The Time Machine
We’re crazy in love with time. Other than our relationships with significant others, there is no relationship more intimate than the one we have with time. We are obsessed with time.
It started in the beginning. I mean the very beginning.
in Genesis when God separated the light from the dark, he created daytime and nighttime. Since then we have invented sun dials, water clocks, church bells, clock towers, wristwatches, and wall-mounted clocks all in an effort to capture, measure, and control time. Even our phones keep time. When the power comes on after an outage, we scurry about the house resetting clocks on all manner of electronic devices: the DVR, the stove, the TV, the radio, the microwave oven, etc. After a massive outage, would an astronaut from space see the entire U.S. Northeast blinking until everyone reset their clocks? Do we really need all those clocks?
Obviously time matters to us . . . a lot. But why?
Our notion of time changes over . . . ahem . . . time. Most Westerners think of time as linear and precise, measuring in hours, minutes, seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, and even atomic cycles our passing from present to future but never from present to past. Time never backtracks, never returns to where it started.
Except not always.
It’s all in how you look at it. Linear time provides little meaning to agricultural societies. Farmers are tied to nature and the seasons. Time, like nature, is cyclical: plant in spring, harvest in autumn. Then start over again next spring. So farmers measure time using nature’s devices -- sun, moon, seasons, stars -- each moving through its phases coming full circle and starting over again. In nature the arc of time folds back on itself. Time doesn’t need to be exact, just good enough to finish daily chores and plant and harvest at the right times.
But such a concept of time doesn’t work in modern societies.
The industrial Revolution wouldn’t have gotten far without a clock mounted on the factory wall dividing the day into hours, minutes, and seconds, so that productivity could be measured. Time was linear and had to be exact, or as exact as it could be. If you were paid for working a 10 hour day, then 10 hours had better be the same every day, or someone -- worker or employer -- was being ripped off.
Gone are the simple days. Connecting time to the cyclical clocks of nature no longer serves our needs. We need precise units of time to do all the things we need to get done. We need to hear and see every tick and tock of time’s passing to keep on schedule. But dividing time into precise units -- hours, minutes, seconds -- requires a subtle yet profound change in our concept of time. To measure time in precise units we have to abstract the concept of time itself. Hours, minutes, and seconds don’t exist in nature. They exist only in rational thought.
This abstraction did not evolve without pain.
For many the notion of abstract time was a concept too far. A good example would be the New Haven clock tower fiasco. Back in the early 19th century, the citizens of New Haven, Connecticut, being industrious people, thought it a good idea to build a second clock tower. It would nicely match the existing one on the campus of Yale University. After all, an enterprising young community can’t have too many clock towers.
But once the second clock tower was built, something odd happened. The new clock matched Yale time but four times a year. The rest of the year it spent out pacing or falling behind it’s brother clock. Turns out Yale time tracked the sun’s changing position over the course of the year, while the new clock tracked mean time -- the average of the sun’s positional changes over the year. Thus the new clock sometimes matched Yale time, but most of the time didn’t. But time is time right? No.
Mean time divided the day into equal units of time. Sun time did not.
Mean time proved too much of a leap of faith for some citizens to handle. For some the new clock was heretical. Citizen argued with citizen. You were a Yalie or a Newbie. Finally, the argument erupted in the local paper, where it raged for months. Those in favor of (Sun) Yalie time are well represented by the writer “True Time,” while those in favor of (mean) Newbie time by “J.”
True Time:
“To have a clock in a town to tell the public what the time is NOT is certainly a novel scheme. It is said that the clock gives mean time. But why mean time? Mean time is not true time, nor is true time mean time. A public clock, which tells the truth four times only in a year, is something very much like a public nuisance.” *
J:
“[A]ll the business of our life -- our meals, our labors -- our hours of rest -- everything requires that the day should be divided into equal and uniform positions.” *
Is time the essence of truth?
For most people noon is when the sun is directly overhead. Except we really don’t measure time that way. Not anymore. in mean time, noon is almost never when the sun is directly overhead. Sun time varies with the season, making hours, minutes, and seconds longer or shorter depending on the season. But a varying length hour, minute, or second isn’t of much use to sophisticated moderns. Mean time makes no attempt to follow sun time. Hours, minutes, and seconds never vary using mean time. We have forsaken nature in favor of precision.
Didn't take long to use up all the bandwidth hours, minutes, and seconds could supply. The railroads, covering all that distance, with all those connecting trains, changed that. The schedule might tell you to pick up the connecting train in Omaha at noon, but whose noon? Omaha’s? New York’s? It is certainly not noon in Omaha when it is noon in New York. But if it isn’t noon in Omaha when it is noon in New York, what time is it?
Next stop: Greenwich Mean Time followed closely by Time Zones. ALL ABOARD!
When using Greenwich mean time as your reference point, you know when noon Omaha is as long as you know how many time zones separate the two locations. That helped a lot,. People no longer missed their connections because they didn’t know when noon Omaha time was. But then some idiot invented Daylight Savings Time and now no one can figure out when the connecting train in Omaha leaves.
A moment of your time, please. On the Boulder Dam there are two clock towers, one in Nevada, the other in Arizona. Nevada is in the Pacific time zone; Arizona is in the Mountain time zone. Nevada follows daylight savings time; Arizona doesn’t. This means that half the year there is a one hour difference between Nevada and Arizona time, while there is no difference the other half of the year. This despite the two states being in different tme zones. AND I CAN NEVER FIGURE OUT WHICH IS WHICH, WHICH MEANS I CAN NEVER FIGURE OUT WHEN. I solved the problem by moving back east.
Good thing there are no train stations on the Boulder Dam. But I digress.
Technological advancements and major business innovations are often accompanied by advances in our ability to measure time, and in no event can an advancement outpace our ability to measure time accurately.
Indeed, without timepieces that can measure minuscule units of time, we would not have advanced as fast as we have, and traveled as far as we have, in such an incredibly short period of time.
All of this argues for clocks being the greatest invention of all time, even greater than the wheel, even coca-cola. We don’t normally think of time in this way, but most major advancements are inextricably tied to our ability to measure time more and more finely and accurately.
We have quickly come to the point where the precision of atomic cycles is not precise enough. We look for ever better ways to measure time. The electron? The photon? Quarks? This abstracting of time has freed us to do all sorts of things we couldn’t do with the sun, the moon, or the stars.
But it came at a price.
We suffer from time famine. There is never enough time. Time saving devices never save us time, never increase our leisure time; they just permit us to stuff more things into the same amount of time. We are more harried than ever. Ever smaller units of time create more ticks of the clock to fret over. The clock, man’s invention, has turned its master into its slave.
Is the clock the greatest invention of all time?
Perhaps instead of blood pressure medication, doctors should prescribe sun dials.
* Michael O’Malley, “Keeping Watch: A History of American Time,” Kindle Edition.
It started in the beginning. I mean the very beginning.
in Genesis when God separated the light from the dark, he created daytime and nighttime. Since then we have invented sun dials, water clocks, church bells, clock towers, wristwatches, and wall-mounted clocks all in an effort to capture, measure, and control time. Even our phones keep time. When the power comes on after an outage, we scurry about the house resetting clocks on all manner of electronic devices: the DVR, the stove, the TV, the radio, the microwave oven, etc. After a massive outage, would an astronaut from space see the entire U.S. Northeast blinking until everyone reset their clocks? Do we really need all those clocks?
Obviously time matters to us . . . a lot. But why?
Our notion of time changes over . . . ahem . . . time. Most Westerners think of time as linear and precise, measuring in hours, minutes, seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, and even atomic cycles our passing from present to future but never from present to past. Time never backtracks, never returns to where it started.
Except not always.
It’s all in how you look at it. Linear time provides little meaning to agricultural societies. Farmers are tied to nature and the seasons. Time, like nature, is cyclical: plant in spring, harvest in autumn. Then start over again next spring. So farmers measure time using nature’s devices -- sun, moon, seasons, stars -- each moving through its phases coming full circle and starting over again. In nature the arc of time folds back on itself. Time doesn’t need to be exact, just good enough to finish daily chores and plant and harvest at the right times.
But such a concept of time doesn’t work in modern societies.
The industrial Revolution wouldn’t have gotten far without a clock mounted on the factory wall dividing the day into hours, minutes, and seconds, so that productivity could be measured. Time was linear and had to be exact, or as exact as it could be. If you were paid for working a 10 hour day, then 10 hours had better be the same every day, or someone -- worker or employer -- was being ripped off.
Gone are the simple days. Connecting time to the cyclical clocks of nature no longer serves our needs. We need precise units of time to do all the things we need to get done. We need to hear and see every tick and tock of time’s passing to keep on schedule. But dividing time into precise units -- hours, minutes, seconds -- requires a subtle yet profound change in our concept of time. To measure time in precise units we have to abstract the concept of time itself. Hours, minutes, and seconds don’t exist in nature. They exist only in rational thought.
This abstraction did not evolve without pain.
For many the notion of abstract time was a concept too far. A good example would be the New Haven clock tower fiasco. Back in the early 19th century, the citizens of New Haven, Connecticut, being industrious people, thought it a good idea to build a second clock tower. It would nicely match the existing one on the campus of Yale University. After all, an enterprising young community can’t have too many clock towers.
But once the second clock tower was built, something odd happened. The new clock matched Yale time but four times a year. The rest of the year it spent out pacing or falling behind it’s brother clock. Turns out Yale time tracked the sun’s changing position over the course of the year, while the new clock tracked mean time -- the average of the sun’s positional changes over the year. Thus the new clock sometimes matched Yale time, but most of the time didn’t. But time is time right? No.
Mean time divided the day into equal units of time. Sun time did not.
Mean time proved too much of a leap of faith for some citizens to handle. For some the new clock was heretical. Citizen argued with citizen. You were a Yalie or a Newbie. Finally, the argument erupted in the local paper, where it raged for months. Those in favor of (Sun) Yalie time are well represented by the writer “True Time,” while those in favor of (mean) Newbie time by “J.”
True Time:
“To have a clock in a town to tell the public what the time is NOT is certainly a novel scheme. It is said that the clock gives mean time. But why mean time? Mean time is not true time, nor is true time mean time. A public clock, which tells the truth four times only in a year, is something very much like a public nuisance.” *
J:
“[A]ll the business of our life -- our meals, our labors -- our hours of rest -- everything requires that the day should be divided into equal and uniform positions.” *
Is time the essence of truth?
For most people noon is when the sun is directly overhead. Except we really don’t measure time that way. Not anymore. in mean time, noon is almost never when the sun is directly overhead. Sun time varies with the season, making hours, minutes, and seconds longer or shorter depending on the season. But a varying length hour, minute, or second isn’t of much use to sophisticated moderns. Mean time makes no attempt to follow sun time. Hours, minutes, and seconds never vary using mean time. We have forsaken nature in favor of precision.
Didn't take long to use up all the bandwidth hours, minutes, and seconds could supply. The railroads, covering all that distance, with all those connecting trains, changed that. The schedule might tell you to pick up the connecting train in Omaha at noon, but whose noon? Omaha’s? New York’s? It is certainly not noon in Omaha when it is noon in New York. But if it isn’t noon in Omaha when it is noon in New York, what time is it?
Next stop: Greenwich Mean Time followed closely by Time Zones. ALL ABOARD!
When using Greenwich mean time as your reference point, you know when noon Omaha is as long as you know how many time zones separate the two locations. That helped a lot,. People no longer missed their connections because they didn’t know when noon Omaha time was. But then some idiot invented Daylight Savings Time and now no one can figure out when the connecting train in Omaha leaves.
A moment of your time, please. On the Boulder Dam there are two clock towers, one in Nevada, the other in Arizona. Nevada is in the Pacific time zone; Arizona is in the Mountain time zone. Nevada follows daylight savings time; Arizona doesn’t. This means that half the year there is a one hour difference between Nevada and Arizona time, while there is no difference the other half of the year. This despite the two states being in different tme zones. AND I CAN NEVER FIGURE OUT WHICH IS WHICH, WHICH MEANS I CAN NEVER FIGURE OUT WHEN. I solved the problem by moving back east.
Good thing there are no train stations on the Boulder Dam. But I digress.
Technological advancements and major business innovations are often accompanied by advances in our ability to measure time, and in no event can an advancement outpace our ability to measure time accurately.
Indeed, without timepieces that can measure minuscule units of time, we would not have advanced as fast as we have, and traveled as far as we have, in such an incredibly short period of time.
All of this argues for clocks being the greatest invention of all time, even greater than the wheel, even coca-cola. We don’t normally think of time in this way, but most major advancements are inextricably tied to our ability to measure time more and more finely and accurately.
We have quickly come to the point where the precision of atomic cycles is not precise enough. We look for ever better ways to measure time. The electron? The photon? Quarks? This abstracting of time has freed us to do all sorts of things we couldn’t do with the sun, the moon, or the stars.
But it came at a price.
We suffer from time famine. There is never enough time. Time saving devices never save us time, never increase our leisure time; they just permit us to stuff more things into the same amount of time. We are more harried than ever. Ever smaller units of time create more ticks of the clock to fret over. The clock, man’s invention, has turned its master into its slave.
Is the clock the greatest invention of all time?
Perhaps instead of blood pressure medication, doctors should prescribe sun dials.
* Michael O’Malley, “Keeping Watch: A History of American Time,” Kindle Edition.
Comments
Post a Comment