Genesis tells us that God’s first act, after creating our world, was to create night and day – or time.   St. Augustine observed that “The world was not made in time, but together with time”. In ancient times, the alternating of night and day controlled peoples’ lives, and those very dark hours were believed to contain demons and unwholesome vapors.   Plato noted how “evil spirits” were averse to the light.

In those days, there was little sense of time’s passing.   But today, our precise measurements of time have made us virtual slaves to it.   Time controls our habits – our work, eating, sleeping, recreation, appointments, birthdays, holidays, etc.   People are always in a hurry to get somewhere else. Deadlines prevail.  

The measurement of time has historically been filled with error, a never-ending search to measure it more precisely.   It seemed that everyone measured a year differently – lunar months, Egyptian sidereal years, years containing 304 days, 354-355 days, 360 days, years of 10 months beginning March 1st, 3 seasons instead of 4, etc.   Roman days were sometimes added or subtracted for personal advantage. It became so bad that an adjustment had to be made in 46 BC, adding 80 days to create the longest year in history of 445 days (called “The Year of Confusion”), to create the Julian calendar.   

But the calendar remained unsettled.   February once had an extra day compared to today, but one was “borrowed” to make Augustus Caesar’s month (August) equal to Julius Caesar’s (July).   This resulted in the Sept-Dec monthly sequence of 31-30-31-30 days being switched to our present 30-31-30-31 days. In 321, Constantine decreed our present 7 day week with Sunday as the 1st day.   Dionysius (circa 531) then created our A.D. system of dating.      

By the year 1582 the calendar had again become inaccurate, due to a small error in the length of the year.   The Gregorian calendar corrected this 10 day error by making the month of October the shortest month in history at 21 days, by following October 4th with October 15th.   Thereafter, our year officially became 365 days, 5 hr., 49 min., 12 sec. (365.2425).  

In the year 2000, our calendar was again incorrect by 1 day, so a leap day was added to February.   Many incorrectly thought that was a normal leap year adjustment, but a leap day is only added to an even century every 400 years.   Thus, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 had no Feb. 29. The next such leap day will be in 2400.

Getting a correct calendar was one thing, but a correct time was quite another.   The simplest, and possibly the first, time measurement device in history was the gnomon.   A simple vertical stick in the ground or an obelisk casts its shortest shadow at high noon when the Sun passes a person’s meridian, also allowing an observer to determine true north/south.   

Since the gnomon, the world has frantically tried to develop accurate timepieces.   It has tried sundials, graduated and aromatic candles, water clocks, sandglasses, scratch dials, pendulums, mechanical and quartz watches, to name a few.

The problem of time measurement spilled over into ocean navigation.   In the book “Longitude”, Dava Sobel described how shipwrecks were commonly due to inadequate knowledge of longitude.   An accurate watch, as developed by John Harrison in the late 1700’s, allowed sailors to determine how many hours west or east they were from high noon of their home port.   For example, every hour west of your home port, measured at the ship’s local high noon, translated to 15 degrees of longitude, the basis for today’s 24 time zones.   

Accurate measurements of time became increasingly important with the coming of railroads, telegraph, satellites, TV, computers, etc.   Individual cities and railroads used local or high noon for their timekeeping, creating much confusion. Today, our time is based on a cesium atomic clock, accurate to within 1 second every 3 million years, a necessity for today’s lifestyles.         

The ultimate experience of time would be time travel, as depicted in numerous movies, such as “The Time Machine” or “Back to the Future”.   The reality, however, is that time travel would require speeds in excess of the speed of light – Warp Factor 1 in Star Trek – or 186,282 miles per second.   Such speeds aren’t remotely approachable today and may never be, so it remains primarily as a mind exercise.  

Consider that it took Voyager 12.5 years to reach the outer limits of our solar system, or the New Horizons spacecraft some 9.5 years, something light can cover in 4.5 hours.   The fastest speed ever attained by a man-made vehicle was the spacecraft Juno, at 165,000 mph, some 4000 times slower than the speed of light. The world’s fastest plane, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, at 2500 mph is about 270,000 times slower than the speed of light.

So, time travel remains in the hypothetical.   And, as my wife observed: “Time travel is a waste of time”.

copyright 2020 Ron McCarley