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I told you in the last video on calendar notation that
regardless of whether you're using BC/AD or BCE and CE,
that there is no year zero,
that we had 1BC and then we had that theoretical birth of Jesus
and most historians don't think he was born right exactly on 1 January 1AD
but there is no year zero
right after that you go from 31 December 1BC to 1 January 1AD.
There's no year zero.
And despite the fact that I emphasized in the last video,
I didn't take that into consideration when I calculated
how many years there were between Plato's birth and Columbus' discovering of the New Wolrd
The reason why I didn't take that into consideration
is that the year 1492, whether you want to call it AD 1492, Anno Domini 1492,
whether you wanna call it that or you wanna call it 1492 in the Common Era
it's not 1492 years since the theoretical birth of Jesus,
which we know is not the actual birth. He was probably born before that.
It is 1491 years since the birth of Jesus.
And to think about it this way, let's just assume the theoretical date we're talking about here
or this theoretical event, this kind of birth of Jesus that our calendars evolve around
If we talk about 1 January, let's think about it this way, so 1 January in the Common Era,
how long is that since the birth of Jesus? It's not 1 year.
You wouldn't just look at this and say it's been 1 year, because this is theoretically the day that he was born.
So this is zero years, or almost zero years since that theoretical birth of Jesus.
Another way to think about it is: How long after 1 January 1BCE, and I can call this AD and I can call this BC,
what's the time difference between these two days?
So, the way I calculated it before I said "Oh, this is one year after that theoretical birth" that's wrong.
This is during that theoretical birth.
The way I did in the last video, I said "Oh, this is one year after, this is one year before
you add them together and you would get two." But that's wrong.
Because there is no year zero.
So 1 January 1AD, or 1CE is right over here and then 1 January 1BCE is exactly one year before that.
So there's only one year. One year difference.
And the reason why the math is strange is there is no year zero.
If there was a year zero, then my calculation in the last video is correct.
So really, the way that you would calculate the time between Plato's birth at 428BC
and Columbus sailing across the Atlantic in 1492
you would say "ok, this is 428 years before that theoretical birth of Christ
but this isn't 1492 years after that theoretical birth.
This is 1492 minus one. So what you do is you add these two numbers
this is 428 before, this is 1492 minus one years after
so you would add them and then subtract one, so the correct answer - this is the correction part
it isn't 1920 years between Plato's birth and Columbus.
It is, we wanna subtract one from that,
it is 1920 minus one years, so that is 1919 years.
The same way that the difference between 1AD and 1BCE,
you would say, you could almost do this in positive and negative numbers, you say:
"Oh, this is positive one minus negative one and that would give me two, but there is no zero
so you just subtract another one, so this is exactly one year difference.
Just wanted to clarify that. That's what that "no year zero" stuff does.