The Ticking Clock – How Time Shapes our Lives

There are not many times when you can start an article 13.8 billion years ago, but that is when time started. Cosmologists generally agree that this is when the universe started in the Big Bang and therefore when time began.

Time is an incredibly difficult concept to comprehend – it is invisible and intangible, however it is so important that without it we would not be able to do anything at all. It is strange to think that time rules our lives yet can give us a headache when we try to make sense of it.

How do we make sense of time?

The parents amongst us will remember teaching our children how to tell the time – luckily, they are too young at that point to question why. Why is one day 24 hours and why does noon divide that into two 12-hour segments? And who decided an hour should consist of 60 minutes? It is actually quite incredible that we are all able to learn to tell the time at all.

Certain aspects of timekeeping happen unconsciously via the circadian rhythms that help our biological processes to happen at the right time. Many of us can accurately estimate how much time has passed thanks to some complex brain structures, but limiting our exposure to daylight can really wreak havoc on our ability to perceive time.

Some history of how humans interpret time.

We have the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians to thank for how we consider time.

Around 1500 BCE Egyptians started using sundials to divide daylight into twelve segments, most probably based on their recognition that there are 12 lunar cycles per year. Most early cultures divided the year into 12 lunar months, but early Roman calendars used to have 10 months running from March to December, each having 30 or 31 days and forming a type of 8-day week.

In 700 BCE January and February were added giving us a 355-day year and it was only in 45 BCE that Julius Caesar ordered the creation of what we now know as the twelve month calendar. The advent of the ‘Julian Calendar” also introduced the leap year and the year beginning with January 1st. In 44 BCE and 8 BCE the months of Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed to July and August in honour of Julius Caesar and his successor Augustus.

Why are children struggling to learn the time?

Many children are not used to seeing analog clocks and therefore are not taught how to tell the time properly – in this digital age the default is a digital clock. Whilst digital clocks may be convenient and logical we are in fact doing a disservice to our children by excluding analog clocks from our homes. Learning how to read an analog clock is not intuitive and needs direct instruction and explanation – it is difficult to learn with an analog clock and much easier with digital.

Learning to tell the time on an analog clock helps children with two fundamental areas – firstly the concepts of basic fractions i.e. quarters and halves and secondly counting in multiples i.e. by 5s, 10s. 15s etc. “Clock maths” is a number system that is not base 10 so telling time teaches about 12s and 60s being important numbers with many factors and divisors.

Why does time move clockwise?

Theoretically, we could tell time if it moved from right to left so why do clock hands move in a clockwise direction?

The answer is probably because mechanical clocks were first developed in the northern hemisphere. If you are in the northern hemisphere and you stand facing the sun’s path it will move in a clockwise direction i.e. from the east to the southern sky to the west and using a sundial the shadow will follow the same clockwise course i.e. west to north to east (opposite to the path of the sun). Seeing that it is just as easy to make clock hands move anticlockwise it seems logical that when the first clocks were being developed the movement of the hands copied the path of a sundial’s shadow.

Interesting facts about time.

• Before the invention of the clock the sundial was the only way to measure time. After the invention of the clock, the sundial maintained its importance, as clocks needed to be regularly reset from a sundial, because the accuracy of early clocks was so poor.
• Taipei 101, a skyscraper standing over 500 metres brought the ancient sundial tradition into the 21st century. The design of an adjoining park uses the tower as the style for a huge horizontal sundial.
• Daylight savings time started being used during World War One because of a coal shortage. Longer daylight hours meant there was less need for electricity (coal powered) to keep the lights on.
• Around a billion years ago an Earth day lasted 18 hours because the moon was much closer causing Earth to spin faster – now the moon’s gravity is causing Earth’s spin to slow down. When the dinosaurs were in charge (roughly 70 million years ago) a day was around 23.5 hours meaning the Earth year had 372 days.
• From 1836 John Belville, an English astronomer who worked at the Greenwich Observatory set his watch every morning against the Greenwich clock and travelled to his 200 clients “selling” them the time. Back then, people struggled to keep their clocks in sync so they could look at John’s watch and adjust theirs for a subscription fee.
• New clocks or watches have a default setting of 10.10 which is for aesthetic reasons. Setting the hands in this way allows the hands to be displayed in a neat and symmetrical way that also does not obscure any brand or logo in the clock’s centre.

American poet, Robert Frost had a novel idea of how time controls us. He said, ‘By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.”

Warrick Asher

General Manager – Business Development, BarnOwl GRC.

July 2024