Tinkering with Time

摘要

It's been said that "If you are on time, you're late," or, "To be early is to be on time." It's all relative. If you go to a meeting and people are already there, you feel as if you are late. If you are the first to arrive, you wonder if you've got the schedule wrong, and then you check your watch or phone for the time. Time can be troublesome for us, because the present is an ever-changing instant where the past meets the future. We cruise through life when all players reference the same moment, but should we become out of sync, the ride gets bumpy. We can imagine that in humanity's early times the first concepts of time were cyclic periods-like dayight, seasons and life/death. Our fundamental measurement of a day directly relates to our life and history, and seems to tie all nature together. But what about those activities that occur within the confines of each day? Some way of defining the parts of a day were needed. At the time, we had one division-dayight-with most considering the start of a day to be daybreak or sunrise, and the start of night to be sunset.