As the days of quarantine add up, many of us have expressed a strange sense of time becoming blurred — the hours we used to divide with our old routines have been upended, and our unchanging surroundings can sometimes make the feeling of time feel less progressive. In fact, of course, the external physical world has not changed the pace of entropy. It is we who carved out time into discrete chunks who have changed.
Here you see one of the oldest extant attempts to structure time with a mechanical clock. This is the 14th-century clock of Wells Cathedral in England, built by a master of the trade named Peter Lightfoot. Christian institutions were especially interested in keeping track of time to alert the monks, priests, and general public when it was time to pray. Using the system of seconds, minutes, and hours begun in Ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, the days were divided into 24-hour cycles. Those counting the hours from sunset followed an Italian system — our modern way of having two 12-hour cycles beginning at midnight comes from France.
The Wells Cathedral clock reflects its culture in another way: it illustrates a geocentric idea of the universe with the earth in the center, and the sun and moon rotating around it. The stars change position regardless of our observations, but the way we imagine time is subjective and reflects our own world-views.
Source(s): _Scientific American_, “A Chronicle of Timekeeping,” by William J.H. Andrews, Feb 1, 2006; DOI: blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/step-back-time-two-historical-clocks-re-displayed/, by David Rooney, 25 August 2017; wikipedia.
