Time to reflect on time
View(s):A respected civil engineer who is now in his eighties posed a question during one of our recent conversation sessions: “In recent times I have seen journalists use the phrase ‘real time’. What does it mean?” We figured out that it is a term connected with computers and is used with computer responsiveness.
Also, when a television presenter states that the pictures shown are in real time, it means that it is happening at that time, whatever the time zone that the viewer is on.
This made me reflect on time and how time is packaged into different periods which are in our calendar.
Devoid of any scientific development, Julius Caesar arrived at the length of the as 365 days and 6 hours in the year 45BC. However, in 39 AD, the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy noted that there is a 5 minute shortfall and that a year should contain 365 days 5 hours and 55 minutes. In 1267, a Roman priest Roger Bacon calculated it as 365 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes. Considering that they had no telescope and believed that the sun revolved around the earth, these calculations were reasonably close approximations. Today, this value has been determined as 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds.
The division of a year into months is related to the study of the motion of the moon. Nearly every ancient culture worshipped the moon. Ancient Egyptians called their moon God as ‘Khonsu’.
The Greek and Roman goddess of the moon had three faces: Hecate when dark, Artemis when waxing and Selene or Luna when full. Moslems all over the world watch out for the new moon of Ramadan, Islam’s holy month of fasting. The moon seemed to be a perfect clock in its dependable regularity as it took roughly 29.5 days to pass from new moon to full moon. Such 12 full cycles of the moon seem to roughly correspond with a year.
David Ewing Duncan in his excellent book titled ‘Calendar’ states that the ancient Romans had only 10 months. They named the first four months as Martius (March) to honour the god of war, Aprilis (April) referring to raising hogs, Maius (May) for a local Italian goddess and Junius (June) for the queen of the Latin gods. The remaining months were called fifth to tenth which in Latin were Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December. Later Quintilis was renamed as July to honour Julius Caesar and Sextilis became August to remember the Emperor Augustus Caesar. Later two more months were added to create a calendar of 12 alternating 30 and 31 day months with the exception of February which had 29 days. However the Senate decided that Augustus’s month with 30 days, should not have fewer days than the month honouring Julius Caesar, with 31 days. Therefore a day was snatched from February leaving it with only 28 days (29 in a leap year). So now, we have a complicated numbering system with days of the months.
Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November,
February has twenty eight alone;
All the rest have thirty one.
Excepting leap year – that’s the time,
When February’s days are twenty nine.
Unlike the month or the year, the week is an entirely artificial period of time. It is probably first made necessary by the demands of trade. The original weeks were perhaps the gaps between market days. Weeks varied from four days among some African tribes to ten days in the Inca civilization and in China.
The more likely source of the seven day week is Rome, where the equivalent of the modern week was adopted in about the first century AD. Astronomy was so influential in the ancient world that 7 became a mystical number because of the seven planets that they had identified at that time.
The names of the days of the week were tied to the seven planets and their orbits in the earth-centered universe. Sun was for Sunday, Moon for Monday and Saturn for Saturday. Mars or Tiw represented Tuesday, Mercury of Woden indicated Wednesday, Jupiter or Thor outlined Thursday and Venus or Freya became Friday.
Twelve was an important number to the Egyptians as it was the number of lunar cycles in a year and the number of constellations of the Zodiac. Gradually day and night were each divided into 12 periods, and the 24-hour day was born. Although we use a base 10 system when counting using the 10 digits from 0 to 9, the Babylonians used a base 60 number system. This is perhaps the reason for dividing an hour into 60 minutes and a minute into 60 seconds. Their choice of 60 as the base was because of the large number of factors that 60 had and thereby the avoidance of fractions. It is believed that the 360 degrees about a point too originated due to the use of base 60.
As Seneca said “Time is the one thing that is given to everyone in equal measure”. Although time has no beginning or end, we are able to measure time. But, time once lost is lost forever. It can never be regained. Time plays an important role in our lives and we are all dependent on time. “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst” quoted William Penn. Let us appreciate this gift of time and use it in an appropriate manner.
R.N.A. de Silva
ndesilva@osc.lk
The author was a Head of Residence at the United World College of Hong Kong and is now at the Overseas School of Colombo as a member of its faculty.