Like who actually turned around and said k now it is 12 oclock and made a clock!. Who decided there would be 24 hours in a day!?Www@QuestionHome@Com
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Position:Home>Philosophy> Who ever decided when time started?Question: Who ever decided when time started!? Like who actually turned around and said k now it is 12 oclock and made a clock!. Who decided there would be 24 hours in a day!?Www@QuestionHome@Com
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Here's a really interesting excerpt from a book I'm reading, by John Zerzan!. In short, (to the best of my knowledge) the clock was first used and integrated into modern civilization for monks to know when it was time to pray!. I believe the Sumerians were responsible for the whole division-by-60 deal!. And Egyptians created the first 'water clock'!. The sundial was probably what gave rise to the whole clock-being-circular concept, and the amount of 'time' it takes for the hour hand to travel around the clock completely!. ``No time is entirely present,'' said the Stoic Chrysippus, and meanwhile the concept of time was being further advanced by the underlying Judeo-Christian tenet of a linear, irreversible path between creation and salvation!. This essentially historical view of time is the very core of Christianity; all the basic notions of measurable, one-way time can be found in St!. Augustine's (fifth- century) writings!. With the spread of the new religion the strict regulation of time, on a practical plane, was needed to help maintain the discipline of monastic life!. Bells summoning the monks to prayer eight times daily were heard far beyond the confines of the cloister, and thus a measure of time regulation was imposed on society at large!. The population continued to exhibit ``une vaste indiff?rance au temps'' throughout the feudal era, according to Marc Bloch (1940), but it is no accident that the first public clocks adorned cathedrals in the West!. Worth noting in this regard is the fact that the calling of precise prayer times became the chief externalization of medieval Islamic belief!. The invention of the mechanical clock was one of the most important turning points in the history of science and technology; indeed of all human art and culture (Synge 1959)!. The improvement in accuracy presented authority with enhanced opportunities for oppression!. An early devotee of elaborate mechanical clocks, for example, was Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti, described in 1381 as ``a sedate but crafty ruler with a great love of order and precision'' (Fraser 1988)!. As Weizenbaum (1976) wrote, the clock began to create ``literally a new reality!.!.!.that was and remains an impoverished version of the old one!.'' A qualitative change was introduced!. Even when nothing was happening, time did not cease to flow!. Events, from this era on, are put into this homogeneous, objectively measured, moving envelope--and this unilinear progression incited resistance!. The most extreme were the chiliast, or millenarian, movements, which appeared in various parts of Europe from the 14th into the 17th centuries!. These generally took the form of peasant risings which aimed at recreating the primal egalitarian state of nature and were explicitly opposed to historical time!. These utopian explosions were quelled, but remnants of earlier time concepts persisted as a ``lower'' stratum of folk consciousness in many areas!. During the Renaissance, domination by time reached a new level as public clocks now tolled all twenty-four hours of the day and added new hands to mark the passing seconds!. A keen sense of time's all- consuming presence is the great discovery of the age, and nothing portrays this more graphically than the figure of Father Time!. Renaissance art fused the Greek god Kronos with the Roman god Saturn to form the familiar grim deity representing the power of Time, armed with a fatal scythe signifying his association with agriculture/domestication!. The Dance of Death and other medieval memento mori artifacts preceded Father Time, but the subject is now time rather than death!. The seventeenth century was the first in which people thought of themselves as inhabiting a particular century!. One now needed to take one's bearings within time!. Francis Bacon's The Masculine Birth of Time (1603) and A Discourse Concerning a New Planet (1605) embraced the deepening dimension and revealed how a heightened sense of time could serve the new scientific spirit!. ``To choose time is to save time,'' he wrote, and ``Truth is the daughter of time!.'' Descartes followed, introducing the idea of time as limitless!. He was one of the first advocates of the modern idea of progress, closely related to that of unbounded linear time, and characteristically expressing itself in his famous invitation that we become ``masters and possessors of nature!.'' Newton's clockwork universe was the crowning achievement of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, and was grounded in his conception of ``Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flowing equably without relation to anything eternal!.'' Time is now the grand ruler, answering to no one, influenced by nothing, completely independent of the environment: the model of unassailable authority and perfect guarantor of unchanging alienation!. Classical Newtonian physics in fact remains, despite changes in science, the dominant, everyday conception of time!. The appearance of independent, abstract time found its parallel in the emergence of a growing, formally free working class forced to sell its labor power as an abstract commodity on the market!. Prior to the coming of the factory system but already subject to time's disciplinary power, this labor force was the inverse of the monarch Time: free and independent in name only!. In Foucault's judgment (1973), the West had become a ``carceral society'' from this point on!. Perhaps more directly to the point is the Balkan proverb, ``A clock is a lock!.''Www@QuestionHome@Com actually I think it was the Sumerians!. They came up with the 60 seconds, 60 minutes format!.Www@QuestionHome@Com It was the Babylonians!.Www@QuestionHome@Com The question is not who but what, time as been determined by the the sun and moon, not Timex or for the posh RolexWww@QuestionHome@Com well it all began around !.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!. actually its quite a dull story so i wont bore you!.Www@QuestionHome@Com Me!. ;)Www@QuestionHome@Com same who will decide when time wil endWww@QuestionHome@Com |