Online Encyclopedia
Intellectual history of time
When one speaks about the intellectual history of time, one essentially is stating that changes have occurred in the way we experience and measure time. Our conceived abstract notions of time have presumably developed in accordance with our art, our science, and our social infrastructure. (See also horology.)
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Towards time-keeping
With the invention of agriculture in the 3rd millennium BC, people relied heavily on the cycles of the season for planting and harvesting crops. Most humans came to live in settled societies. Over time, people came to associate changing patterns of the stars with the seasons. This was the beginning of calendars.
This early conception of time was based on the setting and rising of the sun. Only the learned could use astronomy to jiggle-in and jiggle-out days to make the lunar and solar calendars coincide, but even to them the idea of "10:14 A.M." or "6:23 P.M." would be unreachable - a sundial isn't that precise. It took centuries for technology to make time measurement accurate enough for seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds, femtoseconds, or attoseconds to have a realistic meaning.
In 650 BC, when the water clock was invented, time was at first synchronized accordingly, so that in winter the hours were shorter and in summer they were longer.
Isochronous time
With invention of the pendulum clock in 1656 came isochronous time, based on a fixed unit interval. Time was still adjusted to match what was thought of as "natural time", the angle of the sun on the horizon. Isochronous time was seen as a problem more than a solution, because people's lives still revolved around the light needed to see. The acceptance of isochronous time had to wait until 1879 when the light bulb was invented.
But the clocks were still aligned with the rise of the sun. It took the steam engine to completely divorce time from the sun. Invention of the locomotive in 1830, time had to be synchronized across vast distances in order to organize the train schedules. This eventually led to the development of time zones, and, of course, global isochronous time.
The isochronous clock changed lives. The business day revolved around it, and appointments were no longer "within the hour", but on the hour, and five minutes was late (except for a party). Time technology turned human life into a rigorous schedule.
Further reading
- The Discoverers - Daniel J. Boorstin
- Theory Out of Bounds - Isabelle Stengers/Ilya Prigogine
- Order out of Chaos - Ilya Prigogine
- Multifractals and 1/f noise - Benoît Mandelbrot
- Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time( Studies in Literature and Science) - Michel Serres; et al.
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas S. Kuhn
- Technics and Civilization - Lewis Mumford