ABSTRACT
The dawn of the modem era’s third millennium has inspired a flood of news stories, about everything from celebrations at the end of 1999 (or 2000, depending on who’s counting) to accounts of computers going haywire because they are programmed to give the year in only two digits. Our reckonings of time may impose only a social grid on the flow of cosmic time. Nevertheless, we widely recognize the passage from one millennium to another as momentous, and wonder what it portends. Are we witnessing the end of one era and the beginning of another? From what, and to what?
