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Dear Professor:
Happy Holidays and yes wishing you the best of health for this exciting
new millennium.

Tell me, from your viewpoint, what makes the year 2000 so special
compared to all the many other good  years which have passed in your life time?
What had more impact on your life, whatever the year brought or whatever
you did in a certain year?
I wonder is it the time which is precious, or is it what we the
individuals do while time turns as the world turns?
Just curios, like always.

helmut s.

Dear Helmut:
I'll try to answer your questions, - which isn't easy. First of all, the special attention given to the turn of the millenium by some people is downright silly and somewhat comical for a number of reasons. 

There is some doubt as to the exact year Christ was born; moreover, if the assumption is correct that he was born one week before the beginning of Year 1, then the second millennium since then - there having been no Year 0 -  would end not this year but a year from now.  But to attribute special attention to the end of the second millennium depends on our having chosen the decimal system as the basis for our counting system.  Had we chosen any other, the "millennia" would occur at very different times.  That much for the adherents of number fetishism, especially those expecting either the end of the world or a second coming of Christ on the occasion.

This doesn't mean that one might not seize upon even a phony millennial
event as an occasion to reflect on the state of the world and the changes that we may expect to lie ahead. 

The present time seems to call especially for such an evaluation.  The world is clearly on the verge of tremendous changes.  These three seem to me the outstanding ones:  The implications of the communication revolution, of which we have merely seen the first beginnings; the advances already made and continuing to be made at an accelerating pace in the field of bio-medicine; and the switch from "conventional" warfare between nation-states to defense against more-and-more sophisticated methods of terrorism.

About my personal experience as the years have gone by I have little to say.   What has happened to me has been a mixture of external events (some bad, most of them luckily good) and my own lifestyle decisions (of which some also have been bad, but most of them luckily good).

Any more questions?  All the best to you from both of us for the new year and beyond.  Olaf

P.S.  Incidentally, according to what I read, the historical consensus as to the year of Christ's birth is 4 BC.  So, the end of the world, according to some, should have occurred a few years ago.  Maybe we didn't notice. 

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