4 Answers
Humans or humanoids?
The concept of time probably came before Homo sapiens sapiens. Days (sunup to sunset), lunar months and even seasons were used before the more accurate measurement of time was considered.
In many cases the social structure was organized so that one would not need to arrange a meeting. The days activities (hunting, foraging, cooking and building as examples) were discussed either the morning of the day or the night before.
Only when the population of a people grew to the size of a city did means of dividing the daylight time into hours or some other unit.
In a society almost ruled by clocks and calendars it is hard to realize that this is a relatively new way of organizing one's day.
This first calendars seem to date from about 6000 years ago. Other artifacts dealing with the marking of time might be as old as 30,000 years.
The sexagesimal system (60 seconds in a minute/ 60 minutes in an hour) is probably 4000 years old. Twenty-four hours in a day seems to have come from the Egyptians, who has two 10 hour parts (day and night) each separated by 2 hours of twilight at dawn and dusk.
From Yahoo
10 years ago. Rating: 4 | |
Time is the fourth dimension and a measure in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future,[1][2][3][4][5][6] and also the measure of durations of events and the intervals between them.[3][7][8] Time has long been a major subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars.[3][7][8][9][10][11] Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems.[12][13][14] Some simple, relatively uncontroversial definitions of time include "time is what clocks measure"[7][15] and "time is what keeps everything from happening at once".[16][17][18][19] Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe—a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[20][21] The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[15] and Immanuel Kant,[22][23] holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be travelled.
10 years ago. Rating: 2 | |