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Naming things is hard. Current name is relative to current date because it talks about an event 4200 years ago. Any literature discussing this will be stuck wi
by flixic 7y ago
Naming things is hard.
Current name is relative to current date because it talks about an event 4200 years ago. Any literature discussing this will be stuck with this relative name and eventually will become incorrect.
I understand why they don't want to use BC to name a global event that touched all cultures, and far before C was a thing.
Maybe it would make sense to adopt kurzgesagt's Human Era calendar, starting at approximate time of first human settlements. They call current year 12019.
- lifthrasiir 7y agoNot exactly. A word "BP" in the full name ("4.2-kiloyear BP event") is a key: it stands for "Before Present", where the "Present" is defined as 1 Jan 1950 for the archaeological and geological purpose [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present
- senectus1 7y agoI'd never heard of that before... I like it.
- p1mrx 7y agoSo when Marty went back to 1955, that actually was The Future, archaeologically speaking.
- ageofwant 7y agoSo BP = C + 1950, and this is better how ? Seems worse really, why not just stick with C ?
- adrianN 7y agoIt's better in the way that radio-dating kind of broke once we figured out fission and started nuclear weapons testing, so the early post-war years are quite important to people who use that technique.
- ncmncm 7y agoExactly this: it is a permanent mark on the strata: below this, radiocarbon dating works, provided no leakage fom above; above, not.
- Udik 7y agoI guess it's just because the difference between BC and BP is irrelevant for most archeological and geological purposes, and referring to a specific year for something that happened 200 million years ago doesn't seem to make much sense, so "present" is a suitably vague indication. But then you have special cases like this one, recent enough that the difference is actually 50%, and you need to specify a more precise time point for present. So, as an afterthought, you decide that "present" is 1950, but you still use a uniform scale for all events.
- ageofwant 7y agoWell now that makes a bit more sense.
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoAny date epoch using calendar years as a unit is going to be C + X for some (positive or negative) X.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoThat depends on your calendar. Some calendars average around the same time as the gregorian calendar, but can deviate significantly on shorter time scales (e.g. the Hebrew calendar, which uses lunar months and leap months to keep rough track to a solar calendar). Other calendars have more deviation - for instance, the Islamic calendar merely approximates the solar year with moons on a single year timeframe, so it moves about 10-12 days a year and just accepts that in some years, Ramadan will be in winter and in others it will be in summer. Moreover, even our calendar and epoch has changed. Since Jesus pbuh was conceived nine months before he was born, the English used to record the beginning of the year as the 25th March OS before they adopted the Gregorian calendar. Therefore, the 20 March and the 30 March of the same year would have different numbers. (The general public still celebrate new years on the 1 January in this period, which can make dates between new years and lady day ambiguous.) So unless you circuitously define a "calendar year" to mean "the calendar used for measuring compared to C", your statement is false. If you circuitously define it, it is a useless statement which says nothing more than "true statements which can be made about calendar length are true", which is unnecessarily specific while being at the same time redundant.
- Iv 7y agoBP can be read as "Before Pollution by airborne radioactive isotopes made radiocarbon dating unusable"
- philipov 7y agoor "British Petroleum"
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoPresent being defined as 1950 strikes me as exactly the sort of problem that GP was trying to avoid.
- perl4ever 7y agoThe middle of the period called "modern art" seems to be about 1915.
- philipov 7y agoModern is not a synonym of contemporary. We're currently in the late stage of the postmodern period.
- perl4ever 7y agoPostmodernism has been around for a long time. It appears at least some people think it's firmly historical and not contemporary...and that opinion is from almost a decade ago.
- philipov 7y agoYeah, I considered that, but I couldn't think of a new philosophical movement that's replaced it, so chose to say that we're in a late phase of postmodernmism. The important point is that modernism is firmly in the past. EDIT: Early Modernity began around 1500 and Late Modernity (allegedly) ended in 1989. I think Postmodernity still has a few years left to play out.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Thorentis 7y agoWhy is BC bad because this event touches all cultures? Every part of science and academia is effected by the culture doing the research, and is almost its own fascinating historical record in itself. Trying to make everything as generic as possible is bland and boring.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoThe reason BC is bad is because, when you hear BC, you think, oh this has been calibrated by knowledge of the passage of time according to records by humans. So perhaps we know it happened in year 20 of the reign of King B, and we have enough other information to believe that means about 125 BC. But the date of this event was determined by radioactive calibration. It's not measuring the same thing. It measures something that approximates human years. This might seem like a trivial distinction to lay people, but it's relevant to the field, and the 4.2 k BP year event is a technical term.
- thih9 7y ago> Trying to make everything as generic as possible is bland and boring. This is subjective. On the other hand going with a generic choice helps create a well defined universal language. This makes scientific cooperation across cultures easier. Sample difficulties of going with culture-specific naming: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_and_US_customary_measurement_systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_a...
- cies 7y ago> Naming things is hard. > Maybe it would make sense to adopt kurzgesagt's Human Era calendar, starting at approximate time of first human settlements. So what about calling it the settlement era, as humans were around before the first settlement, making "human era" a bad name to begin with. :)