If the clock was set by the sun...?

Question

many years ago, and isn't accurate, then how can we be sure that daytime isn't nightime and nightime isn't daytime? Also, who set breakfast, lunch and tea time? I'm very confused, someone help!!!!

Firedent, what I'm trying to say i how do we know for curtain that the sun is the sun and the moon is the moon. Technically we will never be able to find out the truth.

Answer 1

Your confused !! I do see your point though,thinking like this can bring on headaches lol :)

Answer 2

The sun was used as an early time keeping mechanism because in the northern hemisphere the shadow cast by a stick or other object generally points north arond noon. When the sun rises the shadow points west, and when it sets it points east. So if you divide up the day into 24 ours, you can divide up a sundial to tell you the time according to the sun 9Of course, it's no good at night ;>)).

Daytime is day time because the sun is above teh eastern or western horizon, and nighttime is nighttime because the sun is below either horizon - has nothing to do with an arbitrary number on a clock or sun dial. Yes, the numbers are arbitrary - sonmeone could easily have decided that what we call noon was "zero hour" and numbered the clock accordingly. Or they could have pick sunrise on a given day to be "zero hour" or any other value for that matter. So what the clock shows is a measure based on an agreed to convention for telling time.

Meal times aren't cast in concrete - they're more convention established by th ebody's diurnal cycle. Tea time is a social convention - probably orginated as a snack between lunch and dinner to give people a little boost. The coffee break is an engineered device - that's right - engineered. Samual Taylor, a mechnaical engineer in the late 1800's, was doing time-motion studies on workers unloading railway cars. He noted that they worked quickly at the start of the day and tailed off before lunch. After kunch they worked quickly again, but tailed off by the end of the day. He reasoned that a short break between meals would permit them to eat and drink something and rest a little restoring their energy and increasing their productivity. He was right and hence the coffee break was invented.

So all the meal times are by custom and convention and today, are loosely tied to our body's natural cycle. I say loosely because shift workers often eat dinner at what most of use would call breakfast time.

Answer 3

its quite simple actually, you are just confusing your self. time is calculated by the movement of the sun across the sky, in fact, if you lived in a place where there was plenty of sun e.g. a desert, you wont need a watch to know what time of the day it is. all you need is to put a stick on the ground and as the sun moves across the sky, the shadow of the stick will move from east to west, at exactly 12.00 o'clock in noon, there wont be any shadows because the sun will be exactly over the stick, but as it goes to 5 past and so on, the Shadow will appear on its west side. so the sun it self tells us what time of the day it is, as for months and years, that is actually earth telling us when it is, that's why when we make all the pollution, its cold even in the summer and its sometimes hot in the winter. but we don't decide time, time decides it self. that's the reason the whole world is the same form to calculate time, if we decided that then the whole world would have different things.

PS watch was invented in Arabia, they have plenty of sun in there so i guess they would be the best people to come up with such things.

Answer 4

We know when it is daytime because we can see the Sun in the sky. That is the DEFINITION of daytime, the time when the Sun is above the horizon. We know the Sun is the Sun and the Moon is the Moon because we can see them and they look different. It is not complicated. It really isn't.

Answer 5

It sounds like this is more philo than science.

Science can show that the thing in space we call the sun is NOT the moon quite easily though consistent observation.

Never in the history of humanity has there ever been any confusion on this. The fact that you suddenly have some indicates to me that you are trying out some kind of philo abstraction you just learned about and in probably 2 weeks you will have forgotten about it.

Answer 6

The exact time of day (or night) is constantly being recalculated in the same way the calendar years are being adjusted (leap year). This is all a man-made system after all and relative to celestial points of reference.

Answer 7

Wow, now I am just as confused as you. Just a thought--- starting a night shift at work just as the sun was rising.

Answer 8

if daytime were nightime you wouldn't be able to see your lunch.
simple really.

Answer 9

there is no sun visible in the sky during nighttime.

EDIT: we've already been to the moon.

Answer 10

the sun is yellow and the moon is gray thats how we tell them aprt