or year 10, or even a year 500. The Anno Domini system, which was adopted by the Gregorian calendar, was first conceived in what would now be called 525 A.D. and came into widespread use starting in the 11th century. So there wasn't even a big party for the year 1000 (or 1001), and certainly people weren't running around 2,009 years ago saying, "Hey, happy 1!". This is all an exercise in creative backdating. And whether the year thought (probably incorrectly) to be that of Christ's birth was 1 A.D. or 0 is purely an academic matter.
Therefore, it is a completely arbitrary and rather pedantic convention to insist that a decade runs from, say, 2001 to 2010 rather than 2000 to 2009. It makes at least as much sense to define a decade by a common next-to-last digit. Perhaps more sense, in the digital age.
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Twenty years sounds like a good long run.
