S2E9: A Brief History Of Timekeeping
Slate Technology
Slate
4.6 • 636 Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2019
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
The first mechanical clocks were made to summon monks to prayer. Ever since, timekeeping technology has often been about control and obligation. But underneath a mountain in Texas, a new kind of clock is being built that’s meant to alter the way we think about time. Can it force us to connect our distant past with our distant future, tick by tick?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Tom, how's your Bible scholarship? |
| 0:02.0 | Do you remember Genesis? |
| 0:03.0 | It's the one at the start of the Old Testament. |
| 0:05.0 | Yeah, let there be light, that kind of thing, right? |
| 0:08.0 | Yes. |
| 0:09.0 | And right after that, right after Let There Be Light, it says that God divided the light from the darkness, |
| 0:14.0 | and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. |
| 0:17.0 | And that was the first day. |
| 0:19.0 | So there you have, in like the second paragraph of the Bible, |
| 0:22.6 | basically, a designation of a unit of time, the first day. And God kind of invents the week at that |
| 0:29.7 | point as well, doesn't he? Because he creates stuff for the next few days, you know, the animals |
| 0:33.4 | and all that kind of thing. And then on the seventh day, he rests, which sort of suggests |
| 0:36.8 | there's something special about seven. But is there anything special about seven? If you leave aside this Judeo-Christian idea that there's a Sabbath every seven days, well, the seven-day week is pretty arbitrary. There's nothing in nature that says we should reset after seven rotations of the earth. No, it's not linked to anything astronomical. |
| 0:58.9 | And in the past, other cultures have had a five-day week or an eight-day week or a ten-day week or no week at all. |
| 1:03.6 | And it's only relatively recently in history that humanity has standardized on this idea of a seven-day week. |
| 1:07.2 | The idea of the 24-hour day is another arbitrary one. |
| 1:15.6 | The only reason we divide our day into 24-hour-long segments right now is because people thousands of years ago used sex-adessimal counting systems. And people have tried to change that too after the French Revolution. They tried 100-minute hours and 20-hour days to try and make everything more decimal, but that really didn't catch on. |
| 1:24.6 | So these arbitrary numbers, seven days in a week, 24 hours in a day, |
| 1:29.1 | they don't come from nature or from any natural sense of time. They come out of the human need |
| 1:33.8 | to overlay our rules on time and then to let those rules govern our lives. We've been doing that |
| 1:39.2 | forever. We impose artificial concepts of time on ourselves in ways that we sometimes barely even notice anymore. |
| 1:46.9 | The trend over the centuries has been for us to measure time more and more precisely, |
... |
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