who invented units of time

I am just ........................

whs said:

I think the OP has a serious query - he should get a serious answer. It is a fascinating subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

quite right too,this is serious stuff guys and it is running out.

There are at least three aspects of time:

experiential,
conceptual,
and physical.

Experiential time may drift ever so slowly (often for the young, who are impatient for adulthood) or flee all too fast (especially as one approaches the precipitous terminal cliff at an advanced age). Experiential time is perhaps the most insubstantial element in human consciousness. It is with us all through our waking hours, apparently drifting silently and ceaselessly in the external world as well as within the very core of our being.

Conceptual time is like an imaginary straight line that can extended to infinity in either direction, taking us to realms way beyond the bracket whose bounds cosmologists proclaim as the big bang and heat-death. It has no beginning and no end, just an imaginary stretch the mind constructs.

Then there is the steady flow of physical time in a given frame of reference, the sort that is measured by physicists and chronometers, taking advantage of periodic changes, either at the lunar and stellar levels or at the microcosmic domain of atomic transitions. Physical time, as per current cosmology, had its birth with the big bang and was nonexistent prior to this ignition of the physical world.

Theologians have argued about whether God created time. The simple answer could be, “Of course God did, for did not God create everything?” Or, “Certainly not, since there was no God prior to thinking man.” In other words, the two simple answers depend on whether a person is a theist or an atheist. The Svetasvatara Upanishad describes God as the "architect of time": kâlakâro. For Pythagoras, time was the soul of the world.
What is relevant to recognize is that experiential time plays a role when we are bored or having fun, conceptual time comes into the fore when we are logically analyzing the nature of time, and physical time matters when we are doing serious physics or cosmology.

Shakespeare once described time as both our parent and our grave. Indeed, each one of us tastes a slice of time, and when the lights go off in conscious life, we drop out of the steady stream in which we seem to be drifting. It is conscious life that perceives the presence of the stream. When we are thrown into the invisible stream of physical time, it turns into experiential time, a portion of a stream that continues indefinitely. What we do during that interval is what really matters. and so on!

Hmm, what I find interesting is that no matter if you use English measurements for length, weight etc. or metric, they both use seconds,minutes,hours.

Calendars I don't go into because I hate date calculation more than anything else in computing 'cept maybe parsing precedence of some programming language with lots of nested parens and brackets.

Kind of makes me wonder why some iconoclast didn't invent counter units to seconds etc... though.

One thing I can't swallow is time lords being extinct. I mean, they were traveling around in time all the time. So how could they not be someplace/where? :)

z3r010 said:

MilesAhead said:

Hmm, what I find interesting is that no matter if you use English measurements for length, weight etc. or metric.

We've used metric for over 40 years, there is only 2-3 countries in the world clinging to the stupid imperial system.

You make it sound like something with Darth Vader involved. :)

I just think it odd nobody came up with an alternative to seconds. Supposedly one eye blink is a fifth of a second. So that would seem like a natural basis. Like "you students don't settle down in 3 blinks they'll be hell to pay" or something.

Powers of 10 is way easier. When I ran a high vacuum system I didn't bother with pressure measured in inches. Afaiwc 760 mm was 1 atmosphere. At least for the purposes of my work. And vacuums were typically 5x10 to -5 mm as a minimum. :)

MilesAhead said:

I just think it odd nobody came up with an alternative to seconds.

Swiss watch maker Swatch came up with a decimal time concept called .beat in 1998, you can still buy watches using the Swatch .beat time units.

Check your local time in .beats: Official Swatch Website - Swatch International
About Swatch .beats: Swatch Internet Time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kari

z3r010 said:

MilesAhead said:

Hmm, what I find interesting is that no matter if you use English measurements for length, weight etc. or metric.

We've used metric for over 40 years, there is only 2-3 countries in the world clinging to the stupid imperial system.

But I am in one of those countries. Are you calling us stupid? But I don't care what you think of because I have to follow it since I live here. (I actually wish we could just migrate to metric because our system is so confusing.

When I built my house in Florida, I made them plans at the scale of 1:100. They could not deal with that. They were using those rediculous rulers that had different imperial scales where you could not convert one to the next - except with those rulers. I think the Romans were more advanced, else they could not have built all those buildings, streets and military installations.

Computer0304 said:

z3r010 said:

MilesAhead said:

Hmm, what I find interesting is that no matter if you use English measurements for length, weight etc. or metric.

We've used metric for over 40 years, there is only 2-3 countries in the world clinging to the stupid imperial system.

But I am in one of those countries. Are you calling us stupid? But I don't care what you think of because I have to follow it since I live here. (I actually wish we could just migrate to metric because our system is so confusing.

-1.0001010101 rep for that