Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts

15 January 2024

Does anybody really know what time it is?


           Einstein taught us that time is relative.  Popular writers will say this explains why an hour in a waiting room is longer than an hour having a beer with your best friend.  This isn’t true.  These occasions feel different because your perception of passing time is highly contingent on the qualities of the experience.  Einstein’s got nothing to do with it.

    The human factor, in those cases, has mostly to do with patience.  I’m not an expert on the subject, since I have none.  For me, a dentist’s office, traffic jams, my living room while waiting for my wife to put on her makeup, my bedroom as a child waiting for Christmas morning to commence, the queue administered by the NTSB, are torture chambers. 

            Checkout lines at the food store are the ultimate gladiator combat zone of patience.  Recently, I got behind a crowd of cheerful partygoers preparing for a big night at home.  They were having a lot of fun, and the food store employees were infected by the high spirits.  There was non-stop joking and laughing.  I was dying, since I really needed to get through that line as soon as possible, since I had to flee the store for reasons inexplicable at the time.  In retrospect, I was merely impatient. 

            So I bailed out of my position and went to the line next door, where only a single elderly lady was ready to find her way through the self-checkout. This was a huge mistake.  She had no idea how to navigate the automated system, stumbling her way through every transaction.   She had also stacked her purchases to overflowing in the little bin at the rear of the cart, and having angled the thing so she was now at the front end, had a great deal of difficulty retrieving her packages, fruits and vegetables.  I rescued this effort by moving all her stuff onto the conveyor belt.  She thanked me, while complaining loudly that nothing in life worked as well as it used to.  I agreed.

The young guy in charge of helping people through the self-checkout came over about a dozen times to recalibrate the system after the woman did some novel things with the barcodes and buttons at her disposal.  The guy had to call over his supervisor at least twice with the words, “Never seen this one before.”

I became the old lady’s fiduciary for the final act of cashing out, which involved discovering that only one of her fistfuls of credit and debit cards actually worked.  I nearly wept with joy when the word “Approved” finally flashed on the little screen.   Somewhere in the middle of all this, the partygoers left the store, in full celebration.  We waved to each other.

            The lesson for me was a little bit of patience at first would have saved a huge amount of time, and stomach acid, on the back end. 

             I know several people who have virtually no sense of passing time.  Whether a blessing or a curse is up for debate, since one can easily fill in both sides of the ledger.  I have an acute sense of time, which I blame on the German side of my family, who considered five minutes early as being on time.  Not five minutes before, nor five minutes after.  None of them wore a watch, since they could tell you the exact time aligned with the GMT down to the nearest second.  So I’m almost never late, though someone I live with is never on time, unless by happy accident. 

Another relative of mine ascribes his wife’s time blindness to the perfidy of the Magic Clock.  If she needs twenty minutes to complete a task, she merely looks at the Magic Clock, which will tell her five is all she needs.  Her surprise at the actual outcome is endlessly recurring and never instructive.


  My German grandfather was a clock smith, who would translate time’s march into pendulums, springs, axels and gear sprockets.  He filled his house with about 100 clocks, most of which were strikers.  At midnight, the house would erupt with bells, chimes and ancient clackers.  His family would sleep through it all, since it was merely a cacophonous reminder that another day had just ended, a little bit of life consumed, and new days ahead, a few more bits yet to be endured. 

11 April 2013

History is Mystery


File:NAMA Machine d'Anticythère 1.jpg
Part of the mechanism in the Athens Museum
Some of you might have caught the Nova show a week ago on the Antikythera mechanism, a device from approximately 100 BCE found in 1901 in a Greek shipwreck near the island of Antikythera.  It is the world's oldest (yet found) working analog computer:

File:NAMA Machine d'Anticythère 6.jpg
Reconstruction in Athens Museum

and it generated complete astronomical information and forecasts:  sun, moon, planets, and eclipses, from now until...  whenever.  A very complex machine.  It's assumed the found object was a factory reproduction of an original designed by the great Syracusan mathematician, Archimedes.  In the process of discovering all of this information, the historians used all sorts of mystery-solving techniques - questions, x-rays, research, reconstructions, debates, etc. - to try and figure out what that super-corroded device was, what it was for, and how it was made.  Fascinating.  Catch the reruns, or rent the DVD.

And it explains why so many of us historians are also mystery fans/writers/etc.  Because history is all about solving mysteries, very cold case mysteries, with limited evidence, almost no eye-witnesses, and a whole lot of deduction.  Yes, a lot of people think that history is nothing but names and dates, but I can assure you that's the least of it - the historical equivalent of a GPS system, keeping you afloat in a vast sea of time.  But the real purpose for history is to find out how things got the way they are. History is all about solving the mystery of us. 

Of course, some things never change: human nature (curiosity, greed, anger, pride, love, lust, all the emotions and desires), and what comes of that human nature (the pursuit of power, pleasure, wealth, appetite, and occasionally peace). 


File:EmileFrontispiece.jpeg
Frontisepiece to Rousseau's "Emile"
Some things change dramatically, in a paradigm shift that makes it inconceivable (to us) that things were ever different:  our modern concepts of privacy, romance, childhood, individual rights, and personal comfort are all just that, MODERN concepts. Romantic love used to be considered a form of mental illness (read Chaucer).  What we call privacy used to be proof that you were either had no status or were in prison (who would ever be alone if they didn't have to be?).  Rousseau practically invented modern childhood in "Emile" (ironic, considering that he put each of his four children in an orphanage).  And most societies have always been willing to sacrifice individual rights for societal order, especially if it keeps the barbarians (within and without) at bay.

And some things change all the time, especially fashion and beauty, which are simply exercises in the verb "to change". 

Where does technology fit into this?  Well, I couldn't help noticing that, even on Nova, the scientists were constantly amazed at the complexity of the Antikythera Mechanism, and the ingenuity of the ancients.  And this is a classic example of one of the two great biases that historians face, within themselves and within their students/readers/society:
BIAS # 1.  Time is an arrow, leading to us, and we, right now, are living in the best of all possible worlds at the best of all possible times, and anyone in the past who didn't live the way we do, especially in terms of morality, government, technology, and religion, were stupid, not to mention just plain wrong.  A major subsection of this bias against our ancestors' intelligence is all about technology.  I cannot tell you the number of people who say, well, if the ancients were so smart, how come they didn't come up with the technology of today? The answer is to consider where and how technology was used in the ancient world:
    File:Rome Colosseum interior.jpg
  • WAR:  Greek fire; gunpowder; Archimedes and his war machines (first laser prototype; the Archimedes Claw).
  • TIMEKEEPING and ASTRONOMY:  Chinese paper and compasses, originally used for timekeeping, astronomical observations, divination, and prayers; the Antikythera Mechanism, used for timekeeping and astronomy; water clocks, mechanical clocks, etc. 
  • ENTERTAINMENT:  Look no further than the Roman Colosseum, which used a huge amount of technology of all kinds to present battles on land and sea. 
  • PUBLIC HEALTH:  Flush toilets and sanitary systems of the Indus Valley (Harappa, 26th c. BCE), Knossos (18th c. BCE) and other ancient civilizations; public baths (Indus Valley, Greece, Rome,Ottomans, Japanese).
        Sounds pretty modern to me...
    • NOTE:  I'm well aware that time only moves in one direction (at least in this brane), but it's far more like a tree, with multiple branches and twigs and stems and leaves, than an arrow. There have been societies and civilizations that have vanished completely off of the face of the earth. There are echoes everywhere of things and people that were, but left no trace. And even if they leave a trace, no explanation. Not everything connects. History is full of red herrings. 
The other major bias is the exact opposite:  

    File:Leonidas I of Sparta.jpg
BIAS # 2.  We are a degenerate and weakened species, and things used to be much better, back in... well, the Greeks believed in a Golden Age before their own Age of Iron; the Hindus for millenia have believed we are in Kali Yuga, the age of the demon; and today a surprising number of people like to tell me how much better things were in the 1950's (and I suppose they were, if you weren't a woman, gay, black, or other minority).
    • NOTE:  Just to show how dangerous this bias can be, a classic work of nostalgia history is Plutarch's (ca. 46-120 CE) "On Sparta", in which that violent, anti-education military slave state is presented as the ideal civilization, strong, brave, and free from the corruptions of commerce and money.  Obviously, Plutarch had an axe to grind.  But very few people even think about that.  Because he himself is an "ancient writer" a lot of people swallow everything he wrote as if it were absolute truth, not paying attention to the fact that he wrote almost 500 YEARS AFTER SPARTA'S DEMISE.  That's the kind of thing you have to look out for.  And part of the reason yes, you do have to know your dates... 
My general analysis of bias holders is that the first is primarily held by the young and/or successful; the second is primarily held by older people and/or those who feel throttled by present-day culture (whatever the present day is).  My other great observation is that either bias gives you a perfectly logical reason to ignore the past.  They both imply that we can learn nothing from the past, either because we are absolutely superior or infinitely inferior.  Either way, we are on our own.  Me?  I know that everyone who ever lived were just as human as I, and the basic lesson of the past is that, until human nature changes as completely as fashion or song stylings, history is going to continue to be the same damn thing over and over again.  We'd better start paying attention.