Time

Interesting article on a new book called Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing:

Man has invented many ways to measure physical time, from ancient sundials to water and sand clocks, from the pendulum to the wind-up pocket watch, all the way to the modern atomic clock. An example of this latter-day timekeeper, introduced in 1950, measures a second as 9,192,631,770 cycles in the energy radiation of the Caesium atom. This produces an atomic second, which is one-86, 000th of a solar day, and is accurate to one second in three million years. Not bad, if you care about promptness. Whether time is real or not (as philosophers continue to ponder), whether without our constructions it really does “flow,” what unites all clocks is that they measure a well-defined, regular, and uniform physical change of one kind or another.

In their wonderful book, Russell G. Foster and Leon Kreitzman tell us that while our ability to measure time has improved over the ages, we have nevertheless “been steadily losing a battle with time. Instead of controlling our modern clocks, they control us.” Think about it: when we want to know when it is time to eat, or to go to bed, or to plan a vacation, we look at watches and clocks and calendars. Increasingly, these tools become dictators. But consider nature for a moment: without a Rolex or even a Swatch, the monarch butterfly knows to migrate from North America to Central America at precisely the same time each year. With no calendar and no alarm clock, the cicada emerges from the ground after exactly thirteen or seventeen years for a few fleeting weeks of frenzied mating–and […]