The hands of the clock of civilization strike a cosmic midnight, tolling the end of a thousand years and the beginning of a thousand more. Religions were formed around the fear of this passage, governmental systems crumbled under its weight, the very nature of time was questioned during the transition into the new millenium. From ancestral cave scratchings of the moon and sunrises, to the tapestries recounting the season's harvest, we have been driven to define and organize time, its passage capturing the essence of human thinking and creativity. Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millenium engages the reader in a socio-scientific discussion on the origin and impact of this most majestic moment as it approaches the year 2000.

Gould asks three main questions: What is the millennium? When is it? Why does it carry such importance? From these questions emerge scientific debate and historical intrigue.

What is the millennium? Gould refuses to acknowledge that it is simply the tearing of a calendar page or a number of atomic oscillations. The passage of time comprises events that carry the momentum of humanity. Gould writes: "We need time's arrow to assure us that sequences of events tell meaningful stories and promise hope for improvement. We need time's cycle for an ordered rescue from the fear that history might feature no more than a random and senseless jumble of events without meaning or guidance--just one damn thing after another..." Without a meaningful organization of time, existence is schizophrenic: events seem fragmented and inaccessible to the needs of human introspection.

The construction of temporal intervals reflects a deep-seated human need to impose structure upon reality. In this section, Gould challenges the reader to cast off any notions of time as an absolute or objective quantity, leading the reader to wonder if time is a reflection of humanity, rather than of natural reality. He recounts past civilizations' attempts to construct time based on their exposure to the periodicity in nature. From the counting of days by the average time between sunrise and sunset to the change in seasons, time's divisions have been evolving with experience and technology, but remain inherently subjective. Atomic clocks which some may percieve as an objective measure, are based upon the observation of millions of oscillations of cesium atoms, which now define our second. This section is fascinating, since it delves into the fundamental subjectivity of time.

In light of the human origin of time, we turn to the second question: When is the millennium? The search for the answer began in the sixth century. At that point, Dionysus Exiguus (Dennis the Short) was asked to construct a chronology for Pope St. John I. Oddly enough, the beginning of time according to Exiguus was not Year Zero, but Year One when Rome was built, an obvious subjective construction. He divided time again by the circumcision date of Jesus, 753 years after the building of Rome. This choice of year led to a dramatic inconsistency with the Gospels since King Herod, who played a pivotal role in the early life of Jesus Christ, would have died before Jesus was born. Consequently, the calendar was revised and led to the B.C./ A.D. system starting at 1 B.C., not zero. Starting a calendar with Year One is not surprising since at the time, the Chinese did not have a zero, the Egyptians had rarely used it, the Mayans did not grasp zero's deep meaning, and Hindu and Arabic scholars did not invent zero for themselves until about the ninth century.

The error of starting at Year One instead of Year Zero propagates into the next question: When is the millennium? Do we celebrate on 1 January 2000 or on 1 January 2001? The answer to this question is more of a class-cultural issue than a scientific question. What Gould argues is that both celebration dates are correct, but have led to the dichotomization of an intellectual class and a primitive class, with the intellectuals using historical fact to define their celebrations and the primitives longing for the aesthetic appeal of round numbers. The ancient creators of the calendar we use today started at one, not zero, so the passage of 1000 years occurs when we move from year --00 to year --01. However, the passage from 1999 to 2000 has a more dramatic appearance than from 2000 to 2001. Through historical anecdotes, Gould argues that this sensually pleasing change leads many of us to don our New Year's hats a year earlier than an intellectual definition would allow.

Why celebrate at all? Gould's third question focuses on humanity's need to celebrate time's passage. Gould does not fully address the notion of why we care about the millennium at a sociological level and is perhaps the weakest point of the book. Recognizing Gould's pronounced scholarly approach from previous books, the reader is forced to conclude that there is little available research about this question, else Gould would have elaborated upon it in scholarly exuberance. In spite of this, Gould engages the reader on topics such as the history of the Jewish Calendar and hypotheses on the origins of our primordial notions of time. The book concludes with a personal account of Gould's experience with his son, who is autistic and capable of instantantly calculating the day of the week for any date in any century. This section is a personal look into the meaning of time and is warming to the soul.

As we approach the new millenium, it is appropriate to address the social and scientific impact that the construction of the passage of time has had on civilization. Stephen Jay Gould's book discusses this impact and its implications on time, a quantity that the scientific community takes as an objective given.

D. Elizabeth Pugel

126MRL, Loomis Physics Labs

Urbana, IL 61801

217/265-5010

pugel@uniuc.edu