If it's all computerized, they could mess up occasionally because machines, like the humans that made them, are fallible. So sometimes I wonder, what if the "universal clock" or whatever got offset by like half a second or more every year and no one noticed, and over the years it keeps doing that so right now we think it's a certain time but it's "really" not. In other words, what we are calling an hour is really not, which explains why it seems like years are going faster & faster.
I want to know how we know exactly what time it is, and how we keep track of that to an EXACT science.
2007-11-04 03:28:53 · 4 answers · asked by Sunrayye 5 in Arts & Humanities ➔ Philosophy
Yeah, I know that the concept of "time" is relative, but I'm only talking about what we as human beings call time, i.e the 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, etc. I want to know how they keep that at one rate & how good they are at keeping it that way.
2007-11-04 04:26:29 · update #1
The world keeps track of time with "atomic clocks." There is one in Colorado, one in Greenwich, England, and maybe some more. They are accurate to billionths of seconds over thousands of years. You can buy one for your home, and it will be automatically set to accuracy by a signal sent to it from Colorado.
2007-11-04 10:43:43 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
There are two distinct views on the meaning of the word time.
One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured. This is the realist's view, to which Sir Isaac Newton subscribed, and hence is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.
A contrasting view is that time is part of the fundamental human intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which we sequence events, quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them, and compare the motions of objects. In this second view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows", that objects "move through", or that is a "container" for events, and even might be said to not exist.
2007-11-04 11:42:46 · answer #2 · answered by West 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The origin was the knowledge (or maybe perception) of sunrise and sunset. Every day. Day after day. I guess somebody invented time to make sure those were different days (and not the Groundhog Day).
2007-11-04 11:39:15 · answer #3 · answered by Zora Y 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Time is the illusion of NOW having a beginning or an end!
2007-11-04 11:32:15 · answer #4 · answered by Premaholic 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋