
When time became regular and universal, it changed history - jonbaer
https://aeon.co/essays/when-time-became-regular-and-universal-it-changed-history
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gumby
Our conception of micro time is also modern. The Babylonians (who came up with
the excellent system of 12 hours in a day and 12 in a night) divided the day
into equal increments or hours, but the length of a day's hour changed from
day to day as the length of the day changed. As far as I know the modern,
fixed-length hour was an invention of the English (pre British) navy who used
it to manage watches.

When clocks were developed the hour length became fixed, and the modern
invention of the divisions of minute ("tiny") and ultimately second ("even
more tiny") became first feasible and then, as the Industrial Revolution
progressed, became useful. I've always assumed we had RPM and not RPS because
of this, although very slow rotations would be easier to work with with a more
find-grained denominator.

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jchanimal
Has anyone here written a 12 hour day, 12 hour night clock as described? I'm
fascinated now, it seems like it could be a cool watch face to superimpose
fixed length hours over day/night hours.

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stevekemp
You should look up the way they measure time in Ethiopia, they have a 12 hour
clock - 12-hours of darkness, and 12 when there is daylight.

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cobbzilla
Fascinating: the idea that end-time cults happened to emerge in a society with
an “endless monotonously increasing” numbering scheme for years, as a kind of
response to some cognitive dissonance about the inevitability of time to go on
forever.

For those who also find this stuff fun, I’m reading and highly recommend “When
Christians Were Jews: The First Generation” by Paula Fredriksen [1], about the
very early Christians.

I find it a vivid and history-backed picture of those times. It’s hard to
appreciate just how apocalyptic the first believers were, and how the
continued failure of the end-times to come would change the messaging and
focus of the religion over the first few generations.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Fredriksen#Books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Fredriksen#Books)

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gumby
> In ancient Mesopotamia, years could be designated by an outstanding event of
> the preceding 12 months:

This system was also used more broadly in Japan, where the "Era" name (元号)
would change after a momentous event, typically a few years apart but
occasionally in rapid succession. Since Meiji they only change with the
Emperors, as just happened last week.

In countries like the UK, laws are still numbered using the year of the reign
of the monarch.

The process described in the article makes me think of the modern transition
of land (property) being the spaces between the roads rather than roads being
something that runs through land. The latter sort of remains in Japan as well,
where ordinary roads are typically not given names.

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781
Another good read on time and clocks:

> _By the 16th century, European cities were so well synchronized that
> Rabelais could state “a city without bells is like a blind man without a
> stick.” The clock and the bells it chimed synchronized the relations among
> men._

> _Clock time is a fungible measure of sacrifice. Of all measurement
> instruments, the clock is the most valuable because so many of the things we
> sacrifice to create are not fungible. The massive clock towers of Europe,
> with their enormous loud and resonant bells, broadcasting time fairly across
> the town and even the countryside, rather than the last relics of the
> medieval, were the first building block of the wealthy modern world._

[http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CD...](http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html)

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gumby
It was however not consistent town-town; noon was set locally by moving the
arms to the "noon" position when the sun was overhead....something that varied
from east to west.

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mikorym
The way I experience African history is that there is no devision of time at
all into numeric quantities. There is rain, and the sometimes short and
sometimes excruciatingly long wait in between.

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jaden
I thought this article might bring it full circle and touch on the "time
denier" theory, essentially claiming that a globally universal time does not
exist. Carlo Rovelli's book The Order of Time goes into greater detail.

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empath75
Einstein already eliminated universal time.

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ForHackernews
The opening paragraph confidently asserts we know it's the year 2019, but
there's one fun theory that suggests it might not be:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis)

