Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => Famous Scientists, Doctors and Inventors => Topic started by: lilkim on 20/07/2006 18:47:42
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Who truely were the first people to invent and start using time?
B free!!!
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what would happen if time did not exist? like if everyone in the world no longer went by it and just did what they needed to do when they felt like it instead of waiting for a certain "time" to come?
B free!!!
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Time was never invented, it has always been there.
If by time, you are talking about the first people to measure time – time is measured by almost every living entity in some way or another – at very least, they know when the sun rises and when it sets.
Absolute time, that is the notion that someone measuring time in London can also use the same reference point for time in Bristol, and with a calculated shift of exactly 5 hours, would also know the time in New York; this came about because of the railways, and because of the need to make sure that a train leaving Bristol could be predicted to be at a given time at a given place for each stage of its journey to London, and to know that it will not collide with other trains on the rail system. Before the railway, time was simply calculated by what was noon in a local context (i.e. when was the Sun at the highest point in the sky over your local town – which would be different from one town to the next). Even the need for minute by minute precision was a consequence of railway timetables, before that, simply being predictable to within a quarter hour was doing quite well.
Ofcourse,the units of time we use, where day and night were divided into 12 hours, and each hour divided into 60 minutes, was developed by the Babylonians, who judged the 12 hours as the 12 significant constellations in the sky (the same basis is used for the 12 months of the year – or more relevantly, the 12 signs of the zodiac), and 60 is simply those 12 subdivided by 5 again (the Babylonians had a base 60 numbering system).
George
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quote:
Originally posted by lilkim
what would happen if time did not exist? like if everyone in the world no longer went by it and just did what they needed to do when they felt like it instead of waiting for a certain "time" to come?
This is in reality an impossible situation. Certainly, modern society is exceptionally fine grained in its usage of time, calculating time by nanoseconds in some cases, but all biological systems depend upon time in one way or another. Many species need to synchronise their mating behaviour, otherwise they would never reproduce. All species are in one way or another dependent upon the time of day (at least insofar as they are concerned with sunrise, sunset, and the times between) to alter their behaviour accordingly.
At a more detailed level, all machines (and all living organisms are biological machines) need to synchronise their component parts so that the all function together appropriately, and so the internal workings of any living system must have some notion of time – just as the internal workings of a computer, or even a motor car, must have some notion of time, although how it uses it may vary from machine to machine and component to component.
George
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OK...i get it about machines and mateing, but, regarding people..what do you think would happen if no1 went by time and just lived by doing whenever they felt like it?
B free!!!
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it seems like the most popular growth in humans is a sence of time, even over technolgy...technology has grown dramatically over the last decade and time seems to have been the whole inspiration..like faste computers so it does not take so long to log on etc...or wireless so you can spend the "time" to work ona project while you r supposed tobe on vacation..everything is focused around time...and people have become more isoated due to it....i would like to see what everyone would do if there were no more "time" schedules or pressure of "time" to get something done...i really believe that at first there would be chaos, but then it woud go back to being able to acually have peace somewhere in ones life without the hindering thing of "time" hanging over your head.
B free!!!
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Back before Time measured on watching...the sun was measure by the course of a shadow...
"Lo" Loretta
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so what about harrison and the greenwich meridian line
Michael
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Chronometer, right? Still new technology compared to following the sun to sun method...I am not sure if there was a measurement of seasons calculated from the moons or by the sun? I think I read somemthing on it...I will have to think about it a bit...
"Lo" Loretta
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Chronometer, right? Still new technology compared to following the sun to sun method...I am not sure if there was a measurement of seasons calculated from the moons or by the sun? I think I read somemthing on it...I will have to think about it a bit...
"Lo" Loretta
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quote:
Originally posted by ukmicky
so what about harrison and the greenwich meridian line
Yes, I was thinking about measurement of longitude, which also requires accurate measure of time, although it only directly effected seamen and ordinary people still did not have such an accurate measure of time.
George
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quote:
Originally posted by lilkim
OK...i get it about machines and mateing, but, regarding people..what do you think would happen if no1 went by time and just lived by doing whenever they felt like it?
Forget any notion of mass transit/public transport, whether you are talking about train services, or aeroplanes – they need schedules. Motor cars make life easier.
Would still have problems with business meetings. You could not ofcourse expect any schedules to be met. Might be a little problematic if your house was burning down, and the firemen decided to saunter along just when they felt like it. Everything would take an order of magnitude longer to achieve because you'd have to wait for every single step of the operation to wait until someone was ready to do it.
George
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hmm
k
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people were happy with life when there were no "meeting" and seemed to be able to live and function without the pressure of time, so why could we not now??
k
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Babylonians, Egyptians and Romans all used time. I can't say for sure that some pre civilisation dating all of these did not use time for measure events etc.
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quote:
Originally posted by 4getmenot
people were happy with life when there were no "meeting" and seemed to be able to live and function without the pressure of time, so why could we not now??
Indeed – but happiness and life expectancy are two different things.
In the wealthier countries, where we live longer, we also have far more pressure on our time. In poorer countries, where life expectancy is short, and their lives are governed more by the rising and setting of the Sun than by the clock, they have more time and more death.
We certainly could not sustain the population densities we have, particularly in our urban areas, without effective transport systems, and very efficient and precise management of all of our resources, including that critical resource, the resource of time.
Whether, after the initial shock of mass starvation and a collapse of civilisation as we know it, we may ultimately be happier of less happy in a world where we live less long, have less population pressures (and so probably have more babies – which we would need in order to balance the higher mortality rates), and fewer time pressures – I will leave to your imagination.
George
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If you are all alone in the world, the notion of time is not really imortant. It becomes important as soon as you are depending on other people.
Example : when people start to hunt as a group, the notions of time and space are important even if only to prevent people from killing each other by accident. You need to know that this thing in front of you at a giving moment is probably not one of your fellows, but more probably the animal you are hunting.
As relations between people become more complex, measurement of time needs to be more precise, so that "tomorrow" is not just "some time in the future" but rather "within the next 24 hours".
The notion of time became more important when it also started to indicate "an amount of work" that had to be paid. A ream of paper for example was the amount that could be produced by a skilled worker in one day. In many languages there used to be units of surface indicating the amount of farming ground that could be plowed in one day...