Complex Numbers

It's About Time

...that is, this article is about time.

The Tyranny Of Time  
The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political. It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us.

I should note that I know nothing about this source, "Noema," apart from this one article. They seem to adhere to the New Yorker School of Not Getting to the Fucking Point.

After opening with a story about a guy who apparently wanted to make Greenwich Observatory explode (but, unlike the guy who wanted to blow up Parliament, doesn't have a British holiday celebrating him), they start to spiral into what might be the first glimmerings of a point.

We discipline our lives by the time on the clock.

So? You want us to just ignore time?

Our working lives and wages are determined by it, and often our “free time” is rigidly managed by it too.

All time is "free time." You just have different obligations at different times.

Broadly speaking, even our bodily functions are regulated by the clock: We usually eat our meals at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are hungry, go to sleep at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are tired and attribute more significance to the arresting tones of a clock alarm than the apparent rising of the sun at the center of our solar system.

Speak for yourself. I eat and sleep when I feel like it. Of course, not everyone has that luxury. Also, I'd rather go to sleep when the sun rises; it's too bright during the day and I can't see my computer screen as well.

The fact that there is a strange shame in eating lunch before noon is a testament to the ways in which we have internalized the logic of the clock.

I was never aware of that. I am, of course, aware that it's frowned upon to drink booze in the morning (and sometimes even in the afternoon), but I don't pay any attention to that. There is no such thing as "day drinking." There is only drinking.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people reported that their experience of time had become warped and weird.

Yes. That happens when things proceed differently from the usual routines. That's well-documented.

After all, time is change, as Aristotle thought — what is changeless is timeless.

All due respect to Aristotle, but he also thought that there were only five elements (earth, air, water, fire, aether), and that "Sleep takes place as a result of overuse of the senses or of digestion." Wikipedia link  . Sure, he pretty much kick-started science, but the whole thing about science is that findings get refined and/or corrected over... well, over time.

But what makes us wrong and the clock right?

Neither is wrong or right. A person's perception is their perception. A clock measures we have decided to call a "day" and its subdivisions. Use each for different purposes.

Birth is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it.

Get the hell out of here with that navel-gazing bullshit. True, we don't know what "produces time" (except maybe entropy, unless there's some breakthrough in physics I'm unaware of), but if every clock in the world were to suddenly disappear, the planet would still make one rotation in one day. That's... like... the definition of a day. (Okay, so there are solar days and sidereal days and the other use of "day" as "the time the sun is visible in the sky" but that's not important right now.)

The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged.

Assertion without evidence; flag on the play.

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.

Yeah... I don't know about that, either. Most life on Earth adapted to, at the very least, day-night cycles and, perhaps, seasons. We're absolutely synced with these natural clocks. Whether we choose to ignore our bodies' signals telling us it's time to sleep or eat or screw or whatever, well, that's a different issue. At least to me.

In the natural world, the movement of “hours” or “weeks” do not matter. Thus the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sudden extinction of species that have lived on Earth for millions of years, the rapid spread of viruses, the pollution of our soil and water — the true impact of all of this is beyond our realm of understanding because of our devotion to a scale of time and activity relevant to nothing except humans.

Am I missing something, or is that a complete non-sequitur? Yes, hours are arbitrary; we could have made a solar day equal ten (longer) hours or made a 10-day week, but we collectively decided to stick with the Sumerian model (with modifications). Want to talk about what's truly arbitrary? What we call a calendar month. It's related to nothing -- just set up so there are 12 of them in a revolution. A true "month" is between the same phase of the moon, something like 29.5 days, which is close but no cigar. Oh, and I really wish article writers would stop explaining that "month" means "moon-th." It's trite as hell in a world where we already have Mondays.

But I digress.

Clock time is not what most people think it is. It is not a transparent reflection of some sort of true and absolute time that scientists are monitoring. It was created, and it is frequently altered and adjusted to fit social and political purposes. Daylight savings, for instance, is an arbitrary thing we made up.

And?

“People tend to think that somewhere there is some master clock, like the rod of platinum in the Bureau of Weights and Measures, that is the ‘uber clock,’” Birth told me. “There isn’t. It’s calculated. There is no clock on Earth that gives the correct time.”

Again: And? All scientists care about is how long a second is, which can then be used to define other measures of time, and that is a well-defined unit.

What’s usually taught in Western schools is that the time in our clocks (and by extension, our calendars) is determined by the rotation of the Earth, and thus the movement of the sun across our sky. The Earth, we learn, completes an orbit of the sun in 365 days, which determines the length of our year, and it rotates on its axis once every 24 hours, which determines our day. Thus an hour is 1/24 of this rotation, a minute is 1/60 of an hour and a second is 1/60 of a minute.

None of this is true. The Earth is not a perfect sphere with perfect movement; it’s a lumpy round mass that is squashed at both poles and wobbles. It does not rotate in exactly 24 hours each day or orbit the sun in exactly 365 days each year. It just kinda does. Perfection is a manmade concept; nature is irregular.

It's close enough for most practical purposes.

But since the 14th century, we’ve gradually been turning our backs on nature and increasingly calculating our sense of time via manmade devices.

There are very, very good reasons for that (although to be honest, I think that there's room for a more natural, local version of timekeeping alongside the global one; this local timekeeping would be based on the sun's rising, setting, zenith and nadir, and would be completely different depending on your location on the globe). One very good reason is that if I need to talk to someone in London or Mumbai, we can agree on a time; we can't just say "sunset."

I won't rag on much more of this. I will, however, point out that it was the invention of an accurate timekeeping device that originally allowed sailors to make ocean crossings; you can only determine your longitude if you know where a celestial object should be at a particular time, and when that particular time occurs. Okay, it's more complicated than that, but the point is that I think this article conflates our measurement of time with time itself, which you can't do because Einstein and relativity and whatnot.

This does not mean that time is an illusion. Just to be clear.

I'm not saying the article doesn't make some good points, but I think the line between "standards" and "natural time" gets blurred in there. Still, there's plenty to think about, and maybe if you read it you'll come away with a different perspective. After all, we have different perspectives of time itself.