Sent this in to Cecil and got a reply saying that he gets alot of questions and can only pick one, so that i should maybe post my question here and see if i get any responses…so…have at it!
Throughout the history of man, humans from different cultures have developed
different things in differing ways from one another. Languages, cultural
norms, etc. My question is: How is it that man seems to have arrived at a
unified means of defining time (and i don’t just mean in modern times). Did
the ancient Chinese divide time the same way as the Greeks or people in the
Middle Ages? I know there was the difference in opinion about the calender,
but who decided there would be 24 “hours” in one revolution of the sun? Why
not 8 divisions or 36? Also, who decided that a second would be defined as x
number of vibrations (right?) of a quartz crystal? Why quartz? Why that many
vibrations? And why 60 divisions to a second, minute and hour instead of
multiples of 100 like in metric measurements?
It’s not quartz, it’s the resonant frequency of the cesium atom. It was defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Here is a website explaining this: http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/atomic.html. The whole site deals with many of your questions. The standard was arrived at because it is (relatively) easy to measure and to replicate. The number of vibrations was arrived at to keep the “new” second consistent with the old (which was ultimately based on the length of the solar day, of course).
It’s not 24 hours in one revolution of the sun, it’s 24 hours in one rotation of the Earth on its axis. You’ll find that most systems of time keeping are astronomically based. Ancient cultures kept track of time by the day (an obvious measurement), the month (an approximation of the lunar cycle), and the year (seasons, positions of the stars in the sky) (which of course, is the revolution of the Earth around the sun). The differences we see are the ways the different cultures tried to fit a standard calendar to the not-easily-divisible day/month/year standards. It’s interesting to note that these astronomical standards do not exactly divide into each other. (thus the need for leap years, etc.)
You might find a womanish book, Women’s Reality. It explains that white men see time like 2pm on the clock is 2pm, Indians [american] see 2pm as after the next hunt, women see 2pm as usually around 215pm, Etc…
Read “Empires of Time” by Anthony Aveni. It explains that different cultures do (did) indeed have different ways of measuring – and indeed thinking about – time.
On the other hand, no matter what your culture, there’s some units of time you’re just stuck with. No matter what you do, the time from one sunset to the next will average one day, and from one harvest to the next will average one year. Some cultures may not have named any other units of time than the natural ones, but they still used the basic ones-- Deciding to go on a hunt in the morning is completely different than going on the same hunt in the afternoon, or at night.
