Time Passages (with apologies to Al Stewart)

Since daylight savings time kicked in a few weeks back, I've been contemplating the nature of time and how we measure it. Our obsession with slicing time up into manageable pieces is far from a modern development, but we do seem to split the proverbial hair more minutely all the time.

Let's look at the basics. Before people understood concepts like the rotation and orbit of the earth, they probably managed their lives by the simple alternation of light and darkness. Daytime activities likely did not transition well into night, when people yielded to their circadian rhythms.The necessities of life came from the earth and the sky; the pursuit of sustenance and shelter occupied the unmeasured time.

But even then certain patterns regarding the division of time must have been obvious: the cycle of the moon; the changing seasons; the gestation period before birth. These are yet today fundamental to our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

I imagine that the taming of fire initiated gradual changes in the organic interaction between man and nature. Portable light meant the night could be made shorter.  A baby step in the direction of controlling time, though seasonal and other cyclical phenomena remained untouchable.

Each subsequent advancement in the knowledge and skill base of human beings seems to have enabled us to move outside natural rhythms a bit more. Somewhere along the way, rudimentary calendars and diaries began to take shape. Events and stories were recorded in paintings and hieroglyphs, a deviation from the verbal tradition of simpler times. The predictability of the lunar phases was boldly acknowledged; humans were not only marking time but began sectioning it off well into the future.

Eventually, humans realized we did not have to remain bound to the land and the seasons inextricably, nor live by faith any longer: a few visionaries revealed the intricacies of mathematics and science, and the universe lost a great deal of its mystery. The machines we designed, including timekeeping devices, grew more complex as we became more sophisticated.

The growth of industry and the advent of globalism necessitated accurate and universal measurements of many media, including time itself. Suddenly we were locked into the schedules demanded by manufacturers, and many of us became forever locked out of anything resembling a natural relationship with time.

Fast forward to today. What is the first thing most of us do on any given day? Wake up to an alarm and immediately check the time. From then on, it feels like a tug-of-war between us and the clock. Think of the many phrases we have that reference time, particularly as an enemy:

Time flies when you're having fun
A race against time
Time waits for no man
A day late and a dollar short
Time is a-wasting
And so on, ad nauseum.

Is this obsession with time the cause or the result of our mincing it into ever-smaller segments? There is an inherent and unavoidable sense of failure built in to competing against something we can never change; perhaps by breaking it into pieces as tiny as possible, we hope for small victories. Maybe we are reaching the upper limits of our abilities, forcing us to measure new achievements in finer and finer units.

The modern Olympics, begun in 1896, represents the epitome of achievement in sports and international relations. Accurately recording times is a high-profile facet of the games, and a practical science has grown up dedicated to the development and application of timekeeping principles. I found several informative articles about the methodology used to measure time at the games; interestingly, a term I had always assumed was just a buzz phrase--"photo finish"-- originated from the use of technology to photograph the finish line and the time in one shot during Olympic events. An early version of photo finish cameras was used as early as 1912. (See this chronology of Olympic timekeeping by Lacy Perry at howstuffworks.com.)

That's a huge leap from mechanical stopwatches of the previous games. The Olympics now also employ technologies like touch pads in the pools, radar guns for beach volleyball meets, photoelectric cells with laser beams, and digital imaging at 2,000 frames per second. (Steve King's vanityfair.com article gives a nice overview of many applications.) Results are recorded to the millisecond, with the winner sometimes determined "on the basis of a single pixel’s worth of difference between competitors." Where can we possibly go next?

And now that our transition to digital everything seems nearly complete, what about the old school methods? The possibility of losing them to history looms. Let's return to the basic idea of time in our daily lives. A middle school teacher I know recently mentioned that it is not uncommon for her students to be unable to tell the time from a clock with numbers and hands. Kids in their teens and younger have basically never needed to learn how, having grown up in the digital age. Asking them to break the hours into quarters or halves reveals a similar deficiency; some of her students simply don't understand what "a quarter to three" means.

Is it important to hold onto analog timekeeping skills? Yes and no. I find it almost quaint when I see someone wearing a wristwatch these days, so there's a part of me that realizes how old-fashioned analog has become. On the other hand, though, it's also sort of retro-chic, particularly on a young person like my son, who has not only several wristwatches but an antique pocket watch he favors as well. I like the idea of a wind-up mechanism, no batteries required; the less dependence on outside energy the better, no matter how insignificant the draw.

I like regular old clocks anyway, with the steady sweep of the second hand, the little jump of the minute hand, and the comparatively majestic movement of the hour hand. Round and round the dial they go, in their familiar way, unnecessary now perhaps, but, yes, worth having. A digital cuckoo clock, or a grandfather clock with non-functional weights and pendulums would take the joy right out of the experience.

Daily life requires punctuality and routine to a great degree, which means we are not escaping the march of time or its measure by whatever vehicle. I, however, am definitely going to have to draw the line at milliseconds; anything smaller than that is, as they say, above my pay grade.

(Click here for a livescience.com video about Olympic timing.)