It’s About Time

In today’s brief article, I talk about time. What is time? Why do we consider time? What makes time so important? Time is nothing new. Only that it’s meaning, and value, has changed over, well, time. Let’s take a look. ?

The creation of technology demands for the creation of time. Better said, the creation of technology demands for more accurate measures to timekeeping.

Since the beginning of time, the idea of time has varied from century to century, and from culture to culture.

For example, Rome, and the Roman Catholic Church proport that time is linear, constantly moving forward. According to church leaders, time is essential to regulating the observance of holy days of the year.

Most religious sects would agree that maintaining a sense of linear time helps with such observances.

This same idea has been adopted by peoples, and governments. How else would we know when to celebrate Thanksgiving if it were not written on the calendar.

But other cultures, such as the Mayan and Inca cultures, viewed time as cyclical. In fact, the Mayan calendar runs in cycles, with time cycles repeating themselves. Remember the big fear that the world would end in 2012 – the end of the Mayan cyclical calendar?

Was this a big hoax or just some scientists misreading and misunderstanding the Mayan culture?

That’s a story for a different day.

Modern day humans measure time by a spinning ball in the sky – i.e., that’s us, spinning around in a circle orbiting a star. We measure our life span based on the number of times the earth orbits the sun. Aside from this brief science lesson, have you ever given this much thought? Is there a different, even better, way to measure your life expectancy?

In truth, though, time is subjective, and often speculative. And, according to Einstein, time is relative. Special relativity if found in the equation, ?

All of that is nice, but how does it relate to technology?

Good question. I’m glad you asked!

We use technology to replace human effort. Before the computer, we used ink and paper. Before the car, we rode a horse. But before the horse, we walked everywhere. And as we all know, before virtual conferencing, we all had to physically get to one place just to talk for a few hours.

Technology has changed all of that. The thing is, technical devices need to sync with other technical devices. Without boring you to death, computers sync their calendars (I’m being a bit facetious here) using a concept called clock synchronization. In order to send and receive data accurately and correctly, computers need to be on the same page.

In this regard, computers and humans are not much different. We both need to know when things are happening, how long something will last, and how information is going to be communicated.

It’s like being in one of those movies where everyone looks at their watch, and the leader yells “Mark”! Everyone’s watch has not been synchronized. Computers do the same.

But how do we synchronize time across the globe?

Again, good question.

At one point in history, we didn’t. In fact, you could be living in one region where time was determined by the setting of the sun (in Ancient Hebrew, the day starts at the setting of the sun). If you traveled in any direction (north, south, east, or west), the people there might start their day at noon. This created problems for synchronizing schedules. Even worse, times were inaccurate.

As a famous cartoon character once said, “There’s got to be a better way!”

And there is.

According to Greenwich Mean time,

Time Zones are regions on Earth that use the same local time. Conventionally, people compute their local time as an offset from UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

UTC replaced GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) in 1972 as the time standard. UTC is a high precision atomic time standard, which measures time by the nanosecond. UTC has standard seconds as defined by the International Atomic Time. It also has leap seconds (time particle that measures time not on the passage of seconds, but on the Earth's angular rotation) that are announced at irregular intervals for the compensation of geographical occurrences, such as the earth's slowing rotation.

< https://greenwichmeantime.com/global-time/>

In fact, the world is divided into 24 time zones. The course of one day is broken down to the seconds and calculated to define the correct time of a particular place. However, it is not that easy. The 24 time zones, created in accordance to each hour of the day, are theoretically drawn vertically like longitudes over the globe

This global design, though not perfect, is helpful for time synchronization – for computers and people. Computers can calculate the time zone of another computer by how the two computers exchange bits (binary digits – again, a story for another day). In the same way, people have to adjust to early morning or late night Zoom calls just to accommodate their global audience.

So, whether or not you are an early riser of a night owl, every piece of technology demands that you follow it’s need for time. Time matters for work, global positioning systems, and Netflix binge-watching. How you manage your time is your concern. What you do with your time is technology’s concern.

And remember, Siri, Alexa, and Google Home are listening to every time you call out to them. ???

?Credit for pictures: www.pixabay.com

Dr K is the Question Guy. You can find me on LI, YT, FB, and www.drkeithmcnally.com