Out of all things, the author picked time to pick on. Time is one of the few physical things that are objective and real and still can be quite directly experienced by all humans regardless of cultural context or biases.
Nonsense article.
Even in computation, where time is ideally measured very precisely, event based applications are extremely common, far more so than absolute or even exact relative time applications.
Time is computationally and culturally important because of the need to synchronize. But cross cultural synchronization of meetings is hard even at the basic level because prevailing attitudes of “On time” are different in, say, Germany, Spain, and China.
Richard Lewis has written about these cultural differences of time. Here’s a sample of some of his observations. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-under...
I think you are conflating time itself and measuring it (clocks).
edit: My cat died. Now, I can say that I moved house after my cat died, that I got my car before my cat died, or that I met Bill around the time my cat died. Dead pets create time.
You might as well say that time does everything, but that's mistaking the way you keep track of a thing with the thing itself. Time typed this comment.
In Buddhism there is no birth, no death. Both are illusions.
Don't look too closely at it, as things can get squirrelly the deeper you dig:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_of_Time_(book)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli
Edit: For those downvoting, you may wish to look up the question "Does time exist?":
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/carlo-rovelli-...
* https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1888683587729
Calling it "objective and real" is… debatable. Certainly the "objective" part, as Einstein theorized and empirical observation has shown.
Rovelli has much to say about the Second Law and entropy:
In relativity, time is a variable that is different for each observer, but it is still objective. It's not a matter of opinion for each observer. There are formulas that determine how all the variables change, and any observer can know what the other observers' variables are by watching how they move through space and using the formulas.
While some naive Newtonian concepts such as a single universal time metric stop working, there's no wiggle room for observer A and B to be inconsistent with one another based on their personal opinions. There is one objective reality and one objective way to quantify it mathematically.
Time isn't a single universal quantity in relativity, but it's still objective. Einstein didn't turn physics into cultural anthropology.
> a variable that is different for each observer
This is literally what "subjective" means - different dependent on the subject.
subjective: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.
- Something being a subject, narrowly meaning an individual who possesses conscious experiences, such as perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires.
- Something being a subject, broadly meaning an entity that has agency, meaning that it acts upon or wields power over some other entity (an object).
- Some information, idea, situation, or physical thing considered true only from the perspective of a subject or subjects.
The third being the only obvious applicable one.
It's also hypocritical to demand an adherence to an anti-common-sense physics-based formal definition of "time" while refusing the same courtesy towards formal definitions of "subjective."
"Objective" doesn't mean "experienced from all perspectives in the same way". Two different observers of a cube will get two different perspectives of the cube. The cube is still a single, objective, observer-independent reality. The same applies to relativistic time. It's a single reality (part of the spacetime manifold) that is measured differently in different reference frames. The different measurements must be consistent with one another according to a system of formulas. Just as different perspectives of a cube must be consistent with one another based on (1) the cube's objective existence in space and (2) the formulas of optics which determine the perspective each observer will receive.
It may be helpful to think about a more mundane example. Google search results for a given search term depend on who searches, which makes them relative. But they don't depend on the feelings of the searcher and hence are not subjective.
It may be helpful to think about a more mundane example. The results Google returns for a given search term depend on who searches, which makes them relative. But they don't depend on the feelings of the searcher and hence are objective, not subjective.
I just read a review of his "Noble Savages" book in the NYT and it's one of the worst things I've ever read. The author said almost nothing about the book and spent the entire time gossiping about the author, occasionally backing the gossip with tiny snippets of the authors' writing.
This one was somewhat better; https://www.npr.org/2013/02/16/171918973/noble-savages-a-jou...
IDK if people derive some prestige from outdoing one another in this regard.
"In reality, this process had already been taking place throughout the 1800s as a result of European colonialism, imperialism and oppression. Colonialism was not just a conquest of land, and therefore space, but also a conquest of time. "
Just poetry.
For example, is is known that teenagers would have health benefits from later school start time but it's almost impossible to implement that due to rigid clocks of everybody else. In fact, everyone would benefit from a good sleep.
When you go to a store, do you expect to know if it's open beforehand or getting there and finding it closed at random is ok?
Schools still need clocks to coordinate regardless of what time they start.
It runs through all aspects of society.
Once when I was in Munich I needed medicine on a Sunday. Despite the pharmacy's posted hours stating it would be closed, I was somehow able to raise the pharmacist and get the medicine I needed. I was very grateful that day to have a human in the loop.
I hardly think store opening hours are a good argument for the "absolute necessity" of supreme rule of the wall clock.
It absolutely has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with people essentially not believing that it actually matters. And to some extent due to convenience for parents who drive their kids to school.
My local school system does have high school students starting late relative to elementary schools.
Our school district did that this year. You know what happened? Teenagers stayed up later, either by choice or obligations, and got the same hours of sleep before, only now some of them can't hold afterschool jobs because they get out of school too late to fit homework and employment in.
Everyone is looking forward to reverting the change next year.
Depending on a where a driver is on their route, taking a piss might be 2-minute pop into a fast food bathroom, or a 20-minute diversion to find a bathroom. This is a good example of how important and basic human experiences don’t conform to the idea of universal and repeatable time increments that can be bolted together to make schedules.
Instead of the schedule accommodating the person, the person must accommodate the schedule. This is what the author means when they say the clock creates time.
One of the ways we measure power in society is the ability to resist this. The Amazon driver has to pee in a bottle to keep their job. But everyone has to wait for the CEO if they need the bathroom between meetings.
Plenty of soldiers, laborers and miners shit their pants on duty because of the controls placed upon them. That has nothing to do with time or clocks.
The Mayans were very gifted astronomers, and built their temples such that the sun would shine exactly through a small portal at the top of the temple on the equinoxes. Christian basilicas and Jewish temples had similar timekeeping functions.
The Greek and Roman pagans saw time as turbulent and cyclical, subject to the caprice of the gods.
The pre-modern, Christian worldview saw time as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but also as a vertically-structured fractal of cycles within cycles, and our orientation within was ascending upwards to an eternity outside time and space.
The Protestant fathers saw the linear progression of time forwards towards salvation as the true content of the gospel — that our orientation is forwards, towards the future.
Some Maori saw our orientation in time as backwards, that we walk with our back towards the impenetrable future, with the past visible in front of us.
None of these, however, saw time as an infinitely critiqueable, totally relative social construct with no given reality outside of humanly mutable, intersubjective power relations. This makes the author of the article, in my sincere opinion, the “whitest” of them all.
Timezones and DST are especially politically sensitive. See: https://blog.poormansmath.net/the-time-it-takes-to-change-th...
Same for the ideas around what is a reasonable time to sleep, eat, work. There are all sort of biases for/against early risers and owls across different societies.
Sounds like you and the other commenters might have an axe to grind here.
Time exists regardless of measurement, just like mass, volume, voltage, etc.
If time did not exist outside of measurement we would have no reason to measure it. We created clocks (and other devices) to measure the passage of time, but we were well aware of its passage before we measured it.
I feel like this is headed toward a low-value philosophical discussion about how nothing really means anything without an observer or something like that.
That is about as simple as I can make it. It is probably just as useful as saying a spinor is a square root of a vector. While simple, it doesn't do much to illustrate the point. A background in constructionism can however be had at the expense of reading 189 pages.
On the other hand, the notion of assigning a particular label (e.g. "9 o'clock" to some moment of time) is arbitrary and determined by social consensus or political aspects, physical reality plays little role in that.
How's life in 1904?