accurate clocks
Clocks surround us daily. We obey to the laws of hours and days. If you are running late, you feel stress, if you are too early, you feel boredom. When you look at your phone, the clock is always starting at you from the top of the screen. And it has been like this since, what feels like, forever.
First time keeping devices we've found were created 1200 BC. The humanity has spent three thousand years under the ever marching forward hand of time. But as I've discussed in my post about teleportation1, having the technology and having that technology with you all the time can be seen as two completely different topics. Even so, we didn't have the luxury of carrying around accurate time with us until mid XVIII century.
And there is no wonder why! Modern mechanical watches are a marvel of engineering. We take it for granted this days, especially with the simplifications that quartz oscillators introduced to the internals. I highly recommend you to checkout out this amazing post about the internals of mechanical watches2.
Being able to tell the time precisely gave us the ability to orient on the seas with much more accuracy. You can calculate latitude by measuring the sun's angle at noon, but to find out your longitude you need to know the exact time. Even today, GPS satellites rely on an insanely high accuracy atomic clock to calculate your position.
So there is no doubt, that time tracking has been a huge blessing for the humanity. And today clocks are literally everywhere. They mostly became digital, but if you look around yourself right now you will probably find at least a few devices, that besides everything else, also have internal clocks in them. Do they all tell different time? Different kinds of time? No? But why do we need so many of them, then?
I've been noticing a pattern in myself, that I am trying to eradicate: say, I'm traveling somewhere via a bus to meet up with a friend. We've agreed to meet at X:00. I'm just sitting there. And then I get an urge to check the time. Why? Can I make the bus go faster, if I am running late? Does it really matter, if I am late by a few minutes? I literally can't influence the situation in any way, but for some reason I feel better knowing if I am late or if I am on time.
And I see this pattern in so many places now. At least for me, knowing the time makes me feel safer. But I think, it is just a habit, that has been developed through out my whole life. My life doesn't depend on me knowing the current time, especially to the minute.
Overall, the format of time tracking we stuck to is an interesting choice, if you could call it that. There are so many interesting alternative time measurement systems: hexadecimal time, metric time, arvelie… The system we use today, is the one we are stuck for the rest of our lives. But it doesn't mean, that it is the best one out there. The fact, that we think of time in minutes is just a historical tradition. There is no reason why 1.225 minutes is not a correct time unit to think in. We can even give it a name, call it morenits, and it would be as valid to say that there are 1175.51 morenits in a day, as that there are 1440 minutes in that same day. So there is also no reason, why we need to know the exact time to a minute, and not to 10 minutes, or 15 or 30 or even to an hour. Knowing that it is roughly 15:00 is already good enough for most use cases. So why do we default to 15:07 instead?
Or why does the time start at midnight? Why don't we say that the 0th hour is when we wake up? (I actually tried that for a while, interesting, but it is hard to constantly sync up with everyone else's time)
We need to relax about accuracy. We have enough pressure in our lives already. It is okay to be late by 5 minutes. Or by 5 morenits. Time is a tool, and it should remain just that.