04/29/2024

We Still Don’t Fully Understand Time

Planning horizons have shrunk because lives change so fast

In our everyday lives, time is a precious commodity. We can gain or lose it. We can save, spend or waste it. If our crimes are revealed, we risk having to do time.

To scientists, time is something we can measure. Clocks have, over the centuries, been the high tech artifacts of their era—the water clock, the pendulum clock, Harrison’s chronometer and so forth up to the incredible precision of atomic clocks—marvels of modern technology, albeit without the evident aesthetic quality of more traditional timepieces. (Though engineering friends tell me that, viewed through a microscope, there’s beauty in the intricacies of a silicon chip.)

Before there was a reliable calendar—or any records, or artifacts that could be reliably dated—the past was a "fog." But this didn’t stop efforts to impose fanciful precise chronologies. Most precise of all was that worked out by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, according to which the world began at 6 p.m. on Saturday, 22 Oct., 4004 B.C. Right up until 1910, bibles published by Oxford University Press displayed Ussher's chronology alongside the text.

Please select this link to read the complete article fromTIME.