The concept of time?

Question

I saw pink floyd on the 21st and one of their laser show had millions of clocks flying, which triggered my question What is time and how did they come up with it? i mean in the pre-historic period where they could breally speak to now where we have mins-secs-hours... thanks

I'm not saying pre-historic people are stupid, how is it that people can labol time.. i mean it's been here and there forever... i guess it just doesn't sit right with me.. How can someone call a minute a minute, maybe it's not really called a mintue.. but it's the fact that it's called a mintue because some 3000 yrs ago someone called it so and we all agreed on it. HAHAHAHa No offense it anyone :)

Answer 1

Time is just a concept created by us humans to keep track of the progress of the world. In reality, there is no time. The universe is infinitely timeless and mysterious.

Answer 2

simple. They see dark sky and light sky, and their conscious minds realize that there is a cycle between the darkness and the lightness. Eventually they approximated that the interval between the dark sky time and the light sky time is equal at every cycle, thus they call this cycle of dark and light as day (in their language of course).

Next they see the seasons, most part of the world have seasons, and they counted the days between each seasons and found out another cycles, they call this year (in their language, again)

Next, people want to have more accurate scheduling, they don't want to can only say, before sunrise, etc. They uses various measure (primitive clocks like sundials, sand watch) to divide a days into hours, minute and seconds. The popular time divison turns out to be the one invented by the civilizations that frequently uses a number of base 6, 24, or 60 (there were ones, forgot which one they also invented the 360 deg angles division), so the daily division is 24 hour, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. These people also divided the year into 12 months.

and this tradition of using base 24 and base 60 time continues until now. Some people have tried to use base 10 time division (1 day consists of 10 hour, 1 hour consist of 100 minutes, 1 second consist of 100 seconds, if I don't misremember) but failed get popular acceptance

Answer 3

Time is what is measured by any repeating periodic phenomenon. For the 'pre-historic' people, time was measured in days (night and dark), months (from phases of the moon) and years (from the sun's apparent motion in the sky). Days were usually broken down into morning, noon-time, and evening, which did not have the same length from day to day (since the period of sunlight changes from day to day). Time at night could be measured by the location of the stars.

For portions of a day, water clocks were commonly used (let water flow into a vat and measure how deep the water is to tell time), but these were not very accurate. Heartbeats could always measure shorter periods of time, but they also weren't very accurate for longer periods.

It wasn't untilt hew invention of the escapement mechanism that mechanical clocks were able to be accurate enough to show hours. After Galileo, pendulums greatly increased the accuracy of clocks, but it wasn't until the 1700s that a watch was made that was accurate to the level of seconds over a year or so. This was important for solving the 'longitude problem'.

Now we use atomic clocks the measure the vibrations of light. For shorter time periods, we use anything from time-of-flight of relativistic particles to the time it takes for molecules or atoms to vibrate.

Answer 4

How pre-historic are you talking about? They invented analog computers in Europe over 2,000 years ago, surely they could tell time too. (Especially since the gears in the computer worked much like a medieval era clock.) I think it is funny how people say that the "pre-historic" people were suppose to be stupid yet they accomplished more good for the betterment of the whole group than we do now. Now everyone is all about themselves and accomplishing things for individualist purposes.

By the way when you say "in the pre-historic period where they could breally speak" 'breally" is spelt 'barely'. Good one modern genius.

Answer 5

Time as such does not exist. Motion spaces out time. If motion increases the time slows down. If motion decreases time speeds up to the point where motion comes to a standstill... then all events happens simultaneously.

Answer 6

Time is the non-spatial distinction between two events. Actually, to be correct, it's 'spacetime' but, at non-relativistic speeds, separation is usually more obvious as to it's being 'spacelike' or 'timelike' (we call the latter, 'causality')

Everything else is just newer and better ways to measure it, record it, calculate with it, create calendars, etc.


Doug

Answer 7

I think they experienced night and day. Through further observations, man saw how stars and the sun and the moon change. With the advent of technology and further studies, they finally came up with seconds, minutes, and hours.

Answer 8

"Time is the invention of man to keep everything from happening simultaneously".
Interesting... this poses the question:
Is time the invention of man because with our limited consciousness of the Universe we must have an established order of events in earth lives?

Answer 9

Pink Floyd rocks!
Time is an archive of motion.

Answer 10

Hours, minutes and seconds are just points of measurement that show how far away or how close we are to something or other