The concept of time has always fascinated me. We all know what time is, but it defies definition. Early in civilization, people began to mark
time by breaking it into chunks. We have
millennia, centuries, decades, years, seasons, months, weeks, days, hours,
minutes and seconds.
Only three of those units of time are directly embedded in
nature: the year, the season and the
day. All other units of time are
arbitrarily created by man. OK, the
seven day-week was God’s idea. But I
suppose God could have set up a five- or eight-day week, if he had desired.
For us, time is marked by regular, observable recurrences in
nature. All of these marks center around
the sun, quite literally. We evaluate
and mark life on the basis of light.
I wonder how much simpler life would be if we measured only
the natural units of time.
