A fellow and I have been debating about the existence of the year 0.
I believe that it does not exist, while my friend thinks the opposite.
My justification is that there is no such thing as a 0th year on a timeline.
He argues that time works much like a mathematical numberline, so when 1bc is over the next year would be 0.
Please give me a reasonable arguement that the year 0 doesn't exist. We have consulted our history teacher and he took my side. I have also used sources from the internet to prove my point but he still believes that these sources aren't credible enough.
The arguement is about the Gregorian Calendar and nothing else.
Please help me to prove this dumdum that he is wrong.
There is no year zero. BC means "before Christ", so 1 BC is the first year before the birth of Christ. AD means " in the year of the lord" so 1AD is the first year of the lord. The switch over long is the birth of Christ itself.
The arguement is about the Gregorian Calendar and nothing else.
For dates before 1582 you really should be using the Julian Calendar.
Neither the Julian nor the Gregorian Calendar includes a year 0. It's defined that way and there's not much to debate.
In some fields a year 0 is used, but that's just to make calculations easier. Astronomers usually do include a year 0 as that's eliminates a complexity when you're talking about things which happened X thousand years ago (in you do use a year 0, "X thousand years ago" is actually X thousand years ago and not X-1 thousand years ago. A small difference, but sometimes it's important). Also the ISO standard for dates includes a year 0000 which corresponds with 1 BC. But that's just because years 0001 to 9999 are the actual years and 0000 comes before 0001 in that method; the year before 0001 being of course 1 BC.