6.6.1 If the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, and the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control. (Weiner, 1948)

6.6.2 "Time Rules Life," the motto of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, is a statement borne out in formal time units that make up our calendar as well as in the way everyday events in out lives have become organised and packaged. Western time is socialised, circularised, linearised, artificialised, and corrupted-our days are numbered. Constructions of time have moved from artificial divisions based on rhythms derived from living in nature's environment to digital microdivisions. The hand on the clock was the last remnant of any direct contact between the day as we know it and the place of the sun in the sky. In scientific laboratories the divisions proceed to micro (millionths) and pico (billionths), even femto (quadrillions) seconds. The value of precision in time is quantified in watches sold by Patek Phillipe in Switzerland, which are said to be the most complicated and precise in the world and cost up to six million dollars! Lewis Mumford (1962) has said of the clock that it is time disassociated from human events, of mathematically measured sequences: the special world of science.

6.6.3 Starting with the original intention of the Greeks simulating how the heavens move, organised timekeeping has become a complex construction involving religion, politics, and human intrigue. Our first real clocks, such as the Tower of the Winds in Athens, were models composed and constructed to glorify the beauty of the heavens, not necessarily to satisfy precision. (Aveni, 1990, pg. 92.) It was the Christian religion, with its demands for controlled, disciplined life, that contributed to the development of constructed time that fetishised precision. But even more, it is the demands of controlling labour that moved the clock towards standardisation. Concerns about shifts and when people begin and end their work propelled the mechanical timekeeping which today has moved into the digital micro level. Born out of religion, commerce, the rise of towns and the bureaucracy accompanying them, the work clock began to dominate life from the late Middle Ages on.

6.6.4 Much of time measurement, including the measurement of minutes and seconds, has moved into an abstract realm that is figments of our collective imaginations. But it is the atomic clock that truly illustrates the height of the rationalistic subdivisions of time. It measures how long it takes an electron of an atom to pass from one energy state to another. Since no one is able to see individual atoms, they are measured collectively and statistically. Furthermore, energy levels, even electrons and atoms, are microscopic metaphors devised as a way of explaining microscopic behaviour of nature. The atomic second became the official world time standard in 1967, dividing time into milli, micro, pico, and femo seconds. This concept of natural oscillation of microscopic matter as a time standard has entered the everyday public life in the form of digital watches and the world of computing. [top]