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- [00:07]
A
No one can quite agree what time is, not even physicists, especially physicists. Einstein shows that it bends and warps. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli goes further, suggesting that time might not fundamentally exist at all. And yet you've had that surge of panic when you're late for something. But that experience of time as something measured, divided and obeyed is not a natural fact. It's a human invention. So how did we go from living by sunrise, sunset and the harvest to it's 6:03? And what did that do to us? The earliest timekeepers were not clocks. They were monuments. At Newgrange in Ireland, built around 3200 BC. A narrow roof box above the entrance is designed so precisely that on the shortest days around the winter solstice, a shaft of the sunrise travels down the passage and lights the central chamber. It lasts for about 17 minutes. Then darkness returns. And across the sea in England, Stonehenge was constructed from around 3000 BC. The monument aligns with the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset. It was clearly built to make the turning points of the year visible and unforgettable. On the other side of the world, at Shanquilo in Peru, dating to roughly 250, 200 BC, 13 towers were arranged along a ridge to form a solar calendar. It's the oldest known solar observatory in the Americas. These monuments were not isolated curiosities. Monumental astronomical structures appear independently across ancient cultures in Egypt, China, India, Mexico and the Near East. Something was driving humans everywhere toward the same impulse to fix time in stone, to make the invisible cycles of the sky somehow legible and permanent. The tools that followed were smaller, but no less brilliant. The sundial, the earliest example of one that's preserved, is an Egyptian shadow clock from the second millennium bc, and it read time from the movement of a shadow. You had water clocks, another breakthrough, because it could measure time in the dark, indoors, without the sun. So to fully understand how time impacts us today, we have to go back, way back. I spoke with Finn Burridge, who's a science communicator at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, to find out how time itself actually began.
- [02:49]
B
Nobody can really agree on it. Nobody really knows because. Because nobody really knows what time is. It's a big problem in the physics world. I guess there's three or four ways you can tackle it from a physics perspective. And one of them, the oldest one, is the classical interpretation of time, that it exists kind of outside of the universe itself as a constant ticking clock. Not a property of the universe itself, but something that always flows forward, that is the same everywhere. And that everything in the universe is beholden too, that we all go through it at the same speed. And that's what was believed for many, many, many, many years. This is the kind of classic Newtonian description. Then once we begin to look out into the universe, once we begin to see what happens, we realize the universe had a beginning. That it seems as though everything in the universe came from one point, one point not just in space, but one point in time, which was the Big Bang. And this was the first challenge because this implied that there was a beginning of time as well as space. That doesn't break that interpretation because you can just say, yes, it did. It began then at the big bang, 13.7 billion years ago. Great. Obviously, that beckons the question, what was before then? Right? Was there a before? And this is where all the disagreements break out. Some camps say, yes, maybe there is, there was something before the universe. If so, then what was it? And we're still trying to answer that. We don't know. There may have been something. There may have been nothing. Others that say it just simply began, then we can't. We can't say anything more about it because we don't know anything more about it. So it did begin at the Big Bang. However, then a guy called Einstein comes along. Einstein creates his theories of relativity, general and special relativity. And in his theories, time is not this just constant ticking force that applies to everything. It's a coordinate. So we can describe the universe in terms of where we are. So we can in the universe. You give yourself a coordinate. I'm here right now on Earth, in my house, and we have a coordinate in time, which would be the date. And everything in the universe has this coordinate. But the problem with this description, as Einstein told us, is these coordinates can change. They can bend. Space and time don't always tick at the same rate everywhere. In Einstein's theories, time can actually tick slower in certain places or faster, depending on how fast we move through the universe and depending on if we're close to something really heavy. And we've proven this to be true. So Einstein's theories were fairly revolutionary. But every test that we've thrown at it has turned out to be accurate, has turned out to be true. So in the 70s, we took clocks on airplanes and we flew them around the world at different directions. So that's different speeds. They came back ticking, not in sync, not because the clocks were broken, not because they weren't designed properly, because they had physically experienced different rates of time, which I think is really weird, really interesting, but true. So in this interpretation of time, it doesn't exist as this eternal ticking clock. It's different for everyone. It's different for every observer and is different everywhere in the universe. And they don't agree with each other.
- [06:28]
A
I could talk about this all day, but if we try and limit ourselves to the. The human experience of time, which obviously starts a very long time after the Big Bang, yes, it is still different, isn't it? And it's as difficult as it is to reach into the recesses of prehistory and think about how those humans would have understood time, how would it have been different? And how would they have had a sense of its passing and measuring it at all?
- [06:59]
B
So really, the really interesting part for that, for me, is the measurement of time. Again, the human experience of time, we all feel it kind of going forwards. It's that kind of classical explanation of, you know, we can't. We always feel it going forwards. It passes for us regardless. But measuring time has clearly been something that's really important to all cultures. There are sticks that have been found in Southern Africa that have 29 notches in them, which is the 29 days, we think maybe of the moon, the moon's phases. Because one of the main ways that humans have experienced time and counted and measures time is from the stars and the moon. It's almost like we have been given a natural clock in our skies. Right. It's a really good way of measuring time. Time. The moon's phases have been recorded by almost all of the cultures that we find in archaeology in some way. They still form the basis of calendars today. So the. The Islamic religious calendar is still a lunar calendar used by billions of people worldwide. So clearly we have intrinsically got a need to measure and record time. Why? Well, we can't exactly say why when we go back very, very far in time. But there are two, two main camps, and they can both be agreeing with each other, really. There's a practical need to measure it for trade, for building, for construction, for migration. We need to know when and where animals will be in the area. If you have got a trade deal with the local people, you want to know how long it's going to last. So there are very practical reasons to record time. Then there's the religious and ritual reasons. And that is clearly prevalent in many cultures. The ritual need to celebrate things like the solstice or the equinox. You have your gods sometimes. In some cultures, the gods are physically stars, the moon, the sun. So measuring Their passage through the skies is actually a way of understanding the gods better. And this is seen through almost all cultures worldwide.
- [09:08]
A
When we look across prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge, Newgrange, Warrenfield, what can we say with confidence that they were measuring?
- [09:19]
B
So with confidence, they are definitely clearly measuring solstices. Solstices are a really key measurement for ancient peoples. So a solstice is really interesting. It's kind of the point in the year which the sun either reaches its furthest south or further north position, if you like, in the sky, or lowest or highest position in the sky. And it's, although we can't say this for sure, it to us is quite an important time of the year because it marks passing of the seasons. So when the sun begins to return after the winter, or when the sun begins to fall in the summer, you can see how these would have ritual significance for cultures, because knowing when the solstice has happened, knowing when the seasons are changing, when your migration must take place, when different food sources are going to start appearing again for hunter gatherers, clearly really important times and of course, ritual significance again.
- [10:24]
A
So we've talked about the solstices and the moon. You're an astronomer, I know you're hugely passionate about astronomy. Where does the interaction with keeping time and astronomy begin?
- [10:39]
B
So it begins at the very, very, very first human attempts to try, track time and to measure time. And it actually continues today. It's still important for our, for our civil timekeeping today, which I'll get to in a bit. But to make a good timekeeper, to track any time at all, you need something that is regular, cyclic, that it has a constant rate of change. You can, you can use anything really. You can use a dripping kind of water clock. As long as water drips regularly out of something that can be a clock, a heartbeat, for example, the changing of the leaves. These can be used as clocks, but they're not particularly regular. They have things that can affect them. You know, if you run faster, your heartbeat's going to change. The leaves don't always change on the same date every year. The rate at which water drops out of a clock can change if someone knocks the clock or if the hole changes at the bottom of this clock in size, it will change. Whereas the stars, the rotation of the Earth, the lunar cycle, the passage of the sun through the constellations is really, really, really regular. It's almost perfect. And especially in kind of pre technological era, it seemed almost exactly perfect. So it simply made sense for this to become a way that humans tracked change and you see this in Warren Field. You see this on these tally charts in the oldest calendars that we find out of Egypt and Babylon, that the first things that they were tracking is the moon. They would, they would change the position of this boulder in Warren Field every time they saw the phase of the moon change because it's almost perfect. Every 29 or so days you get a perfect clock in the sky to track. And it's very easy to observe wherever you are, provided it isn't cloudy, you should be able to see it if you go outside and look at it at night, it's with you everywhere. You don't have to take a device around with you wherever you go. You can see it weather dependent.
- [12:45]
A
You mentioned water clocks. So what are some of the earliest devices that we see in history where people are trying to measure time?
- [12:54]
B
So these are some of the water clocks are some of the oldest devices that we found. So they come from Babylon and Egypt at around 1500 B.C. so they're three, three and a half thousand years old. And they're fairly simple constructions you will have. They're a bit like a sand timer really, but with water. So you'd fill a jug or a vase with water and you'd create a small opening at the bottom. It would drip out at a constant rate because gravity is fairly constant everywhere on the earth. And these were mainly used at night to track time. And during the day you would track the motion of the sun. At night you would use the water clock to keep track of shifts or patterns or commerce or whatever. They were using the water clocks for these then kind of they stay for a few thousand years, you keep water clocks and then we get to, we get other devices. So we have oil lamps and candles. These were used in, of the Far east, in China, they spread throughout Asia and into Europe. And we don't start to see mechanical devices used until the kind of 13th and 14th century. So for most of human, for most of that time, most of civilization's history, you would be using candles, you'd be using water clocks, oil lamps. And even then in the 12th and 13th century, these mechanical clocks were not particularly accurate.
- [14:21]
A
It's fascinating. Have you thought much about how time measurement changing would have altered the experience of what it feels like to be human or our psychology or even spiritually, how we interact with the environment over time, like moving from a slower, more cyclical approach to this measurement, which does feel like linear progress and increasingly relentless.
- [14:51]
B
Yeah, I think, I think that becomes really pronounced again, more pronounced in our modern world than it would have for most ancient peoples. And we really see that begin to take off with the Industrial revolution when especially train timetables drove it in Britain. And Greenwich had a huge part to play in that because even every town in England before the kind of early 1800s had its own time, tracked it just via the sun. Bristol was a few minutes ahead of London. Right. But once we began to live in a world where those minutes mattered to catch a train to the big city, the time is so present in our lives and it simply wouldn't have been in the past.
- [15:38]
A
It also strikes me as we naturally become more disconnected from the environment because if you rely on watching the environment to know the time that you're doing things versus being able to have it on a watch or an iPhone or a computer, like, I don't need to look at the sky, I don't need to admire the lunar cycles or really know much astronomy in order to organize my days. But if you did, then you're naturally going to be more bound up in it.
- [16:07]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And as a, in my astronomy life as, as an astronomer, it's, it is very evident that most people's connection, especially with the stars in the sky is completely gone. And I think, yes, we don't need it anymore. But it is, I think, sad that these traditions and these cycles that were so important to humans in the past have now completely gone.
- [16:37]
A
When do humans start to divide time in ever smaller increments and why are they compelled to do that?
- [16:45]
B
So even, Even, you know, 5,000 years ago, we have the modern hour that we know and love is being used, but they're not constant. This is what's really interesting. And this, this pervade, this stays for thousands of years because, you know, we all experience the changing of the day's length as we go into summer. The sun is up for longer summer hours would have been longer than winter hours. And this was fine. They didn't mind that, to them it wasn't a problem. Their winter hours were simply shorter and their daylight hours were simply longer. And you would have tracked this, this shadow as it moved across the sky and you'd have just used it in day to day life. Because most of what you're measuring, time would have been for agriculture, for things you do during the day, get into the market, trading your goods. It didn't matter that the hours weren't constant. You would just say, you know, meet at the 12th hour or my shift ends at this hour. And you had more time to do things during the summer. So Your hour would have been longer, you got to work for longer. There's more time to do stuff in winter, a little bit less time, that's okay. You go home and you do things at night and then you go to sleep. So it was, although it was almost similar to what we have today with a 12 hour day, well, 24 hour day we have but 12 hours of daylight, 12 hours of night. It was slightly different. And this doesn't change. For thousands of years the Romans used it, the, the Greeks, interestingly, the philosophers and the Greeks, mathematicians, they were the first to come up with equal hour, equal length hours. They used it for their calculations to work out the distance to planets and the moon and the sun. But it didn't take off with the general population because it just, it was more of a mathematical curiosity. It was something they didn't need. They didn't need an hour that was the same length every day. They didn't have clocks good enough to track it, they just had sundials. So it wasn't, it wasn't really until we began to have mechanical clocks, even into the 16, 1700s, up to industrialization, that we began using equal, equal length hours in day to day life. But it is where our words for minute and second come from, which is kind of interesting. So I should probably mention that the Greeks and then into the Romans, they hyp, you know, they split the day into 24 hours. Hypothetically, each hour was the same length and then they would divide those into smaller parts. So this was divided by 60, you get a minute, divide it by 60 again, you get a second. And in Latin that first small part would have been para minutia, the small part prima first and then the second part was para secunda and that would be the second part. We still use that minuta for minute and secunda is second. It was the second division of time. And those words have stayed with us even to the modern, to modern era. Even though the Romans, the Greeks didn't use them in day to day life, which is interesting.
- [19:53]
A
The next great breakthrough came in medieval Europe with the invention of the mechanical escapement. The mechanism that made the first true mechanical clocks possible by releasing a clock's power in steady, regular beats. These clocks first took hold in monasteries where prayer followed a strict timetable. But they didn't stay there for long. By the early 14th century, large weight driven clocks were appearing in church towers and civic centres across Europe, striking the hours over entire communities. Then came precision. In 1656, Christiaan Huygens built the first pendulum clock because Pendulum swings have a regular rhythm. It gave clock makers a far more stable way to measure equal intervals. Accuracy leapt from clocks being off by minutes a day to being off by mere seconds. So time became more precise. So much so that life could be organized in a much more disciplined fashion. Then time conquered distance. Sailors could already work out latitude, their north south position. Longitude, though, was harder. To know how far east or west you were, you needed the exact time at a fixed reference point and the exact local time where you were. It's hard for us to imagine how mind bending the invention of precise mechanical time was for people because we're just so deeply enmeshed with it, we hardly even notice it day to day. But it's crazy to think that this wasn't inevitable. So I was curious about how the use of time spread and whether society today would be possible without it. So for that I spoke to Jonathan Martineau, who's an expert in how time impacts society.
- [21:41]
C
Mechanical timekeeping is not, not obvious at all. Like we take it for granted, right? And we've been cultured, you know, and educated into referring and relating to time in that way, but it's not obvious at all. It's quite odd actually, in the history of time forms and the first mechanical clocks are invented around the turn of the 14th century in Western Europe. And there are debates, like technical debates on who actually, you know, invented the first clock and so on. But what's interesting is their first social usage. So where are these mechanical devices going to be used for the first time? And they're mostly used in context of, of wage labor, actually, in order to time the working day. So those are the first usages to actually, and they're seen as a neutral technical device in order to prevent employers or job givers to keep the workers for too long on the bell has struck, so we can leave and so on. So at first it's meant to organize it, to kind of pacify these relations. And later on this, this aspect of timekeeping linked to practices and of labor and production are going to become much more important, especially with the Industrial revolution.
- [22:51]
A
Would capitalism have been impossible without the invention of the mechanical clock?
- [22:57]
C
That's the big question, in my view. Yes. Or it would be a very different type of capitalism. You need mechanical clocks in market economies for many things. You, you need mechanical, you need to be able to have a form of time that is abstract, homogeneous, with equal time units in order to be able to calculate labor inputs, for example, and the time it takes to produce a different, a certain type of commodity for example, so you need a form of time that will be also standardized across different economic actors for distribution, circulation of goods and services, but also for more minute forms of standardization and organization of production.
- [23:45]
A
What did that do to people psychologically when they suddenly have a concept of being late and needing to be productive? And also that homogeneity that you mentioned, I'm wondering what that does to people's sense of being an individual and their autonomy.
- [24:00]
C
Yeah, I mean there's, there's quite an extensive and very interesting literature on this. So the kind of psychological effects of having this, this kind of new conception of time that is at the same time very much of a, seen as a tool. So something you can use to organize activities, to discipline people as well, discipline bodies is a strong political component to that as well. But also this idea of time as something that passes by detached from any, you know, local occurrence or surrounding process going on. Because usually that's how, that's how humans relate to time. There's some, you know, something happening in the moment that determines the time unit. You know, whether you know, it's lighter day, whether you're cooking, whether you are doing an actual activity. So it's time to do that activity. Now time is something that passes, detached from all of these, you know, potential anchoring points in your experience. So there's a sense in which we can talk about a process of alienation of time, time at several levels. First of all, for workers, you know, in a more, you know, Marxian understanding of the thing, workers actually sell their time. So there's a kind of dispossession of time on the labor market, labor time. But also that, that general idea of time as something detached, passing, whatever, whatever we do, the time is still passing at that equal, you know, linear paced way. So there's a sense of detachment here and also the sense of, well, time is going to be, especially with the economic connotation to time measurement, time is going to become seen as something that can be organized rationally in order to generate more productivity. So the main, the master signifier of our relationship to time, I think as a culture has to do with productivity. For this we need these time units to be detached from what we're doing so that we can actually cram them with more activity, make them more productive or efficient in whatever we're doing. We also see this relationship to time as something that, as a resource, actually a resource that is not to be wasted, that is to be made to work or put to use in the more efficient way possible. We Also see that there's a famous study by the sociologist Max Weber on the Protestant ethic and that relationship to time as a skill, scarce resource that also ties into a kind of parallel process of economic rationalization of time, but also cultural rationalization of time in which, you know, so we. We experience time as this, you know, kind of alien force that dictates what we should be doing at several times. Everything is scheduled nowadays in very precise manner. And we also feel that sense of temporal pressure, temporal fatigue as well, a kind of sense of productivity not being something that is only attached to labor or work, but also something that permeates or percolates in all of these other aspects of our lives, even if we're on vacation.
- [27:09]
A
How did it impact elites and laborers differently when it first started to become more widespread? And do you see that still today, people having a different relationship and a different discipline when it comes to time, depending on your economic opportunities and your
- [27:31]
C
position in society at a general social level, I think that this imperative of productivity, this cultural construction of time as the scarce resources not to be. Be wasted is very much imposed, is very much, you know, present and weighing on everyone's shoulder. There are ways in which the access to leisure time is also sociologically differentiated between women and men, for example, between people with children and people with no children, between people with means and no. So there are some ways in which access to leisure time and more perhaps controlled way or control over one's time are sociologically differentiated. But I think that general, you know, cultural attitude of time as this scarce resource, time as something that has to be made more productive, pretty much permeates all layers of society.
- [28:30]
A
What role does time play in navigation and the experience, expansion of empire?
- [28:36]
C
Yeah, so that's a fascinating question as well. We see that implication between political power and timekeeping devices going all the way to ancient times. The calendars that we use were forged by powerful rulers of the Julian calendar by Julius Caesar. The Gregorian calendar we use now as a projection of cultural power from the church in the 16th century as well. So there's always this embrocation. And on that specific notion of naval and colonial expansion, there are several examples. My favorite example is the British Parliament in 1714, if I'm not mistaken, issuing the Longitude act, which is actually a competition that is launched where anyone that can.
- [29:28]
A
That.
- [29:28]
C
That can come up with a precise marine chronometer that will be able to help ships calculate very precisely their longitude will be awarded a price. I think it's something like £20,000 at the time.
- [29:43]
A
And the more 1.5 million today it says exactly.
- [29:47]
C
So the more precise your clock is, the higher price you get. And there's this, this guy, this inventor, John Harrison, who eventually did win some of that money, who comes up with these very intricate, magnificent machines, actually that are able to calculate exactly how much time has passed since the ship has left its original point of departure. So that longitude can be calculated with a very precise coefficient, if you will. And that's super important for a bunch of things. N Projection of naval power this problem of longitude is itself raised by colonial enterprise. In the case of Britain at the time, the issue is also triggered by some naval defeats as well in naval battles. So to be able to precisely. So that scientific problem is itself rooted in practices of naval commerce, of colonialism and so on. So that link between projection of imperial power and in that case the refinement of cloth making tools is very clear.
- [30:59]
A
You mentioned the role of religious figures in the church in early control of timekeeping and marking the year. And we know that church bells in monasteries were a key early way that people would have had a. A concept of time. What is the role of religion specifically in how time is measured and how people interact with it?
- [31:25]
C
Historic historically, it's massive. The role of the, of religion, church authorities or religious authorities is massive. We go back to ancient times with the very word calendar in Latin comes from the Latin calerie, which, which means to call or to announce. And that was a function performed by priests in. In ancient societies that that were actually come out of their temple and announced the time that it was to the population. So there's a kind of, of projection of cultural power at time as something that is linked to God as well. In many theological systems, the Christian one obviously is very important as well. God as the creator of times. There's some something of time belonging to God as well, very important in the Christian tradition, among others. But think of the. The differences in calendars as well. The Islamic calendar, for example, as compared with the Gregorian calendar, with different ways of organizing the year according to lunar or solar or lunar solar systems. So there, there are ways in which religious authorities, in my view, as. As a form of exercise of cultural power and cultural hegemony, will organize time. Decide when are the holidays, what do the holidays mean? So relates the passage of time with religious symbolism as well, which is very important for a reproduction of church power. The French revolutionaries understood that very well during the French Revolution. One of the first thing that they did was to amend, not just amend completely change the calendar to exempt it from any reference to church or to ancien regime politics. So they devised a new calendar, the Calendrier Republique, with a new system of 10 months, 12 months, 30 days. No religious holidays. The holidays are revolutionary figures or moments. So this idea of emptying the passage of time and those time devices free from that cultural power of the Church was also very important and recognized very well by the French revolutionaries at that moment. And they kept that calendar going for a few years during the revolution before coming back to eventually the Gregorian calendar after. But this notion of organizing time as something that belongs to cultural or political elites is. It's continuous in the history of time.
- [33:52]
A
For sure, I, I found that particular link as time is a creation of, of God. So interesting because you think about how religious elites have been arbiters of, you know, redeeming people from sin, how they should live their lives, forgiveness. And then time is just another extension of that. And we saw that really early on. I, I just think that's so interesting when we look at how time impacts us today, when we have notifications on our phones, alarms, constant meetings, we travel based on public transport and airplanes. How do you see the difference between how time affected people in perhaps the 1800s and 1900s and how it affects people today?
- [34:45]
C
I think, I mean, one of the most interesting sociological theory in the last few years is the theory of social acceleration. And it is this idea that with the refinement of time measuring techniques, but also the constant imperatives of productivity and growth that have been, you know, cultural, you know, culturally hegemonic for such a long time now, this idea that the experience of time that we, that we have today is much more marked by this notion of acceleration, and it's actually verifiable in statistics and sociological studies. Asking people, they have this survey, the time Use survey that they have in the United States, for example, they've been asking since the 1960s simple questions to people with regard to their relationship to time. Whether you feel you have enough time to complete all your tasks during the day, whether you feel time pressure, whether you feel you have control over your own time. And what we see in the last decades is a constant progression of the number of people that say that they don't have control over their time, that they feel rushed, that they cannot complete all of their tasks, that they always feel like they're running faster and faster just to remain afloat, if you will, to remain on pace. So this, this, this relationship to time as something that constantly escapes us, that we're actually Always running after is very much widespread culturally and I think is culturally very odd when we compare that relationship to time, that feeling of acceleration to other cultures and the way that they relate to time. There's a famous study by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who studied the Newer, a nomadic tribe in, in the, in the Maghreb. And there is this, this, this moment in the interview when they're talking to the Newers and they're describing how they perceive people who seem to be hurried, who seem to be restless. And there's connotations of them being, being like little demons or little devils, you know, so there's not a positive connotation to this notion of being always busy and always, you know, hurried and so on. Whereas in our culture it's actually well seen to be, I'm so busy, you know, I have to take a break at some point. To look like you're exhausted is actually something, something that's well seen because, you know, you're active and, and you're. You, you work well and so on. So there, there's this relationship to time as something again, not to be wasted, that today takes on an all other dimension with, as you mentioned, phones and so on and so forth, connecting us to that imperative of productivity. Almost 247 now.
- [37:29]
B
Right.
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C
So this relationship of being rushed, being always, you know, pressured by time, I think is very much, you know, the general feeling right now culturally.
- [37:44]
A
There is so many interesting tidbits in that as well, because when I think about the projection of power from people, you're right, it's cross culturally, so different. Sometimes people project status by basically a lack of effort, a lack of hurrying, as if to indicate I don't need to exert extra effort, I'm powerful enough that I don't have to. Whereas the people who are lower down the food chain and don't have the same kind of autonomy have to behave very, very differently. And what you were saying about the social acceleration, it makes so much sense, doesn't it? Because obviously speed is distance over time. And as we'd be able to collapse distances in terms of travel or the transmission of information, it becomes more relentless. Like I noticed that working in the Media There were 24 hour news cycles and then things and expectations got even faster than that when more and more people could communicate information even faster.
- [38:39]
C
Faster, yeah, absolutely. So the increasing speed of society also created problem for the global time system, the universal standard time system, all the way to 1967. The main time units that we use in order to organize the Global time system was the day. And the day was calculated as the period it takes for the Earth rotates on itself. However, that duration of time is not constant or precise.
- [39:10]
B
Right.
- [39:11]
C
It depends on season, it depends on the tides. The speed of rotation of the Earth is erratic actually and slowing down over time over the long run. So that's not a problem if you're living in 8 hundreds as a peasant in Sicily, right. The fact that the length of the day can vary a few minutes does not affect your temporal practices. But for us, and as you say, especially in the world of media, but finance, you know, aircrafts and so on, these differences mattered quite a bit. So in 1967 we actually changed the definition of the basic time unit of the system went from a day to a second. And to calculate very precisely the length of a second, we actually had for the first time in human history to go to, to let go of celestial bodies as those time markers as that we use in order to calculate our time units and go into the subatomic realm. And today atomic clocks are coordinating the global time system. And one second is defined. I don't have the exact number, but it's 8 at 9 billion ossiation of a kesium atom that counts for a second. So it's very, very precise. But to me that, that is also telling that we went from the day to the second as the main time unit as also testimony to that increasing speed and need for precision that that brings for different, many different social practices today.
- [40:40]
A
Do you have any advice for humans living in 2026 in terms of how they can deal with this increasing sense of urgency and time crunch?
- [40:51]
C
I think there's a symptom of social acceleration and temporal fatigue in the success of practices of meditation and yoga and spiritual quests as well, that they become an industry actually. And I think to me it's telling that these practices are so popular because it expresses the needs that people have to regain some control over their time, some practices of presence, to actually be in the moment, not always thinking about the next thing and so on, but be there at the moment, you know, take advantage of that moment, live it fully. There's a need, I think, in humans to experience these moments that are denied by many different social forces and social imperatives. So I think that my advice would be to find your own way to disconnect from time so it can be different from many people. But I think collectively though, there would be a question or a debate or discussion to have collectively about the cultural value attribute to time, about economic growth about these imperatives that we take from the economic sphere and transpose into our lives as well. So I think collectively we perhaps would need to change our relationship to time and eventually find little ways in which one can disconnect. One can be present, one can maybe just keep the phone in another room for a while. So it can be a bunch of little different things that people can practice. But I think the problem is not individual. We're not the problem. The problem is general, collective, cultural and economic as well.
- [42:37]
A
The old world is still hiding in plain sight. September, October, November, December. Months whose names still mean 7, 8, 9 and 10, because the Roman calendar once began in March. Another example in Croatia, where some of my family are from, the months still sound like the cycles of nature. You have Sierchan, which is January, and it means cutting wood, Travan April, grass cutting, and lystopad October, which means falling leaves. Once clocks, though, became precise, shared and standardized. Time stopped being something that most people noticed in nature and became something that they had to answer to. The question was no longer just whether winter was coming or if the harvest was ready. It was whether you were late, behind, efficient enough, or wasting time. And now we're all living at the far end of that story. GPS works because of atomic clock precision. Financial markets depend on timestamps measured in tiny fractions of a second. We built ever more exact ways to measure time by sky and season. Then monuments, calendars, clocks, finally atoms. The experience of time is ancient, but the discipline of time is manmade. Thank you for giving me your own time. I am Bianca Noblo and I will see you next week.