Re: Usshering in the Seventh Millenium

Don N Page (don@Phys.UAlberta.CA)
Tue, 21 Oct 97 12:44:26 -0600

I realize that I made a stupid mistake in calculating what Oct. 23,
4004 B.C. Julian would have been in the Gregorian calendar. The Julian
calendar runs slower by 3 days in 400 years, so in 6000 years it loses 3 x 15 =
45 days, and not 75 as I erroneously did in my head a few minutes ago. The
Julian calendar is now 13 days behind the Gregorian one. (At the switchover,
Oct. 4, 1582 Julian was followed by Oct. 15, 1582 Gregorian, causing many
people to riot about the 10 days they had "lost," and since then 1700, 1800,
and 1900 were leap years in the Julian calendar but not in the Gregorian one.)
Thus 6000 years ago the Gregorian calendar would have been 45 - 13 = 32 days
behind the Julian one, so Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. Julian would have been Sept. 21,
4004 B.C. Gregorian, which indeed was plausibly the Sunday nearest to the
autumnal equinox that year (assuming that the earth existed then).

Don Page