This may seem obvious. And someone has probably asked it (and answered it) before. Still: how do we know when midnight is? to wit, in the absence of another accurate manufactured timepiece, how do we know when to set our clock?
Obviously I realize that our 24-hour clock is an artificial construct; it could be 17 or 23 or 28 hours. fnord Just as obviously, clocks are designed to time celestial events such as sunrise, moonrise, and so on. And atomic clocks can accurately measure intervals of time. I also realize that some nations do not follow the same clock pattern as happens in the U.S. (that is, the clock is reset at sunrise each morning to adjust for the seasonal tilt of the earth).
My question remains: how exactly do we know when midnight is?
Dawn is easy… maybe. Although you can pinpoint when the sun does rise, how do you know what time sunrise is supposed to be?
In other words, if we bombed ourselves back into the Bronze Age and didn’t know what day it was, how would we know when to set our clocks?
FISH