Which century are we in?
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Friends
Yes, I realize thats a rhetorical question, as any google search will immediately tell you the answer is the 21st.
But how could you convince someone of that fact when they see 2008 to mean the 20 century because 2000 must mean the 20th century.
Well I just spent the last 45 min trying to do just that to no avail. Even after trying various methods of explaining it, from drawing the similarity of the education system and “grades”, to talking about which century the years 1-100 are in.
We got to agreeing that the years 1-100 are included in the first century, but then he insists that the next hundred years (the years 101-200) are also part of the 1st century. Which if you can count, means that the 1st century is actually comprised of 200 years…which contradicts the definition of a century.
I think the whole issue stems from understanding that there is no 0th century. Which means that year 1-100 are indeed the 1st century, not the 0th. Which I agree is a bit of a challenging way of thinking at 2:30 AM, so I’ll give him some slack.
I think one of the easiest ways of relating to the concept is by talking about a particular year, where one would have been in grade XX. If we take grade 12 in our example that means that have finished only 11 years of education, as they started in grade 1 NOT grade 0. So one could say that we are in the 21st century, because we have completed 20 hundred years, and we are now in the 21st set of hundred years.
Either way, it’s not really a topic that I plan on spending too much time trying to elaborate on.
There are only a fixed number of times you can say the world is round, until you have to just wait for them to discover that fact by themselves :P
