“Clock time” (Editorial, 22 October) did not just spread with the Industrial Revolution, it enabled it. Organising factory production requires accurate timekeeping. Developing technology from the steam engine onwards has depended on precision time measurement. And the science that modern technologies rest on was only possible because natural phenomena could be accurately timed. Newton, for example, needed the clock to formulate and test his laws of motion. The modern world is quite simply a result of a Dutchman’s invention in 1656: Christiaan Huygens’ accurate pendulum clock.
What exactly is clock time? Clock time is a time of standardised, fixed intervals. Natural time was a time of events, such as sunrise and sunset. The day between these two events always had 12 hours, summer and winter. In London, the length of the hours varied by our clock-time measure, from just 40 minutes in the winter to 80 in the summer. You can’t derive laws of motion if the length of a second depends on where and when you time an apple falling.
Clock times themselves are decided by us, as we see when we switch from summer to winter time. We “tell the time”, not the sun or the stars. So, living by clock time has separated us from nature. This explains why we have treated nature so carelessly. And because the interval is the only absolute feature of clock time, we are fixated on it. Performance is assessed in terms of how much we can pack into an interval: output or distance covered in an hour, for example. Comparing performance between two intervals has become the measure of progress. Such “progress” has become the goal, regardless of the cost to the wellbeing of our planet and ultimately ourselves. Clock time may be our downfall.
Dr Richard Gault
Harderwijk, the Netherlands
