A History of Time - You're Late for Life, but You Just Don't Know it Yet

Time, like all things, is a concept of necessity. We create measurements for it out of our innate need to codify things and be animals of practicality. As our needs changed, so did our need for different measurements of time.

Time was, when sunrise and sunset were all we needed. We'd hunt and gather during the light. We'd shiver and sleep during the night. For longer periods, we just watched the moon wax and wane. Then someone invented agriculture and subsequently forgot to patent it. Suddenly, we needed to know the best time to plant, when to harvest, when the Nile would flood, and most importantly when to throw the big harvest party. We went to the smart guy in the village, the guy who noticed the little things like the stars progressing through the sky, and we invented the year and the calendar.

As we got organized, the need for decent, daily record keeping and orderly proceedings necessitated the division of the day into manageable increments. This allowed the court cuneiographer (they were the clay stenographers of their day) to record that Josiah paid his taxes of one goat and one cow at exactly 10AM on Marduk-day the 25th of Ishtar in the 22nd year of King Xenophopeatar II. OK, they were still working on the whole BC-AD thing so they did what they could with what they had. Practicality, remember?

We have those moldy Babylonians to thank for slicing things up in 12, 24, and 60. Why not decimals? As any baker knows, quarters, thirds, halves and wholes are always easier to estimate (i.e. more practical especially when collecting taxes of half a bushel of wheat) than tenths. Finally, in the early 19th century, the French invented the metric system and, tada, the metric clock and calendar. Both of which lasted about as long as an aristocrat's head during the Reign of Terror. It's hard to mess with something that's been working well for 6,000 years. Besides, "Happy fete du travail," has a really depressing ring to it in any language.

Eventually, we got around to measuring everything from epochs to minutes. We could BC with the best historians. We could be two minutes late for the boss's balling-out at the textile mill. Everything was going swimmingly until some 20th century smart guy split an atom. Time on that scale required fractions of fractions of seconds. Still being creatures who needed to codify things, we even redefined the second from 1/60th of a minute to "the time needed for a cesium-133 atom to perform 9,192,631,770 complete oscillations." If we hadn't, we couldn't enjoy our fancy quartz clocks.

In the brief span of 10,000 years (brief being a measurement of time as well as a stylish choice in undergarments), we've gone from "Hey, the sun's up! Better get crackin'," to "these vibrating atoms tell me I'm exactly one degree of sun-arc late for work because the other quartz clock on the nightstand is running 4 minutes slow." Now that's progress.

Now that we've shoved ourselves into these artificially vibrating seconds of time, I have to wonder if we're better off for it. Other than meeting at noon for lunch or making sure we're all in the same place at the same moment to work as a group, I question whether clocks are really worth the trouble. In fact, I stopped wearing a watch years ago. It hardly relieves me of the burden of time. There is always a clock nearby on a computer, a cell phone, a dashboard, or a microwave oven. Though that last one inexplicably just blinks 12:00.

The next time you're told, "We start work here at eight o'clock sharp," ask, "Why?" Why can't we just all be here a couple hours after sunrise? How about we all start work when the shadow on that tree is six-feet long? Question time. But be prepared for the inevitable necessity of finding a different job. While you have the down time, try enjoying the sunshine. Right now, the sun is just about mid-sky. I'll say, "Chow for chow," for now.