Time

An overview

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Contents
Articles
Introduction 1

Main article 2
Time 2

Temporal measurement 21
Calendar 21
History of timekeeping devices 27
Clock 48

Definitions and standards 63

Time standard 63
Orders of magnitude 67
Chronology 71

Religion 75
Time Cycles 75
Wheel of time 76

Philosophy 77
Philosophy of space and time 77
Temporal finitism 86

Physical definition 89
Time in physics 89
Spacetime 101
Time dilation 110
Arrow of time 121
Chronon 126

Time travel 128

Time travel 128
Time travel in fiction 149
Grandfather paradox 152

Perception of time 157

 Mental chronometry 157
Sense of time 162

Use of time 166

Time management 166
Time discipline 173

References
Article Sources and Contributors 178
Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors 183

Article Licenses
License 185
Introduction 1

Introduction
Note. This book is based on the Wikipedia article, "Time." The supporting articles are those referenced as major
expansions of selected sections.
 2

Main article

Time
Time is part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to
compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to
quantify the motions of objects. Time has been a major subject of
religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a non-controversial
manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the
greatest scholars.

Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in the

International System of Units. Time is used to define other quantities
— such as velocity — so defining time in terms of such quantities
would result in circularity of definition.[1] An operational definition of
time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions
of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a
free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the
second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments
and everyday affairs of life. The operational definition leaves aside the
question whether there is something called time, apart from the
counting activity just mentioned, that flows and that can be measured.
Investigations of a single continuum called spacetime bring questions
about space into questions about time, questions that have their roots in
the works of early students of natural philosophy.

Among prominent philosophers, there are two distinct viewpoints on

time. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the
universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Time travel,
in this view, becomes a possibility as other "times" persist like frames
of a film strip, spread out across the time line. Sir Isaac Newton
The flow of sand in an hourglass can be used to
keep track of elapsed time. It also concretely
represents the present as being between the past
and the future.

subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as

Newtonian time.[2] [3] 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
Time 3

(together with space and number) within which humans

sequence and compare events. This second view, in the
tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[4] and Immanuel Kant,[5]
[6]
holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and
thus is not itself measurable nor can it be travelled.
Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and
technologists, and was a prime motivation in navigation
and astronomy. Periodic events and periodic motion
have long served as standards for units of time.
Examples include the apparent motion of the sun across
the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a
pendulum, and the beat of a heart. Currently, the Pocket watches are used to keep track of time.
international unit of time, the second, is defined in
terms of radiation emitted by caesium atoms (see below). Time is also of significant social importance, having
economic value ("time is money") as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and
in human life spans.

Temporal measurement
Temporal measurement, or chronometry, takes two distinct period forms: the calendar, a mathematical abstraction
for calculating extensive periods of time,[7] and the clock, a concrete mechanism that counts the ongoing passage of
time. In day-to-day life, the clock is consulted for periods less than a day, the calendar, for periods longer than a day.
Increasingly, personal electronic devices display both calendars and clocks simultaneously. The number (as on a
clock dial or calendar) that marks the occurrence of a specified event as to hour or date is obtained by counting from
a fiducial epoch—a central reference point.

History of the calendar

Artifacts from the Palaeolithic suggest that the moon was used to calculate time as early as 12,000, and possibly even
30,000 BP.[8] Lunar calendars were among the first to appear, with all years having twelve lunar months
(approximately 354 days). Without intercalation to add days or months to some years, seasons quickly drift in a
calendar based solely on twelve lunar months. Lunisolar calendars have a thirteenth month added to some years to
make up for the difference between a full year (now known to be about 365.24 days) and a year of just twelve lunar
months. The numbers twelve and thirteen came to feature prominently in many cultures, at least partly due to this
relationship of months to years.
The reforms of Julius Caesar in 45 BC put the Roman world on a solar calendar. This Julian calendar was faulty in
that its intercalation still allowed the astronomical solstices and equinoxes to advance against it by about 11 minutes
per year. Pope Gregory XIII introduced a correction in 1582; the Gregorian calendar was only slowly adopted by
different nations over a period of centuries, but is today by far the one in most common use around the world.
Time 4

History of time measurement devices

A large variety of devices have been invented to measure time. The
study of these devices is called horology.
An Egyptian device dating to c.1500 BC, similar in shape to a bent
T-square, measured the passage of time from the shadow cast by its
crossbar on a non-linear rule. The T was oriented eastward in the
mornings. At noon, the device was turned around so that it could cast
its shadow in the evening direction.[9]
A sundial uses a gnomon to cast a shadow on a set of markings which
Horizontal sundial in Taganrog (1833)
were calibrated to the hour. The position of the shadow marked the
hour in local time.
The most precise timekeeping devices of the ancient world were the water clock or clepsydra, one of which was
found in the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep I (1525–1504 BC). They could be used to measure the hours
even at night, but required manual upkeep to replenish the flow of water. The Greeks and Chaldeans regularly
maintained timekeeping records as an essential part of their astronomical observations. Arab inventors and engineers
in particular made improvements on the use of water clocks up to the Middle Ages.[10] In the 11th century, the
Chinese inventors and engineers invented the first mechanical clocks to be driven by an escapement mechanism.

The hourglass uses the flow of sand to measure the flow of time. They
were used in navigation. Ferdinand Magellan used 18 glasses on each
ship for his circumnavigation of the globe (1522).[11] Incense sticks
and candles were, and are, commonly used to measure time in temples
and churches across the globe. Waterclocks, and later, mechanical
clocks, were used to mark the events of the abbeys and monasteries of
the Middle Ages. Richard of Wallingford (1292–1336), abbot of St.
Alban's abbey, famously built a mechanical clock as an astronomical
orrery about 1330.[12] [13] Great advances in accurate time-keeping
A contemporary quartz watch
were made by Galileo Galilei and especially Christiaan Huygens with
the invention of pendulum driven clocks.

The English word clock probably comes from the Middle Dutch word "klocke" which is in turn derived from the
mediaeval Latin word "clocca", which is ultimately derived from Celtic, and is cognate with French, Latin, and
German words that mean bell. The passage of the hours at sea were marked by bells, and denoted the time (see ship's
bells). The hours were marked by bells in the abbeys as well as at sea.
Time 5

Clocks can range from watches, to more exotic varieties such as the
Clock of the Long Now. They can be driven by a variety of means,
including gravity, springs, and various forms of electrical power, and
regulated by a variety of means such as a pendulum.
A chronometer is a portable timekeeper that meets certain precision
standards. Initially, the term was used to refer to the marine
chronometer, a timepiece used to determine longitude by means of
celestial navigation, a precision firstly achieved by John Harrison.
More recently, the term has also been applied to the chronometer
watch, a wristwatch that meets precision standards set by the Swiss
agency COSC.
A chip-scale atomic clock
The most accurate timekeeping devices are atomic clocks, which are
accurate to seconds in many millions of years,[14] and are used to
calibrate other clocks and timekeeping instruments. Atomic clocks use the spin property of atoms as their basis, and
since 1967, the International System of Measurements bases its unit of time, the second, on the properties of caesium
atoms. SI defines the second as 9,192,631,770 cycles of that radiation which corresponds to the transition between
two electron spin energy levels of the ground state of the 133Cs atom.

Today, the Global Positioning System in coordination with the Network Time Protocol can be used to synchronize
timekeeping systems across the globe.
In medieval philosophical writings, the atom was a unit of time referred to as the smallest possible division of time.
The earliest known occurrence in English is in Byrhtferth's Enchiridion (a science text) of 1010–1012,[15] where it
was defined as 1/564 of a momentum (1½ minutes),[16] and thus equal to 15/94 of a second. It was used in the
computus, the process of calculating the date of Easter.
As of 2006, the smallest unit of time that has been directly measured is on the attosecond (10−18 s) time scale, or
around 1026 Planck times.[17] [18] [19]

Definitions and standards

Common units of time

Unit Size Notes

attosecond 1/1018 s shortest time now measurable

femtosecond 1/1015 s pulse time on fastest lasers

picosecond 1/1012 s

nanosecond 1/109 s time for molecules to fluoresce

microsecond 1/106 s

millisecond 0.001 s

second SI base unit

minute 60 seconds

hour 60 minutes

day 24 hours

week 7 days Also called sennight

Time 6

fortnight 14 days 2 weeks

lunar month 27.2–29.5 days Various definitions of lunar month exist.

month 28–31 days

quarter 3 months
year 12 months

common year 365 days 52 weeks + 1 day

leap year 366 days 52 weeks + 2 days

tropical year 365.24219 days average

Gregorian year 365.2425 days average

Olympiad 4 year cycle

lustrum 5 years Also called pentad

decade 10 years

Indiction 15 year cycle

generation 17–25 years approximate

jubilee (Biblical) 50 years

century 100 years

millennium 1,000 years

The SI base unit for time is the SI second. From the second, larger units such as the minute, hour and day are
defined, though they are "non-SI" units because they do not use the decimal system, and also because of the
occasional need for a leap second. They are, however, officially accepted for use with the International System.
There are no fixed ratios between seconds and months or years as months and years have significant variations in
length.[20]
The official SI definition of the second is as follows:[20] [21]
The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between
the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.
At its 1997 meeting, the CIPM affirmed that this definition refers to a caesium atom in its ground state at a
temperature of 0 K.[20] Previous to 1967, the second was defined as:
the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time.
The current definition of the second, coupled with the current definition of the metre, is based on the special theory
of relativity, which affirms our space-time to be a Minkowski space.

World time
Time keeping is so critical to the functioning of modern societies that it is coordinated at an international level. The
basis for scientific time is a continuous count of seconds based on atomic clocks around the world, known as the
International Atomic Time (TAI). Other scientific time standards include Terrestrial Time and Barycentric
Dynamical Time.
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the basis for modern civil time. Since January 1, 1972, it has been defined to
follow TAI with an exact offset of an integer number of seconds, changing only when a leap second is added to keep
clock time synchronized with the rotation of the Earth. In TAI and UTC systems, the duration of a second is
constant, as it is defined by the unchanging transition period of the caesium atom.
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is an older standard, adopted starting with British railroads in 1847. Using telescopes
instead of atomic clocks, GMT was calibrated to the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in the
Time 7

UK. Universal Time (UT) is the modern term for the international telescope-based system, adopted to replace
"Greenwich Mean Time" in 1928 by the International Astronomical Union. Observations at the Greenwich
Observatory itself ceased in 1954, though the location is still used as the basis for the coordinate system. Because the
rotational period of Earth is not perfectly constant, the duration of a second would vary if calibrated to a
telescope-based standard like GMT or UT - in which a second was defined as a fraction of a day or year. The terms
"GMT" and "Greenwich Mean Time" are sometimes used informally to refer to UT or UTC.
The Global Positioning System also broadcasts a very precise time signal worldwide, along with instructions for
converting GPS time to UTC.
Earth is split up into a number of time zones. Most time zones are exactly one hour apart, and by convention
compute their local time as an offset from UTC or GMT. In many locations these offsets vary twice yearly due to
daylight saving time transitions.

Sidereal time
Sidereal time is the measurement of time relative to a distant star (instead of solar time that is relative to the sun). It
is used in astronomy to predict when a star will be overhead. Due to the rotation of the earth around the sun a
sidereal day is 4 minutes (1/366th) less than a solar day.

Chronology
Another form of time measurement consists of studying the past. Events in the past can be ordered in a sequence
(creating a chronology), and can be put into chronological groups (periodization). One of the most important systems
of periodization is geologic time, which is a system of periodizing the events that shaped the Earth and its life.
Chronology, periodization, and interpretation of the past are together known as the study of history.
Time 8

Religion
In the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes, traditionally ascribed to Solomon (970–928 BC), time (as the Hebrew word
‫ןדע‬, ‫` ןמז‬iddan(time) zĕman(season) is often translated) was traditionally regarded as a medium for the passage of
predestined events. (Another word, ‫ "ןמז "نامز‬zman, was current as meaning time fit for an event, and is used as the
modern Arabic and Hebrew equivalent to the English word "time".)
There is an appointed time (zman) for everything. And there is a time (’êth) for
every event under heaven–
A time (’êth) to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to
uproot what is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a
time to shun embracing.
A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to
throw away.
A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time
to speak.
A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace. –
Ecclesiastes  3:1–8

Linear and cyclical time

In general, the Judaeo-Christian concept, based on the Bible, is that time is linear, with a
beginning, the act of creation by God. The Christian view assumes also an end, the
eschaton, expected to happen when Jesus returns to earth in the Second Coming to judge the
living and the dead. This will be the consummation of the world and time. St Augustine's
City of God was the first developed application of this concept to world history. The
Christian view is that God is uncreated and eternal so that He and the supernatural world are
Hindu units of time
outside time and exist in eternity.
shown logarithmically
Ancient cultures such as Incan, Mayan, Hopi, and other Native American Tribes, plus the
Babylonian, Ancient Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Jainist, and others have a concept of a wheel of time, that regards time
as cyclical and quantic consisting of repeating ages that happen to every being of the Universe between birth and
extinction.

Numeric and Divine time

The Greek language denotes two distinct principles, Chronos and Kairos. The former refers to numeric, or
chronological, time. The latter, literally "the right or opportune moment," relates specifically to metaphysical or
Divine time. In theology, Kairos is qualitative, as opposed to quantitative.

Philosophy
The Vedas, the earliest texts on Indian philosophy and Hindu philosophy dating back to the late 2nd millennium BC,
describe ancient Hindu cosmology, in which the universe goes through repeated cycles of creation, destruction and
rebirth, with each cycle lasting 4,320,000 years. Ancient Greek philosophers, including Parmenides and Heraclitus,
wrote essays on the nature of time.[22]
Time 9

In Book 11 of St. Augustine's Confessions, he ruminates on the nature of time, asking, "What then is time? If no one
asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." He settles on time being defined more by
what it is not than what it is,[23] an approach similar to that taken in other negative definitions.
In contrast to ancient Greek philosophers who believed that the universe had an infinite past with no beginning,
medieval philosophers and theologians developed the concept of the universe having a finite past with a beginning.
This view is not shared by Abrahamic faiths as they believe time started by creation, therefore the only thing being
infinite is God and everything else, including time, is finite.
Newton believed in absolute space, and a precursor to Kantian time, Leibniz believed that time and space are
relational.[24] The differences between Leibniz's and Newton's interpretations came to a head in the famous
Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence.
Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, described time as an a priori intuition that allows us (together with
the other a priori intuition, space) to comprehend sense experience.[25] With Kant, neither space nor time are
conceived as substances, but rather both are elements of a systematic mental framework that necessarily structures
the experiences of any rational agent, or observing subject. Kant thought of time as a fundamental part of an abstract
conceptual framework, together with space and number, within which we sequence events, quantify their duration,
and compare the motions of objects. In this view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows," that objects
"move through," or that is a "container" for events. Spatial measurements are used to quantify the extent of and
distances between objects, and temporal measurements are used to quantify the durations of and between events.
(See Ontology).
Henri Bergson believed that time was neither a real homogeneous medium nor a mental construct, but possesses
what he referred to as Duration. Duration, in Bergson's view, was creativity and memory as an essential component
of reality.[26]

Time as "unreal"
In 5th century BC Greece, Antiphon the Sophist, in a fragment preserved from his chief work On Truth held that:
"Time is not a reality (hypostasis), but a concept (noêma) or a measure (metron)." Parmenides went further,
maintaining that time, motion, and change were illusions, leading to the paradoxes of his follower Zeno.[27] Time as
illusion is also a common theme in Buddhist thought,[28] and some modern philosophers have carried on with this
theme. J. M. E. McTaggart's 1908 The Unreality of Time, for example, argues that time is unreal (see also The flow
of time).
However, these arguments often center around what it means for something to be "real". Modern physicists generally
consider time to be as "real" as space, though others such as Julian Barbour in his book The End of Time, argue that
quantum equations of the universe take their true form when expressed in the timeless configuration spacerealm
containing every possible "Now" or momentary configuration of the universe, which he terms 'platonia'.[29] (See
also: Eternalism (philosophy of time).)

Physical definition
From the age of Newton to Einstein's profound reinterpretation of the physical concepts associated with time and
space, time was considered to be "absolute" and to flow "equably" (to use the words of Newton) for all observers.[30]
The science of classical mechanics is based on this Newtonian idea of time.
Einstein, in his special theory of relativity,[31] postulated the constancy and finiteness of the speed of light for all
observers. He showed that this postulate, together with a reasonable definition for what it means for two events to be
simultaneous, requires that distances appear compressed and time intervals appear lengthened for events associated
with objects in motion relative to an inertial observer.
Time 10

Einstein showed that if time and space is measured using electromagnetic phenomena (like light bouncing between
mirrors) then due to the constancy of the speed of light, time and space become mathematically entangled together in
a certain way (called Minkowski space) which in turn results in Lorentz transformation and in entanglement of all
other important derivative physical quantities (like energy, momentum, mass, force, etc) in a certain 4-vectorial way
(see special relativity for more details).

Classical mechanics
In classical mechanics, Newton's concept of "relative, apparent, and common time" can be used in the formulation of
a prescription for the synchronization of clocks. Events seen by two different observers in motion relative to each
other produce a mathematical concept of time that works pretty well for describing the everyday phenomena of most
people's experience.

Modern physics
In the late nineteenth century, physicists encountered problems with the classical understanding of time, in
connection with the behavior of electricity and magnetism. Einstein resolved these problems by invoking a method
of synchronizing clocks using the constant, finite speed of light as the maximum signal velocity. This led directly to
the result that observers in motion relative to one another will measure different elapsed times for the same event.

Spacetime
Time has historically been closely related with space,
the two together comprising spacetime in Einstein's
special relativity and general relativity. According to
these theories, the concept of time depends on the
spatial reference frame of the observer, and the human
perception as well as the measurement by instruments
such as clocks are different for observers in relative
motion. The past is the set of events that can send light
signals to the observer, the future is the set of events to
which the observer can send light signals.

Two-dimensional space depicted in three-dimensional spacetime.

The past and future light cones are absolute, the "present" is a
relative concept different for observers in relative motion.
Time 11

Time dilation
"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once".
This quote, attributed variously to Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler,
and Woody Allen, says that time is what separates cause and effect.
Einstein showed in his thought experiments that people travelling at
different speeds, while agreeing on cause and effect, will measure
different time separations between events and can even observe
different chronological orderings between non-causally related events.
Though these effects are typically minute in the human experience, the
effect becomes much more pronounced for objects moving at speeds
approaching the speed of light. Many subatomic particles exist for only
a fixed fraction of a second in a lab relatively at rest, but some that
travel close to the speed of light can be measured to travel further and Relativity of simultaneity: Event B is
survive much longer than expected (a muon is one example). simultaneous with A in the green reference frame,
According to the special theory of relativity, in the high-speed but it occurred before in the blue frame, and will
occur later in the red frame.
particle's frame of reference, it exists, on the average, for a standard
amount of time known as its mean lifetime, and the distance it travels
in that time is zero, because its velocity is zero. Relative to a frame of reference at rest, time seems to "slow down"
for the particle. Relative to the high-speed particle, distances seem to shorten. Even in Newtonian terms time may be
considered the fourth dimension of motion; but Einstein showed how both temporal and spatial dimensions can be
altered (or "warped") by high-speed motion.

Einstein (The Meaning of Relativity): "Two events taking place at the points A and B of a system K are simultaneous
if they appear at the same instant when observed from the middle point, M, of the interval AB. Time is then defined
as the ensemble of the indications of similar clocks, at rest relatively to K, which register the same simultaneously."
Einstein wrote in his book, Relativity, that simultaneity is also relative, i.e., two events that appear simultaneous to
an observer in a particular inertial reference frame need not be judged as simultaneous by a second observer in a
different inertial frame of reference.
Time 12

Relativistic time versus Newtonian time

The animations visualise the different treatments of time in the
Newtonian and the relativistic descriptions. At heart of these
differences are the Galilean and Lorentz transformations applicable in
the Newtonian and relativistic theories, respectively.
In the figures, the vertical direction indicates time. The horizontal
direction indicates distance (only one spatial dimension is taken into
account), and the thick dashed curve is the spacetime trajectory ("world
line") of the observer. The small dots indicate specific (past and future)
events in spacetime.
The slope of the world line (deviation from being vertical) gives the
relative velocity to the observer. Note how in both pictures the view of
Views of spacetime along the world line of a
spacetime changes when the observer accelerates.
rapidly accelerating observer in a relativistic
In the Newtonian description these changes are such that time is universe. The events ("dots") that pass the two
absolute: the movements of the observer do not influence whether an diagonal lines in the bottom half of the image (the
past light cone of the observer in the origin) are
event occurs in the 'now' (i.e. whether an event passes the horizontal
the events visible to the observer.
line through the observer).
However, in the relativistic description the observability of events is absolute: the movements of the observer do not
influence whether an event passes the "light cone" of the observer. Notice that with the change from a Newtonian to
a relativistic description, the concept of absolute time is no longer applicable: events move up-and-down in the
figure depending on the acceleration of the observer.

Arrow of time
Time appears to have a direction – the past lies behind, fixed and incommutable, while the future lies ahead and is
not necessarily fixed. Yet the majority of the laws of physics don't provide this arrow of time. The exceptions include
the Second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy must increase over time (see Entropy); the
cosmological arrow of time, which points away from the Big Bang, and the radiative arrow of time, caused by light
only traveling forwards in time. In particle physics, there is also the weak arrow of time, from CPT symmetry, and
also measurement in quantum mechanics (see Measurement in quantum mechanics).

Quantised time
Time quantization is a hypothetical concept. In the modern established physical theories (the Standard Model of
Particles and Interactions and General Relativity) time is not quantized.
Planck time (~ 5.4 × 10−44 seconds) is the unit of time in the system of natural units known as Planck units. Current
established physical theories are believed to fail at this time scale, and many physicists expect that the Planck time
might be the smallest unit of time that could ever be measured, even in principle. Tentative physical theories that
describe this time scale exist; see for instance loop quantum gravity.

Time and the Big Bang

Stephen Hawking in particular has addressed a connection between time and the Big Bang. In A Brief History of
Time and elsewhere, Hawking says that even if time did not begin with the Big Bang and there were another time
frame before the Big Bang, no information from events then would be accessible to us, and nothing that happened
then would have any effect upon the present time-frame.[32] Upon occasion, Hawking has stated that time actually
began with the Big Bang, and that questions about what happened before the Big Bang are meaningless.[32] [33] [34]
Time 13

This less-nuanced, but commonly repeated formulation has received criticisms from philosophers such as
Aristotelian philosopher Mortimer J. Adler.[35] [36]
Scientists have come to some agreement on descriptions of events that happened 10−35 seconds after the Big Bang,
but generally agree that descriptions about what happened before one Planck time (5 × 10−44 seconds) after the Big
Bang will likely remain pure speculation.

Speculative physics beyond the Big Bang

While the Big Bang model is well
established in cosmology, it is likely to be
refined in the future. Little is known about
the earliest moments of the universe's
history. The Penrose-Hawking singularity
theorems require the existence of a
singularity at the beginning of cosmic time.
However, these theorems assume that
general relativity is correct, but general
relativity must break down before the
universe reaches the Planck temperature,
and a correct treatment of quantum gravity
may avoid the singularity.[37]

There may also be parts of the universe well A graphical representation of the expansion of the universe with the inflationary
epoch represented as the dramatic expansion of the metric seen on the left. Image
beyond what can be observed in principle. If
from WMAP press release, 2006.
inflation occurred this is likely, for
exponential expansion would push large
regions of space beyond our observable horizon.
Some proposals, each of which entails untested hypotheses, are:
• models including the Hartle-Hawking boundary condition in which the whole of space-time is finite; the Big
Bang does represent the limit of time, but without the need for a singularity.[38]
• brane cosmology models[39]
in which inflation is due to the movement of branes in string theory; the pre-big bang model; the ekpyrotic model, in
which the Big Bang is the result of a collision between branes; and the cyclic model, a variant of the ekpyrotic model
in which collisions occur periodically.[40] [41] [42]
• chaotic inflation, in which inflation events start here and there in a random quantum-gravity foam, each leading to
a bubble universe expanding from its own big bang.[43]
Proposals in the last two categories see the Big Bang as an event in a much larger and older universe, or multiverse,
and not the literal beginning.

Time travel
Time travel is the concept of moving backwards and/or forwards to different points in time, in a manner analogous to
moving through space and different from the normal "flow" of time to an earthbound observer. Although time travel
has been a plot device in fiction since the 19th century, and one-way travel into the future is arguably possible given
the phenomenon of time dilation in the theory of relativity, it is currently unknown whether the laws of physics
would allow time travel to the past. Any technological device, whether fictional or hypothetical, that is used to
achieve time travel is known as a time machine.
Time 14

A central problem with time travel to the past is the violation of causality; should an effect precede its cause, it
would give rise to the possibility of temporal paradox. Some interpretations of time travel resolve this by accepting
the possibility of travel between parallel realities or universes.
Theory would point toward there having to be a physical dimension in which one could travel to, where the present
(i.e. the point that which you are leaving) would be present at a point fixed in either the past or future. Seeing as this
theory would be dependent upon the theory of a multiverse, it is uncertain how or if it would be possible to just
prove the possibility of time travel.
Another solution to the problem of causality-based temporal paradoxes is that such paradoxes cannot arise simply
because they have not arisen. As described in the novel The Time Traveler's Wife and alluded to in the movie The
Terminator, free will either ceases to exist in the past or the outcomes of such decisions are predetermined. As such,
it would not be possible to enact the grandfather paradox because it is a historical fact that your grandfather was not
killed. This view simply holds that history is an unchangeable constant.

Judgement of time
The specious present refers to the time duration wherein one's perceptions are considered to be in the present. The
experienced present is said to be ‘specious’ in that, unlike the objective present, it is an interval and not a durationless
instant. The term specious present was first introduced by the psychologist E.R. Clay, and later developed by
William James.[44]

Biopsychology
The brain's judgement of time is known to be a highly distributed system, including at least the cerebral cortex,
cerebellum and basal ganglia as its components. One particular component, the suprachiasmatic nuclei, is
responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range
(ultradian) timekeeping.
Psychoactive drugs can impair the judgement of time. Stimulants can lead both humans and rats to overestimate time
intervals. [45] [46] while depressants can have the opposite effect.[47] The level of activity in the brain of
neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine may be the reason for this.[48]
Mental chronometry is the use of response time in perceptual-motor tasks to infer the content, duration, and temporal
sequencing of cognitive operations. Experiments have shown rats successfully estimating intervals of time.[49]

Alterations
In addition to psychoactive drugs, judgements of time can be altered by temporal illusions (like the kappa effect[50] ),
age,[51] hypnosis,[52] and travel at the speed of light. The sense of time is impaired in some people with neurological
diseases such as Parkinson's disease and attention deficit disorder.
It is a known phenomenon that long periods of time appear to pass faster as people grow older. Stephen Hawking,
also suggests that the judgement of time is a function of age, according to a ratio- Unit of Time : Time Lived. For
example, one day to a eleven-year-old person would be approximately 1/4,000 of their life, while one day to a
55-year-old would be approximately 1/20,000 of their life. According to such an interpretation, a day would appear
much longer to a young child than to an adult, even though the measure of time is the same.
Time 15

Use of time
In sociology and anthropology, time discipline is the general name given to social and economic rules, conventions,
customs, and expectations governing the measurement of time, the social currency and awareness of time
measurements, and people's expectations concerning the observance of these customs by others.
The use of time is an important issue in understanding human behaviour, education, and travel behaviour. Time use
research is a developing field of study. The question concerns how time is allocated across a number of activities
(such as time spent at home, at work, shopping, etc.). Time use changes with technology, as the television or the
Internet created new opportunities to use time in different ways. However, some aspects of time use are relatively
stable over long periods of time, such as the amount of time spent traveling to work, which despite major changes in
transport, has been observed to be about 20–30 minutes one-way for a large number of cities over a long period of
time.
Time management is the organization of tasks or events by first estimating how much time a task will take to be
completed, when it must be completed, and then adjusting events that would interfere with its completion so that
completion is reached in the appropriate amount of time. Calendars and day planners are common examples of time
management tools.
Arlie Russell Hochschild and Norbert Elias have written on the use of time from a sociological perspective.

See also
See the Time navigation templates below for an exhaustive list of
related articles.
• Term (time)
• Horology

Books
• A Brief History of Time
• About Time
• An Experiment with Time* Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman
• From Eternity To Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
[53]
, by Sean M. Carroll
• In Search of Time: Journeys Along a Curious Dimension, by Dan
Falk
• Soul of The World: Unlocking the Secrets of Time, by Christopher
Time's mortal aspect is personified in this bronze
Dewdney
statue by Charles van der Stappen
• Time, by Eva Hoffman
• Time in Antiquity, by Robert Hannah
 21

Temporal measurement

Calendar
A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or
administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time,
typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is known
as a date. Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though
not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon. Many
civilizations and societies have devised a calendar, usually derived from other
calendars on which they model their systems, suited to their particular needs.

A calendar is also a physical device (often paper). This is the most common
usage of the word. Other similar types of calendars can include computerized
systems, which can be set to remind the user of upcoming events and
appointments.
As a subset, calendar is also used to denote a list of particular set of planned
events (for example, court calendar).
The English word calendar is derived from the Latin word kalendae, which was
the Latin name of the first day of every month.[1]

Calendar systems
A full calendar system has a different calendar date for every day. Thus the week
cycle is by itself not a full calendar system; neither is a system to name the days
within a year without a system for identifying the years.
The simplest calendar system just counts time periods from a reference date.
A page from the Hindu calendar
This applies for the Julian day. Virtually the only possible variation is using a
1871–1872.
different reference date, in particular one less distant in the past to make the
numbers smaller. Computations in these systems are just a matter of addition and
subtraction.
Other calendars have one (or multiple) larger units of time.
Calendars that contain one level of cycles:
• week and weekday – this system (without year, the week number keeps on increasing) is not very common
• year and ordinal date within the year, e.g. the ISO 8601 ordinal date system
Calendars with two levels of cycles:
• year, month, and day – most systems, including the Gregorian calendar (and its very similar predecessor, the
Julian calendar), the Islamic calendar, and the Hebrew calendar
• year, week, and weekday – e.g. the ISO week date
Cycles can be synchronized with periodic phenomena:
• A lunar calendar is synchronized to the motion of the Moon (lunar phases); an example is the Islamic calendar.
Calendar 22

• A solar calendar is based on perceived seasonal changes synchronized to the apparent motion of the Sun; an
example is the Persian calendar.
• A "luni-solar calendar" is based on a combination of both solar and lunar reckonings; an example is the traditional
calendar of China and the Hindu Calendar in India.
• There are some calendars that appear to be synchronized to the motion of Venus, such as some of the ancient
Egyptian calendars; synchronization to Venus appears to occur primarily in civilizations near the Equator.
• The week cycle is an example of one that is not synchronized to any external phenomenon (although it may have
been derived from lunar phases, beginning anew every month).
Very commonly a calendar includes more than one type of cycle, or has both cyclic and acyclic elements. A
lunisolar calendar is synchronized both to the motion of the moon and to the apparent motion of the sun; an example
is the Hebrew calendar.
Many calendars incorporate simpler calendars as elements. For example, the rules of the Hebrew calendar depend on
the seven-day week cycle (a very simple calendar), so the week is one of the cycles of the Hebrew calendar. It is also
common to operate two calendars simultaneously, usually providing unrelated cycles, and the result may also be
considered a more complex calendar. For example, the Gregorian calendar has no inherent dependence on the
seven-day week, but in Western society the two are used together, and calendar tools indicate both the Gregorian
date and the day of week.[2]
The week cycle is shared by various calendar systems (although the significance of special days such as Friday,
Saturday, and Sunday varies). Systems of leap days usually do not affect the week cycle. The week cycle was not
even interrupted when 10, 11, 12, or 13 dates were skipped when the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian
calendar by various countries.

Solar calendars

Days used by solar calendars

Solar calendars assign a date to each solar day. A day may consist of the period between sunrise and sunset, with a
following period of night, or it may be a period between successive events such as two sunsets. The length of the
interval between two such successive events may be allowed to vary slightly during the year, or it may be averaged
into a mean solar day. Other types of calendar may also use a solar day.

Calendar reform
There have been a number of proposals for reform of the calendar, such as the World Calendar, International Fixed
Calendar and Holocene calendar. The United Nations considered adopting such a reformed calendar for a while in
the 1950s, but these proposals have lost most of their popularity.

Lunar calendars
Not all calendars use the solar year as a unit. A lunar calendar is one in which days are numbered within each lunar
phase cycle. Because the length of the lunar month is not an even fraction of the length of the tropical year, a purely
lunar calendar quickly drifts against the seasons, which don't vary much near the equator. It does, however, stay
constant with respect to other phenomena, notably tides. An example is the Islamic calendar. Alexander Marshack,
in a controversial reading,[3] believed that marks on a bone baton (c. 25,000 BC) represented a lunar calendar. Other
marked bones may also represent lunar calendars.[4] Similarly, Michael Rappenglueck believes that marks on a
15,000-year old cave painting represent a lunar calendar.[5]
Calendar 23

Lunisolar calendars
A lunisolar calendar is a lunar calendar that compensates by adding an extra month as needed to realign the months
with the seasons. An example is the Hebrew calendar which uses a 19-year cycle.

Calendar subdivisions
Nearly all calendar systems group consecutive days into "months" and also into "years". In a solar calendar a year
approximates Earth's tropical year (that is, the time it takes for a complete cycle of seasons), traditionally used to
facilitate the planning of agricultural activities. In a lunar calendar, the month approximates the cycle of the moon
phase. Consecutive days may be grouped into other periods such as the week.
Because the number of days in the tropical year is not a whole number, a solar calendar must have a different
number of days in different years. This may be handled, for example, by adding an extra day (29 February) in leap
years. The same applies to months in a lunar calendar and also the number of months in a year in a lunisolar
calendar. This is generally known as intercalation. Even if a calendar is solar, but not lunar, the year cannot be
divided entirely into months that never vary in length.
Cultures may define other units of time, such as the week, for the purpose of scheduling regular activities that do not
easily coincide with months or years. Many cultures use different baselines for their calendars' starting years. For
example, the year in Japan is based on the reign of the current emperor: 2006 was Year 18 of the Emperor Akihito.
See Decade, Century, Millennium

Other calendar types

Arithmetic and astronomical calendars

An astronomical calendar is based on ongoing observation; examples are the religious Islamic calendar and the old
religious Jewish calendar in the time of the Second Temple. Such a calendar is also referred to as an
observation-based calendar. The advantage of such a calendar is that it is perfectly and perpetually accurate. The
disadvantage is that working out when a particular date would occur is difficult.
An arithmetic calendar is one that is based on a strict set of rules; an example is the current Jewish calendar. Such a
calendar is also referred to as a rule-based calendar. The advantage of such a calendar is the ease of calculating when
a particular date occurs. The disadvantage is imperfect accuracy. Furthermore, even if the calendar is very accurate,
its accuracy diminishes slowly over time, owing to changes in Earth's rotation. This limits the lifetime of an accurate
arithmetic calendar to a few thousand years. After then, the rules would need to be modified from observations made
since the invention of the calendar.

Complete and incomplete calendars

Calendars may be either complete or incomplete. Complete calendars provide a way of naming each consecutive
day, while incomplete calendars do not. The early Roman calendar, which had no way of designating the days of the
winter months other than to lump them together as "winter", is an example of an incomplete calendar, while the
Gregorian calendar is an example of a complete calendar.

Uses
The primary practical use of a calendar is to identify days: to be informed about and/or to agree on a future event and
to record an event that has happened. Days may be significant for civil, religious or social reasons. For example, a
calendar provides a way to determine which days are religious or civil holidays, which days mark the beginning and
end of business accounting periods, and which days have legal significance, such as the day taxes are due or a
Calendar 24

contract expires. Also a calendar may, by identifying a day, provide other useful information about the day such as
its season.
Calendars are also used to help people manage their personal schedules, time and activities, particularly when
individuals have numerous work, school, and family commitments. People frequently use multiple systems, and may
keep both a business and family calendar to help prevent them from overcommitting their time.
Calendars are also used as part of a complete timekeeping system: date and time of day together specify a moment in
time. In the modern world, written calendars are no longer an essential part of such systems, as the advent of
accurate clocks has made it possible to record time independently of astronomical events.

Currently used calendars

Calendars in widespread use today include the Gregorian calendar, which is the de facto international standard, and
is used almost everywhere in the world for civil purposes, including in the People's Republic of China and India
(along with the Indian national calendar). Due to the Gregorian calendar's obvious connotations of Western
Christianity, non-Christians and even some Christians sometimes justify its use by replacing the traditional era
notations "AD" and "BC" ("Anno Domini" and "Before Christ") with "CE" and "BCE" ("Common Era" and "Before
Common Era"). The Hindu calendars are some of the most ancient calendars of the world. Eastern Christians of
eastern Europe and western Asia used for a long time the Julian Calendar, that of the old Orthodox church, in
countries like Russia. For over 1500 years, Westerners used the Julian Calendar also.
While the Gregorian calendar is widely used in Israel's business and day-to-day affairs, the Hebrew calendar, used by
Jews worldwide for religious and cultural affairs, also influences civil matters in Israel (such as national holidays)
and can be used there for business dealings (such as for the dating of checks).
The Iranian (Persian) calendar is used in Iran and Afghanistan. The Islamic calendar is used by most non-Iranian
Muslims worldwide. The Chinese, Hebrew, Hindu, and Julian calendars are widely used for religious and/or social
purposes. The Ethiopian calendar or Ethiopic calendar is the principal calendar used in Ethiopia and Eritrea. In
Thailand, where the Thai solar calendar is used, the months and days have adopted the western standard, although
the years are still based on the traditional Buddhist calendar.
Even where there is a commonly used calendar such as the Gregorian calendar, alternate calendars may also be used,
such as a fiscal calendar or the astronomical year numbering system[6] .

Fiscal calendars
A fiscal calendar (such as a 4/4/5 calendar) fixes each month at a specific number of weeks to facilitate comparisons
from month to month and year to year. January always has exactly 4 weeks (Sunday through Saturday), February has
4 weeks, March has 5 weeks, etc. Note that this calendar will normally need to add a 53rd week to every 5th or 6th
year, which might be added to December or might not be, depending on how the organization uses those dates. There
exists an international standard way to do this (the ISO week). The ISO week starts on a Monday, and ends on a
Sunday. Week 1 is always the week that contains 4 January in the Gregorian calendar.
Fiscal calendars are also used by businesses. This is where the fiscal year is just any set of 12 months. This set of 12
months can start and end at any point on the Gregorian calendar. This is the most common usage of fiscal calendars.

Gregorian calendar with Easter Sunday

Calculating the calendar of a previous year (for the Gregorian calendar taking account of the week) is a relatively
easy matter when Easter Sunday is not included on the calendar. However, calculating for Easter Sunday is difficult
because the calculation requires the knowledge of the full moon cycle. Easter Sunday is on the first Sunday after the
first full moon after the Vernal Equinox according to the computus. So, this makes an additional calculation
necessary on top of the normal calculation for January 1 and the calculation of whether or not the year is a leap year.
Calendar 25

There are only 14 different calendars when Easter Sunday is not involved. Each calendar is determined by the day of
the week January 1 falls on and whether or not the year is a leap year. However, when Easter Sunday is included,
there are 70 different calendars (two for each date of Easter).

Physical calendars
A calendar is also a physical device (often paper) (for example, a
desktop calendar or a wall calendar). In a paper calendar one or two
sheets can show a single day, a week, a month, or a year. If a sheet is
for a single day, it easily shows the date and the weekday. If a sheet is
for multiple days it shows a conversion table to convert from weekday
to date and back. With a special pointing device, or by crossing out
past days, it may indicate the current date and weekday. This is the
most common usage of the word.

The sale of physical calendars has been restricted in some countries,

and given as a monopoly to universities and national academies.
Examples include the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the
University of Helsinki, which had a monopoly on the sale of calendars At-A-Glance 2004-2005 calendar

in Finland until the 1990s.

Legal
For lawyers and judges, the calendar is the docket used by the court to schedule the order of hearings or trials. A
paralegal or court officer may keep track of the cases by using docketing software.

Calendars in computing
• Category:Calendaring standards
• Electronic calendar

Layout
There are different layouts for calendars.

A table for each month A calendar which has a different month on each page. This page shows
August
History of timekeeping devices 27

History of timekeeping devices

For thousands of years, devices have been used to measure and keep track of
time. The current sexagesimal system of time measurement dates to
approximately 2000 BC, in Sumer. The Ancient Egyptians divided the day into
two 12-hour periods, and used large obelisks to track the movement of the Sun.
They also developed water clocks, which were probably first used in the Precinct
of Amun-Re, and later outside Egypt as well; they were employed frequently by
the Ancient Greeks, who called them clepsydrae. The Shang Dynasty is believed
to have used the outflow water clock around the same time; the clocks were
introduced from Mesopotamia, possibly as early as 2000 BC. Other ancient
timekeeping devices include the candle clock, used in China, Japan, England and
Iraq; the timestick, widely used in India and Tibet, as well as some parts of
Europe; and the hourglass, which functioned similarly to a water clock.

The earliest clocks relied on shadows cast by the sun, so they were not useful in
cloudy weather or at night, and required recalibration as the seasons changed if
the gnomon was not aligned with the Earth's axis. The earliest known clock with
a water-powered escapement mechanism, which transferred rotational energy
into intermittent motions,[1] dates back to 3rd century BC ancient Greece;[2]
An hourglass keeping track of
Chinese engineers later invented clocks incorporating mercury-powered elapsed time. The hourglass was one
escapement mechanisms in the 10th century,[3] followed by Arabic engineers of the earlier timekeeping devices
inventing water clocks driven by gears and weights in the 11th century.[4]

Mechanical clocks employing the verge escapement mechanism were invented in Europe at the turn of the 14th
century, and became the standard timekeeping device until the spring-powered clock and pocket watch in the 16th
century, followed by the pendulum clock in the 18th century. During the 20th century, quartz oscillators were
invented, followed by atomic clocks. Although first used in laboratories, quartz oscillators were both easy to produce
and accurate, leading to their use in wristwatches. Atomic clocks are far more accurate than any previous
timekeeping device, and are used to calibrate other clocks and to calculate the proper time on Earth; a standardized
civil system, Coordinated Universal Time, is based on atomic time.

Early timekeeping devices

Many ancient civilizations observed astronomical bodies, often the Sun
and Moon, to determine times, dates, and seasons.[5] [6] Methods of
sexagesimal timekeeping, now common in Western society, first
originated nearly 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt;[5] [7] [8] a
similar system was developed later in Mesoamerica.[9] The first
calendars may have been created during the last glacial period, by
hunter-gatherers who employed tools such as sticks and bones to track
the phases of the moon or the seasons.[6] Stone circles, such as
England's Stonehenge, were built in various parts of the world, The sun rising over Stonehenge on the June
especially in Prehistoric Europe, and are thought to have been used to solstice

time and predict seasonal and annual events such as equinoxes or

solstices.[6] [10] As those megalithic civilizations left no recorded history, little is known of their calendars or
timekeeping methods.[11]
History of timekeeping devices 28

3500 BC – 500 BC
Sundials have their origin in shadow clocks, which were the first devices used for measuring the parts of a day.[12]
The oldest known shadow clock is from Egypt, and was made from green schist. Ancient Egyptian obelisks,
constructed about 3500 BC, are also among the earliest shadow clocks.[6] [13] [14]
Egyptian shadow clocks divided daytime into 10 parts, with an additional four
"twilight hours"—two in the morning, and two in the evening. One type of
shadow clock consisted of a long stem with five variable marks and an elevated
crossbar which cast a shadow over those marks. It was positioned eastward in the
morning, and was turned west at noon. Obelisks functioned in much the same
manner: the shadow cast on the markers around it allowed the Egyptians to
calculate the time. The obelisk also indicated whether it was morning or
afternoon, as well as the summer and winter solstices.[6] [15] A third shadow clock,
developed c. 1500 BC, was similar in shape to a bent T-square. It measured the
passage of time by the shadow cast by its crossbar on a non-linear rule. The T was
oriented eastward in the mornings, and turned around at noon, so that it could cast
its shadow in the opposite direction.[16]

Although accurate, shadow clocks relied on the sun, and so were useless at night
and in cloudy weather.[15] [17] The Egyptians therefore developed a number of
alternative timekeeping instruments, including water clocks, hourglasses, and a
system for tracking star movements. The oldest description of a water clock is
from the tomb inscription of the 16th-century BC Egyptian court official
Amenemhet, identifying him as its inventor.[18] There were several types of water
clocks, some more elaborate than others. One type consisted of a bowl with small
holes in its bottom, which was floated on water and allowed to fill at a
near-constant rate; markings on the side of the bowl indicated elapsed time, as the
surface of the water reached them. The oldest-known waterclock was found in the
The Luxor Obelisk in Place de la tomb of pharaoh Amenhotep I (1525–1504 BC), suggesting that they were first
Concorde, Paris, France used in ancient Egypt.[15] [19] [20] The ancient Egyptians are also believed to be
the inventors of the hourglass, which consisted of two vertically aligned glass
chambers connected by a small opening. When the hourglass was turned over, grains of sand fell at a constant rate
from one chamber to the other.[17] Another Egyptian method of determining the time during the night was using
plumb-lines called merkhets. In use since at least 600 BC, two of these instruments were aligned with Polaris, the
north pole star, to create a north–south meridian. The time was accurately measured by observing certain stars as
they crossed the line created with the merkhets.[15] [21]
History of timekeeping devices 29

500 BC – 1 BC
Water clocks, or clepsydrae, were commonly used in Ancient Greece following
their introduction by Plato, who also invented a water-based alarm clock.[23] [24]
One account of Plato's alarm clock describes it as depending on the nightly
overflow of a vessel containing lead balls, which floated in a columnar vat. The
vat held a steadily increasing amount of water, supplied by a cistern. By
morning, the vessel would have floated high enough to tip over, causing the lead
balls to cascade onto a copper platter. The resultant clangor would then awaken
Plato's students at the Academy.[25] Another possibility is that it comprised two
jars, connected by a siphon. Water emptied until it reached the siphon, which
transported the water to the other jar. There, the rising water would force air
through a whistle, sounding an alarm.[24] The Greeks and Chaldeans regularly
maintained timekeeping records as an essential part of their astronomical
observations.

Greek astronomer, Andronicus of Cyrrhus, supervised the construction of the Ctesibius's clepsydra from the 3rd
century BC. Clepsydra, literally
Tower of the Winds in Athens in the 1st century B.C.
water thief, was the Greek word for
In Greek tradition, clepsydrae were used in court; later, the Romans adopted this [22]
water clock.
practice, as well. There are several mentions of this in historical records and
literature of the era; for example, in Theaetetus, Plato says that "Those men, on the other hand, always speak in
haste, for the flowing water urges them on".[26] Another mention occurs in Lucius Apuleius' The Golden Ass: "The
Clerk of the Court began bawling again, this time summoning the chief witness for the prosecution to appear. Up
stepped an old man, whom I did not know. He was invited to speak for as long as there was water in the clock; this
was a hollow globe into which water was poured through a funnel in the neck, and from which it gradually escaped
through fine perforations at the base".[27] The clock in Apuleius' account was one of several types of water clock
used. Another consisted of a bowl with a hole in its centre, which was floated on water. Time was kept by observing
how long the bowl took to fill with water.[28]

Although clepsydrae were more useful than sundials—they could be used indoors, during the night, and also when
the sky was cloudy—they were not as accurate; the Greeks, therefore, sought a way to improve their water clocks.[29]
Although still not as accurate as sundials, Greek water clocks became more accurate around 325 BC, and they were
adapted to have a face with an hour hand, making the reading of the clock more precise and convenient. One of the
more common problems in most types of clepsydrae was caused by water pressure: when the container holding the
water was full, the increased pressure caused the water to flow more rapidly. This problem was addressed by Greek
and Roman horologists beginning in 100 BC, and improvements continued to be made in the following centuries. To
counteract the increased water flow, the clock's water containers—usually bowls or jugs—were given a conical
shape; positioned with the wide end up, a greater amount of water had to flow out in order to drop the same distance
as when the water was lower in the cone. Along with this improvement, clocks were constructed more elegantly in
this period, with hours marked by gongs, doors opening to miniature figurines, bells, or moving mechanisms.[15]
There were some remaining problems, however, which were never solved, such as the effect of temperature. Water
flows more slowly when cold, or may even freeze.[30]
Although the Greeks and Romans did much to advance water clock technology, they still continued to use shadow
clocks. The mathematician and astronomer Theodosius of Bithynia, for example, is said to have invented a universal
sundial that was accurate anywhere on Earth, though little is known about it.[31] Others wrote of the sundial in the
mathematics and literature of the period. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the Roman author of De Architectura, wrote on
the mathematics of gnomons, or sundial blades.[32] During the reign of Emperor Augustus, the Romans constructed
the largest sundial ever built, the Solarium Augusti. Its gnomon was an obelisk from Heliopolis.[33] Similarly, the
History of timekeeping devices 30

obelisk from Campus Martius was used as the gnomon for Augustus' zodiacal sundial.[34] Pliny the Elder records
that the first sundial in Rome arrived in 264 BC, looted from Catania, Sicily; according to him, it gave the incorrect
time until the markings and angle appropriate for Rome's latitude were used—a century later.[35]

AD  1   – AD  1500

Water clocks

Joseph Needham speculated that the introduction of the outflow

clepsydra to China, perhaps from Mesopotamia, occurred as far back
as the 2nd millennium BC, during the Shang Dynasty, and at the latest
by the 1st millennium BC. By the beginning of the Han Dynasty, in
202 BC, the outflow clepsydra was gradually replaced by the inflow
clepsydra, which featured an indicator rod on a float. To compensate
for the falling pressure head in the reservoir, which slowed
timekeeping as the vessel filled, Zhang Heng added an extra tank
between the reservoir and the inflow vessel. Around 550 AD, Yin Gui
was the first in China to write of the overflow or constant-level tank
added to the series, which was later described in detail by the inventor
Shen Kuo. Around 610, this design was trumped by two Sui Dynasty
inventors, Geng Xun and Yuwen Kai, who were the first to create the
balance clepsydra, with standard positions for the steelyard balance.[36]
Joseph Needham states that:

... [the balance clepsydra] permitted the seasonal adjustment of

the pressure head in the compensating tank by having standard
positions for the counterweight graduated on the beam, and The water-powered elephant clock by Al-Jazari,
1206.
hence it could control the rate of flow for different lengths of day
and night. With this arrangement no overflow tank was required,
and the two attendants were warned when the clepsydra needed refilling.[36]

Between 270 BC and 500 AD, Hellenistic (Ctesibius, Hero of Alexandria, Archimedes) and Roman horologists and
astronomers were developing more elaborate mechanized water clocks. The added complexity was aimed at
regulating the flow and at providing fancier displays of the passage of time. For example, some water clocks rang
bells and gongs, while others opened doors and windows to show figurines of people, or moved pointers, and dials.
Some even displayed astrological models of the universe.
Some of the most elaborate water clocks were designed by Muslim engineers. In particular, the water clocks by
Al-Jazari in 1206 are credited for going "well beyond anything" that had preceded them. In his treatise, he describes
one of his water clocks, the elephant clock. The clock recorded the passage of temporal hours, which meant that the
rate of flow had to be changed daily to match the uneven length of days throughout the year. To accomplish this, the
clock had two tanks: the top tank was connected to the time indicating mechanisms and the bottom was connected to
the flow control regulator. At daybreak the tap was opened and water flowed from the top tank to the bottom tank via
a float regulator that maintained a constant pressure in the receiving tank.[37]
History of timekeeping devices 31

Candle clocks

It is not known specifically where and when candle clocks were first
used; however, their earliest mention comes from a Chinese poem,
written in 520 by You Jianfu. According to the poem, the graduated
candle was a means of determining time at night. Similar candles were
used in Japan until the early 10th century.[38]
The candle clock most commonly mentioned and written of is
attributed to King Alfred the Great. It consisted of six candles made
from 72 pennyweights of wax, each 12 inches (30 cm) high, and of
uniform thickness, marked every inch (2.5 cm). As these candles
burned for about four hours, each mark represented 20 minutes. Once
lit, the candles were placed in wooden framed glass boxes, to prevent
the flame from extinguishing.[39]

The most sophisticated candle clocks of their time were those of

Al-Jazari in 1206. One of his candle clocks included a dial to display
the time and, for the first time, employed a bayonet fitting, a fastening A candle clock
mechanism still used in modern times.[40] Donald Routledge Hill
described Al-Jazari's candle clocks as follows:
The candle, whose rate of burning was known, bore against the underside of the cap, and its wick passed
through the hole. Wax collected in the indentation and could be removed periodically so that it did not
interfere with steady burning. The bottom of the candle rested in a shallow dish that had a ring on its side
connected through pulleys to a counterweight. As the candle burned away, the weight pushed it upward at a
constant speed. The automata were operated from the dish at the bottom of the candle. No other candle clocks
of this sophistication are known.[41]

A variation on this theme were oil-lamp clocks. These early timekeeping devices
consisted of a graduated glass reservoir to hold oil — usually whale oil, which
burned cleanly and evenly — supplying the fuel for a built-in lamp. As the level
in the reservoir dropped, it provided a rough measure of the passage of time.

Incense clocks

In addition to water, mechanical, and candle clocks, incense clocks were used in
the Far East, and were fashioned in several different forms.[42] Incense clocks
were first used in China around the 6th century; in Japan, one still exists in the
Shōsōin,[43] although its characters are not Chinese, but Devanagari.[44] Due to
their frequent use of Devanagari characters, suggestive of their use in Buddhist
ceremonies, Edward H. Schafer speculated that incense clocks were invented in
India.[44] Although similar to the candle clock, incense clocks burned evenly and
without a flame; therefore, they were more accurate and safer for indoor use.[45]

Several types of incense clock have been found, the most common forms include
the incense stick and incense seal.[46] [47] An incense stick clock was an incense
stick with calibrations;[47] most were elaborate, sometimes having threads, with
weights attached, at even intervals. The weights would drop onto a platter or
An oil-lamp clock
gong below, signifying that a certain amount of time had elapsed. Some incense
History of timekeeping devices 32

clocks were held in elegant trays; open-bottomed trays were also used, to allow the weights to be used together with
the decorative tray.[48] [49] Sticks of incense with different scents were also used, so that the hours were marked by a
change in fragrance.[50] The incense sticks could be straight or spiraled; the spiraled ones were longer, and were
therefore intended for long periods of use, and often hung from the roofs of homes and temples.[51]
In Japan, a geisha was paid for the number of senkodokei (incense sticks) that had been consumed while she was
present, a practice which continued until 1924.[52] Incense seal clocks were used for similar occasions and events as
the stick clock; while religious purposes were of primary importance,[46] these clocks were also popular at social
gatherings, and were used by Chinese scholars and intellectuals.[53] The seal was a wooden or stone disk with one or
more grooves etched in it[46] into which incense was placed.[54] These clocks were common in China,[53] but were
produced in fewer numbers in Japan.[55] To signal the passage of a specific amount of time, small pieces of fragrant
woods, resins, or different scented incenses could be placed on the incense powder trails. Different powdered incense
clocks used different formulations of incense, depending on how the clock was laid out.[56] The length of the trail of
incense, directly related to the size of the seal, was the primary factor in determining how long the clock would last;
all burned for long periods of time, ranging between 12 hours and a month.[57] [58] [59]
While early incense seals were made of wood or stone, the Chinese gradually introduced disks made of metal, most
likely beginning during the Song dynasty. This allowed craftsmen to more easily create both large and small seals, as
well as design and decorate them more aesthetically. Another advantage was the ability to vary the paths of the
grooves, to allow for the changing length of the days in the year. As smaller seals became more readily available, the
clocks grew in popularity among the Chinese, and were often given as gifts.[60] Incense seal clocks are often sought
by modern-day clock collectors; however, few remain that have not already been purchased or been placed on
display at museums or temples.[55]

Clocks with gears and escapements

The earliest instance of a liquid-driven escapement was described by the Greek

engineer Philo of Byzantium (fl. 3rd century BC) in his technical treatise
Pneumatics (chapter 31) where he likens the escapement mechanism of a
washstand automaton with those as employed in (water) clocks.[61] Another early
clock to use escapements was built during the 7th century AD in Chang'an, by
Tantric monk and mathematician, Yi Xing, and government official Liang
Lingzan.[62] [63] An astronomical instrument that served as a clock, it was
discussed in a contemporary text as follows:[64]

[It] was made in the image of the round heavens and on it were
shown the lunar mansions in their order, the equator and the degrees
of the heavenly circumference. Water, flowing into scoops, turned a
wheel automatically, rotating it one complete revolution in one day Greek washstand automaton working
with the earliest escapement. The
and night. Besides this, there were two rings fitted around the
mechanism was also used in Greek
celestial sphere outside, having the sun and moon threaded on them, [61]
water clocks.
and these were made to move in circling orbit ... And they made a
wooden casing the surface of which represented the horizon, since the instrument was half sunk in it. It
permitted the exact determinations of the time of dawns and dusks, full and new moons, tarrying and
hurrying. Moreover, there were two wooden jacks standing on the horizon surface, having one a bell and
the other a drum in front of it, the bell being struck automatically to indicate the hours, and the drum
being beaten automatically to indicate the quarters. All these motions were brought about by machinery
within the casing, each depending on wheels and shafts, hooks, pins and interlocking rods, stopping
devices and locks checking mutually.[64]
History of timekeeping devices 33

Since Yi Xing's clock was a water clock, it was affected by temperature

variations. That problem was solved in 976 by Zhang Sixun by replacing the
water with mercury, which remains liquid down to −39 °C (−38 °F). Zhang
implemented the changes into his clock tower, which was about 10 metres (33 ft)
tall, with escapements to keep the clock turning and bells to signal every
quarter-hour. Another noteworthy clock, the elaborate Cosmic Engine, was built
by Su Song, in 1088. It was about the size of Zhang's tower, but had an
automatically rotating armillary sphere—also called a celestial globe—from
which the positions of the stars could be observed. It also featured five panels
with mannequins ringing gongs or bells, and tablets showing the time of day, or
other special times.[15] Furthermore, it featured the first known endless
power-transmitting chain drive in horology.[3] Originally built in the capital of
Kaifeng, it was dismantled by the Jin army and sent to the capital of Yanjing
The original diagram of Su Song's
(now Beijing), where they were unable to put it back together. As a result, Su
book showing the inner workings of
his clock tower
Song's son Su Xie was ordered to build a replica.[65]

The clock towers built by Zhang Sixun and Su Song, in the 10th and
11th centuries, respectively, also incorporated a striking clock
mechanism, the use of clock jacks to sound the hours.[66] The earliest
striking clock outside of China was the clock tower near the Umayyad
Mosque in Damascus, Syria, which struck once every hour. It was
constructed by the Arab engineer Al-Kaysarani in 1154. The Jayrun
Water Clock, built by Muhammad al-Sa'ati in the 12th century, the
construction of which was described by his son Ridwan ibn al-Sa'ati, in
Drawing of the Jayrun Water Clock in Damascus
his On the Construction of Clocks and their Use (1203), when from the treatise On the Construction of Clocks
repairing the clock.[67] In 1235, an early monumental water-powered and their Use (1203)
alarm clock that "announced the appointed hours of prayer and the time
both by day and by night" was completed in the entrance hall of the Mustansiriya Madrasah in Baghdad.[68]

The first geared clock was invented in the 11th century by the Arab engineer Ibn Khalaf al-Muradi in Islamic Iberia;
it was a water clock that employed a complex gear train mechanism, including both segmental and epicyclic
gearing,[4] [69] capable of transmitting high torque.[70] The clock was unrivalled in its use of sophisticated complex
gearing, until the mechanical clocks of the mid-14th century.[69] [70] Al-Muradi's clock also employed the use of
mercury in its hydraulic linkages,[71] [72] which could function mechanical automata.[72] Al-Muradi's work was
known to scholars working under Alfonso X of Castile,[73] hence the mechanism may have played a role in the
development of the European mechanical clocks.[69] Other monumental water clocks constructed by medieval
Muslim engineers also employed complex gear trains and arrays of automata.[69] Like the earlier Greeks and
Chinese, Arab engineers at the time also developed a liquid-driven escapement mechanism which they employed in
some of their water clocks. Heavy floats were used as weights and a constant-head system was used as an
escapement mechanism,[4] which was present in the hydraulic controls they used to make heavy floats descend at a
slow and steady rate.[69]
A mercury clock, described in the Libros del saber de Astronomia, a Spanish work from 1277 consisting of
translations and paraphrases of Arabic works, is sometimes quoted as evidence for Muslim knowledge of a
mechanical clock. However, the device was actually a compartmented cylindrical water clock,[74] which the Jewish
author of the relevant section, Rabbi Isaac, constructed using principles described by a philosopher named "Iran",
identified with Heron of Alexandria (fl. 1st century AD), on how heavy objects may be lifted.[75]
History of timekeeping devices 34

Astronomical clocks

During the 11th century in the Song Dynasty, the Chinese astronomer, horologist
and mechanical engineer Su Song created a water-driven astronomical clock for
his clock tower of Kaifeng City. It incorporated an escapement mechanism as
well as the earliest known endless power-transmitting chain drive, which drove
the armillary sphere.
Contemporary Muslim astronomers also constructed a variety of highly accurate
astronomical clocks for use in their mosques and observatories,[76] such as the
water-powered astronomical clock by Al-Jazari in 1206,[77] [78] and the astrolabic
Astrolabes were used as astronomical
clock by Ibn al-Shatir in the early 14th century.[79] The most sophisticated
clocks by Muslim astronomers at
timekeeping astrolabes were the geared astrolabe mechanisms designed by Abū mosques and observatories.
Rayhān Bīrūnī in the 11th century and by Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr in the 13th
century. These devices functioned as timekeeping devices and also as calenders.[4]

A sophisticated water-powered astronomical clock was built by Al-Jazari in

1206. This castle clock is considered by some to be an early example of a
programmable analog computer.[80] It was a complex device that was about 11
feet high, and had multiple functions alongside timekeeping. It included a display
of the zodiac and the solar and lunar orbits, and a pointer in the shape of the
crescent moon which travelled across the top of a gateway, moved by a hidden
cart and causing automatic doors to open, each revealing a mannequin, every
hour.[41] [81] It was possible to re-program the length of day and night in order to
account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year. This clock
also featured a number of automata including falcons and musicians who
automatically played music when moved by levers operated by a hidden
camshaft attached to a water wheel.[80] Castle clock by Al-Jazari in 1206

Modern devices

Modern devices of ancient origin

Sundials were further developed by Muslim astronomers. As the
ancient dials were nodus-based with straight hour-lines, they indicated
unequal hours—also called temporary hours—that varied with the
seasons. Every day was divided into 12 equal segments regardless of
the time of year; thus, hours were shorter in winter and longer in
summer. The idea of using hours of equal length throughout the year
was the innovation of Abu'l-Hasan Ibn al-Shatir in 1371, based on
earlier developments in trigonometry by Muhammad ibn Jābir
al-Harrānī al-Battānī (Albategni). Ibn al-Shatir was aware that "using a
A 20th-century sundial in Seville, Andalusia,
gnomon that is parallel to the Earth's axis will produce sundials whose
Spain
hour lines indicate equal hours on any day of the year". His sundial is
the oldest polar-axis sundial still in existence. The concept appeared in
Western sundials starting in 1446.[82] [83]

Following the acceptance of heliocentrism and equal hours, as well as advances in trigonometry, sundials appeared
in their present form during the Renaissance, when they were built in large numbers.[84] In 1524, the French
History of timekeeping devices 35

astronomer Oronce Finé constructed an ivory sundial, which still exists;[85] later, in 1570, the Italian astronomer
Giovanni Padovani published a treatise including instructions for the manufacture and laying out of mural (vertical)
and horizontal sundials. Similarly, Giuseppe Biancani's Constructio instrumenti ad horologia solaria (c. 1620)
discusses how to construct sundials.[86]
The Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan used 18 hourglasses on each ship during his circumnavigation of the
globe in 1522.[87] Since the hourglass was one of the few reliable methods of measuring time at sea, it is speculated
that it had been used on board ships as far back as the 11th century, when it would have complemented the magnetic
compass as an aid to navigation. However, the earliest evidence of their use appears in the painting Allegory of Good
Government, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, from 1338.[88] From the 15th century onwards, hourglasses were used in a
wide range of applications at sea, in churches, in industry, and in cooking; they were the first dependable, reusable,
reasonably accurate, and easily constructed time-measurement devices. The hourglass also took on symbolic
meanings, such as that of death, temperance, opportunity, and Father Time, usually represented as a bearded, old
man.[89] Though also used in China, the hourglass's history there is unknown.[90]

Clocks
Clocks encompass a wide spectrum of devices, ranging from
wristwatches to the Clock of the Long Now. The English word clock is
said to derive from the Middle English clokke, Old North French
cloque, or Middle Dutch clocke, all of which mean bell, and are
derived from the Medieval Latin clocca, also meaning bell.[91] [92] [93]
Indeed, bells were used to mark the passage of time; they marked the
passage of the hours at sea and in abbeys.

Throughout history, clocks have had a variety of power sources,

including gravity, springs, and electricity.[94] [95] The invention of
mechanical clockwork itself is usually credited to the Chinese official
Liang Lingzan and monk Yi Xing.[62] [63] [96] However, mechanical
clocks were not widely used in the West until the 14th century. Clocks
were used in medieval monasteries to keep the regulated schedule of The astronomical clock of St Albans Abbey, built
by its abbot, Richard of Wallingford
prayers. The clock continued to be improved, with the first pendulum
clock being designed and built in the 17th century by Christiaan
Huygens, a Dutch scientist.

Early Western mechanical clocks

The earliest medieval European clockmakers were Christian monks.[97] Medieval religious institutions required
clocks because daily prayer and work schedules were strictly regulated. This was done by various types of
time-telling and recording devices, such as water clocks, sundials and marked candles, probably used in
combination.[95] [98] When mechanical clocks were used, they were often wound at least twice a day to ensure
accuracy.[99] Important times and durations were broadcast by bells, rung either by hand or by a mechanical device,
such as a falling weight or rotating beater.

As early as 850, Pacificus, archdeacon of Verona, constructed a water clock (horologium nocturnum).[100]
The religious necessities and technical skill of the medieval monks were crucial factors in the development of clocks,
as the historian Thomas Woods writes:
The monks also counted skillful clock-makers among them. The first recorded clock was built by the future
Pope Sylvester II for the German town of Magdeburg, around the year 996. Much more sophisticated clocks
were built by later monks. Peter Lightfoot, a 14th-century monk of Glastonbury, built one of the oldest clocks
History of timekeeping devices 36

still in existence, which now sits in excellent condition in London's Science Museum.[101]
The appearance of clocks in writings of the 11th century implies that
they were well-known in Europe in that period.[103] In the early 14th
century, the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri referred to a clock in his
Paradiso;[104] considered to be the first literary reference to a clock
that struck the hours.[103] The earliest detailed description of
clockwork was presented by Giovanni da Dondi, Professor of
Astronomy at Padua, in his 1364 treatise Il Tractatus Astrarii.[96] This
has inspired several modern replicas, including some in London's
Science Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.[96] Other notable
examples from this period were built in Milan (1335), Strasbourg
(1354), Lund (1380), Rouen (1389), and Prague (1462).[96]

Salisbury cathedral clock, dating from about 1386, is the oldest

working clock in the world, still with most of its original parts.[105] It
Da Dondi's 1364 Padua clock
[102]
has no dial, as its purpose was to strike a bell at precise times.[105] The
wheels and gears are mounted in an open, box-like iron frame,
measuring about 1.2 metres (3.9 ft) square. The framework is held together with metal dowels and pegs, and the
escapement is the verge and foliot type, standard for clocks of this age. The power is supplied by two large stones,
hanging from pulleys. As the weights fall, ropes unwind from the wooden barrels. One barrel drives the main wheel,
which is regulated by the escapement, and the other drives the striking mechanism and the air brake.[105]

Peter Lightfoot's Wells Cathedral clock, constructed c. 1390, is also of note.[106] [107] The dial represents a
geocentric view of the universe, with the Sun and Moon revolving around a centrally fixed Earth. It is unique in
having its original medieval face, showing a philosophical model of the pre-Copernican universe.[108] Above the
clock is a set of figures, which hit the bells, and a set of jousting knights who revolve around a track every
15 minutes.[108] [109] The clock was converted to pendulum and anchor escapement in the 17th century, and was
installed in London's Science Museum in 1884, where it continues to operate.[109] Similar astronomical clocks, or
horologes, can be seen at Exeter, Ottery St Mary, and Wimborne Minster.
One clock that has not survived to the present-day is that of the Abbey
of St Albans, built by the 14th-century abbot Richard of
Wallingford.[110] It may have been destroyed during Henry VIII's
Dissolution of the Monasteries, but the abbot's notes on its design have
allowed a full-scale reconstruction. As well as keeping time, the
astronomical clock could accurately predict lunar eclipses, and may
have shown the Sun, Moon (age, phase, and node), stars and planets, as
well as a wheel of fortune, and an indicator of the state of the tide at
London Bridge.[111] According to Thomas Woods, "a clock that
equaled it in technological sophistication did not appear for at least two
centuries".[101] [112] Giovanni de Dondi was another early mechanical
clockmaker, whose clock did not survive, but has been replicated based The face of the Prague Astronomical Clock
on the designs. De Dondi's clock was a seven-faced construction with (1462)

107 moving parts, showing the positions of the Sun, Moon, and five
planets, as well as religious feast days.[111] Around this period, mechanical clocks were introduced into abbeys and
monasteries to mark important events and times, gradually replacing water clocks which had served the same
purpose.[113] [114]
History of timekeeping devices 37

During the Middle Ages, clocks were primarily used for religious purposes; the first employed for secular
timekeeping emerged around the 15th century. In Dublin, the official measurement of time became a local custom,
and by 1466 a public clock stood on top of the Tholsel (the city court and council chamber).[115] It was probably the
first of its kind in Ireland, and would only have had an hour hand.[115] The increasing lavishness of castles led to the
introduction of turret clocks.[116] A 1435 example survives from Leeds castle; its face is decorated with the images
of the Crucifixion of Jesus, Mary and St George.[116]
Clock towers in Western Europe in the Middle Ages were also sometimes striking clocks. The most famous original
still standing is possibly St Mark's Clock on the top of St Mark's Clocktower in St Mark's Square, Venice, assembled
in 1493, by the clockmaker Gian Carlo Rainieri from Reggio Emilia. In 1497, Simone Campanato moulded the great
bell that every definite time-lapse is beaten by two mechanical bronze statues (h. 2,60 m.) called Due Mori (Two
Moors), handling a hammer. Possibly earlier (1490 by clockmaster Jan Růže also called Hanuš) is the Prague
Astronomical Clock, that according to another source was assembled as early as 1410 by clockmaker Mikuláš of
Kadaň and mathematician Jan Šindel. The allegorical parade of animated sculptures rings at h. 12.00 every day.
Early clock dials did not use minutes and seconds. A clock with a minutes dial is mentioned in a 1475
manuscript,[117] and clocks indicating minutes and seconds existed in Germany in the 15th century.[118] Timepieces
which indicated minutes and seconds were occasionally made from this time on, but this was not common until the
increase in accuracy made possible by the pendulum clock and, in watches, the spiral balance spring. The
16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe used clocks with minutes and seconds to observe stellar positions.[117]

Ottoman mechanical clocks

The Ottoman engineer Taqi al-Din described a weight-driven clock with a verge-and-foliot escapement, a striking
train of gears, an alarm, and a representation of the moon's phases in his book The Brightest Stars for the
Construction of Mechanical Clocks (Al-Kawākib al-durriyya fī wadh' al-bankāmat al-dawriyya), written around
1556.[119] Similarly to earlier 15th-century European mechanical alarm clocks,[120] [121] the alarm was set by placing
a peg on the dial wheel at the appropriate time. The clock had three dials reading in hours, degrees and minutes.[122]
Taqi al-Din later constructed a clock for the Istanbul Observatory, where he used it to make observations of right
ascensions, stating: “We constructed a mechanical clock with three dials which show the hours, the minutes, and the
seconds. We divided each minute into five seconds.” This was an important innovation in 16th-century practical
astronomy, as at the start of the century clocks were not accurate enough to be used for astronomical purposes.[123]
An example of a watch which measured time in minutes was created by an Ottoman watchmaker, Meshur Sheyh
Dede, in 1702.[124]

Pendulum clocks
Innovations to the mechanical clock continued, with miniaturization leading to domestic clocks in the 15th century,
and personal watches in the 16th.[96] In the 1580s, the Italian polymath Galileo Galilei investigated the regular swing
of the pendulum, and discovered that it could be used to regulate a clock.[95] [125] Although Galileo studied the
pendulum as early as 1582, he never actually constructed a clock based on that design.[95] The first pendulum clock
was designed and built by Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, in 1656.[95] Early versions erred by less than one
minute per day, and later ones only by 10 seconds, very accurate for their time.[95]
The Jesuits were another major contributor to the development of pendulum clocks in the 17th and 18th centuries,
having had an "unusually keen appreciation of the importance of precision".[126] [127] In measuring an accurate
one-second pendulum, for example, the Italian astronomer Father Giovanni Battista Riccioli persuaded nine fellow
Jesuits "to count nearly 87,000 oscillations in a single day".[127] They served a crucial role in spreading and testing
the scientific ideas of the period, and collaborated with contemporary scientists, such as Huygens.[126]
The modern longcase clock, also known as the grandfather clock, has its origins in the invention of the anchor
escapement mechanism in about 1670.[128] Before then, pendulum clocks had used the older verge escapement
History of timekeeping devices 38

mechanism, which required very wide pendulum swings of about 100°. To avoid the need for a very large case, most
clocks using the verge escapement had a short pendulum. The anchor mechanism, however, reduced the pendulum's
necessary swing to between 4° to 6°, allowing clockmakers to use longer pendulums with consequently slower beats.
These required less power to move, caused less friction and wear, and were more accurate than their shorter
predecessors. Most longcase clocks use a pendulum about a metre (39 inches) long to the center of the bob, with
each swing taking one second. This requirement for height, along with the need for a long drop space for the weights
that power the clock, gave rise to the tall, narrow case.[129]
In 1675, 18 years after inventing the pendulum clock, Huygens devised the spiral balance spring for the balance
wheel of pocket watches, an improvement on the straight spring invented by English natural philosopher Robert
Hooke.[125] This resulted in a great advance in accuracy of pocket watches, from perhaps several hours per day to
10 minutes per day, similar to the effect of the pendulum upon mechanical clocks.[15] [130]

Clockmakers

The first professional clockmakers came from the guilds of locksmiths

and jewellers. Clockmaking developed from a specialized craft into a
mass production industry over many years.[131] Paris and Blois were
the early centers of clockmaking in France. French clockmakers such
as Julien Le Roy, clockmaker of Versailles, were leaders in case design
and ornamental clocks.[131] Le Roy belonged to the fifth generation of
a family of clockmakers, and was described by his contemporaries as
"the most skillful clockmaker in France, possibly in Europe". He
invented a special repeating mechanism which improved the precision
of clocks and watches, a face that could be opened to view the inside
clockwork, and made or supervised over 3,500 watches. The A pocket watch
competition and scientific rivalry resulting from his discoveries further
encouraged researchers to seek new methods of measuring time more accurately.[132]

Between 1794 and 1795, in the

aftermath of the French Revolution,
the French government briefly
mandated decimal clocks, with a day
divided into 10 hours of 100 minutes
each.[133] The astronomer and
mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace,
among other individuals, modified the An antique pocket watch movement, from an 1891 encyclopedia.

dial of his pocket watch to decimal

time.[133] A clock in the Palais des Tuileries kept decimal time as late as 1801, but the cost of replacing all the
nation's clocks prevented decimal clocks from becoming widespread.[134] Because decimalized clocks only helped
astronomers rather than ordinary citizens, it was one of the most unpopular changes associated with the metric
system, and it was abandoned.[134]

In Germany, Nuremberg and Augsburg were the early clockmaking centers, and the Black Forest came to specialize
in wooden cuckoo clocks.[135] The English became the predominant clockmakers of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Switzerland established itself as a clockmaking center following the influx of Huguenot craftsmen, and in the 19th
century, the Swiss industry "gained worldwide supremacy in high-quality machine-made watches". The leading firm
of the day was Patek Philippe, founded by Antoni Patek of Warsaw and Adrien Philippe of Berne.[131]
History of timekeeping devices 39

Wristwatches
In 1904, Alberto Santos-Dumont, an early aviator, asked his friend, a French watchmaker called Louis Cartier, to
design a watch that could be useful during his flights.[136] The wristwatch had already been invented by Patek
Philippe, in 1868, but only as a "lady’s bracelet watch", intended as jewelry. As pocket watches were unsuitable,
Louis Cartier created the Santos wristwatch, the first man's wristwatch and the first designed for practical use.[137]
Wristwatches gained in popularity during World War I, when officers found them to be more convenient than pocket
watches in battle. Also, because the pocket watch was mainly a middle class item, the enlisted men usually owned
wristwatches, which they brought with them. Artillery and infantry officers depended on their watches as battles
became more complicated and coordinated attacks became necessary. Wristwatches were found to be needed in the
air as much as on the ground: military pilots found them more convenient than pocket watches for the same reasons
as Santos-Dumont had. Eventually, army contractors manufactured watches en masse, for both infantry and pilots. In
World War II, the A-11 was a popular watch among American airmen, with its simple black face and clear white
numbers for easy readability.[138]

Marine chronometers

Marine chronometers are clocks used at sea as time standards, to

determine longitude by celestial navigation.[139] They were first
developed by Yorkshire carpenter John Harrison, who won the British
government's Longitude Prize in 1759. Marine chronometers keep the
time of a fixed location—usually Greenwich Mean Time—allowing
seafarers to determine longitude by comparing the local high noon to
the clock.[139] [140] [141]

A twin-barrel box chronometer.

Chronometers
A chronometer is a portable timekeeper that meets certain precision
standards. Initially, the term was used to refer to the marine
chronometer, a timepiece used to determine longitude by means of
celestial navigation.[139] More recently, the term has also been applied
to the chronometer watch, a wristwatch that meets certain precision
standards set by the Swiss agency COSC.[142] Over 1,000,000
"Officially Certified Chronometer" certificates, mostly for mechanical
wrist-chronometers—wristwatches—with sprung balance oscillators,
are delivered each year, after passing the COSC's most severe tests,
A modern quartz watch and chronograph
and being singly identified by an officially recorded individual serial
number. According to COSC, a chronometer is a high-precision watch,
capable of displaying the seconds and housing a movement that has been tested over several days, in different
positions, and at different temperatures, by an official, neutral body. To meet this requirement, each movement is
individually tested for several consecutive days, in five positions, and at three temperatures. Any watch with the
designation chronometer has a certified movement.[143]
Clock 48

Clock
A clock is an instrument used to indicate, measure, keep, and
co-ordinate time. The word clock is derived ultimately (via
Dutch, Northern French, and Medieval Latin) from the Celtic
words clagan and clocca meaning "bell". For horologists and
other specialists the term clock continues to mean exclusively
a device with a striking mechanism for announcing intervals
of time acoustically, by ringing a bell, a set of chimes, or a
gong. A silent instrument lacking such a mechanism has
traditionally been known as a timepiece.[1] In general usage
today a "clock" refers to any device for measuring and
displaying the time. Watches and other timepieces that can be
Platform clock at King's Cross railway station, London.
carried on one's person are often distinguished from clocks.[2]

The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the

need to consistently measure intervals of time shorter than the
natural units: the day; the lunar month; and the year. Devices
operating on several different physical processes have been
used over the millennia, culminating in the clocks of today.

Sundials and other devices

The sundial, which measures the time of day by using the sun,
was widely used in ancient times. A well-constructed sundial
can measure local solar time with reasonable accuracy, and
sundials continued to be used to monitor the performance of
clocks until the modern era. However, its practical limitations
- it requires the sun to shine and does not work at all during
the night - encouraged the use of other techniques for
measuring time.

Candle clocks, and sticks of incense that burn down at

approximately predictable speeds have also been used to
estimate the passing of time. In an hourglass, fine sand pours
through a tiny hole at a constant rate and indicates a
predetermined passage of an arbitrary period of time.

Clock at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich

Clock 49

A clock in Ulm

Replica of an ancient Chinese incense clock

Clock 50

Water clocks
Water clocks, also known as clepsydrae (sg: clepsydra), along with the
sundials, are possibly the oldest time-measuring instruments, with the
only exceptions being the vertical gnomon and the day-counting tally
stick.[3] Given their great antiquity, where and when they first existed
are not known and perhaps unknowable. The bowl-shaped outflow is
the simplest form of a water clock and is known to have existed in
Babylon and in Egypt around the 16th century BC. Other regions of the
world, including India and China, also have early evidence of water
clocks, but the earliest dates are less certain. Some authors, however,
write about water clocks appearing as early as 4000 BC in these
regions of the world.[4]

Greek astronomer, Andronicus of Cyrrhus, supervised the construction

of the Tower of the Winds in Athens in the 1st century B.C.[5]
The Greek and Roman civilizations are credited for initially advancing
water clock design to include complex gearing,[6] which was connected
to fanciful automata and also resulted in improved accuracy. These
advances were passed on through Byzantium and Islamic times,
eventually making their way to Europe. Independently, the Chinese A scale model of Su Song's Astronomical Clock
developed their own advanced water clocks（钟）in 725 A.D., Tower, built in 11th century Kaifeng, China. It
passing their ideas on to Korea and Japan. was driven by a large waterwheel, chain drive,
and escapement mechanism.

Some water clock designs were developed independently and some

knowledge was transferred through the spread of trade. Pre-modern
societies do not have the same precise timekeeping requirements that
exist in modern industrial societies, where every hour of work or rest is
monitored, and work may start or finish at any time regardless of
external conditions. Instead, water clocks in ancient societies were
used mainly for astrological reasons. These early water clocks were
calibrated with a sundial. While never reaching the level of accuracy of
a modern timepiece, the water clock was the most accurate and
commonly used timekeeping device for millennia, until it was replaced
by the more accurate pendulum clock in 17th century Europe.

In 797 (or possibly 801), the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Harun

al-Rashid, presented Charlemagne with an Asian Elephant named
Abul-Abbas together with a "particularly elaborate example" of a
Automatic clock of al-Jazari, 12th century. water[7] clock.
Clock 51

In the 13th century, Al-Jazari, an engineer who worked for

Artuqid king of Diyar-Bakr, Nasir al-Din, made numerous clocks
of all shapes and sizes. The book described 50 mechanical devices
in 6 categories, including water clocks. The most reputed clocks
included the Elephant, Scribe and Castle clocks, all of which have
been successfully reconstructed. As well as telling the time, these
grand clocks were symbols of status, grandeur and wealth of the
Urtuq State.[9]

Early mechanical clocks

None of the first clocks survived from 13th century Europe, but
various mentions in church records reveal some of the early
history of the clock.
The word horologia (from the Greek ὡρα, hour, and λεγειν, to
tell) was used to describe all these devices, but the use of this word
(still used in several Romance languages) for all timekeepers
conceals from us the true nature of the mechanisms. For example,
there is a record that in 1176 Sens Cathedral installed a ‘horologe’
but the mechanism used is unknown. According to Jocelin of An elephant clock in a manuscript by Al-Jazari (1206
Brakelond, in 1198 during a fire at the abbey of St Edmundsbury AD) from The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious
[8]
(now Bury St Edmunds), the monks 'ran to the clock' to fetch Mechanical Devices.

water, indicating that their water clock had a reservoir large

enough to help extinguish the occasional fire.[10]

A new mechanism

The word clock (from the Latin word clocca, "bell"), which gradually supersedes "horologe", suggests that it was the
sound of bells which also characterized the prototype mechanical clocks that appeared during the 13th century in
Europe.
Outside of Europe, the escapement mechanism had been known and used in medieval China, as the Song Dynasty
horologist and engineer Su Song (1020–1101) incorporated it into his astronomical clock-tower of Kaifeng in
1088.[11] However, his astronomical clock and rotating armillary sphere still relied on the use of flowing water (i.e.
hydraulics), while European clockworks of the following centuries shed this old habit for a more efficient driving
power of weights, in addition to the escapement mechanism.
A mercury clock, described in the Libros del saber, a Spanish work from AD 1277 consisting of translations and
paraphrases of Arabic works, is sometimes quoted as evidence for Muslim knowledge of a mechanical clock.
However, the device was actually a compartmented cylindrical water clock, whose construction was credited by the
Jewish author of the relevant section, Rabbi Isaac, to "Iran" (Heron of Alexandria).[12]
Between 1280 and 1320, there is an increase in the number of references to clocks and horologes in church records,
and this probably indicates that a new type of clock mechanism had been devised. Existing clock mechanisms that
used water power were being adapted to take their driving power from falling weights. This power was controlled by
some form of oscillating mechanism, probably derived from existing bell-ringing or alarm devices. This controlled
release of power - the escapement - marks the beginning of the true mechanical clock.
These mechanical clocks were intended for two main purposes: for signalling and notification (e.g. the timing of
services and public events), and for modeling the solar system. The former purpose is administrative, the latter arises
naturally given the scholarly interest in astronomy, science, astrology, and how these subjects integrated with the
Clock 52

religious philosophy of the time. The astrolabe was used both by astronomers and astrologers, and it was natural to
apply a clockwork drive to the rotating plate to produce a working model of the solar system.
Simple clocks intended mainly for notification were installed in towers, and did not always require faces or hands.
They would have announced the canonical hours or intervals between set times of prayer. Canonical hours varied in
length as the times of sunrise and sunset shifted. The more sophisticated astronomical clocks would have had
moving dials or hands, and would have shown the time in various time systems, including Italian hours, canonical
hours, and time as measured by astronomers at the time. Both styles of clock started acquiring extravagant features
such as automata.
In 1283, a large clock was installed at Dunstable Priory; its location above the rood screen suggests that it was not a
water clock . In 1292, Canterbury Cathedral installed a 'great horloge'. Over the next 30 years there are brief
mentions of clocks at a number of ecclesiastical institutions in England, Italy, and France. In 1322, a new clock was
installed in Norwich, an expensive replacement for an earlier clock installed in 1273. This had a large (2 metre)
astronomical dial with automata and bells. The costs of the installation included the full-time employment of two
clockkeepers for two years .

Early astronomical clocks

Besides the Chinese astronomical clock of Su Song in 1088 mentioned

above, in Europe there were the clocks constructed by Richard of
Wallingford in St Albans by 1336, and by Giovanni de Dondi in Padua
from 1348 to 1364. They no longer exist, but detailed descriptions of
their design and construction survive, and modern reproductions have
been made. They illustrate how quickly the theory of the mechanical
clock had been translated into practical constructions, and also that one
of the many impulses to their development had been the desire of
astronomers to investigate celestial phenomena.

Wallingford's clock had a large astrolabe-type dial, showing the sun,

the moon's age, phase, and node, a star map, and possibly the planets.
In addition, it had a wheel of fortune and an indicator of the state of the
Richard of Wallingford pointing to a clock, his
tide at London Bridge. Bells rang every hour, the number of strokes
gift to St Albans Abbey
indicating the time.
Dondi's clock was a seven-sided construction, 1 metre high, with dials showing the time of day, including minutes,
the motions of all the known planets, an automatic calendar of fixed and movable feasts, and an eclipse prediction
hand rotating once every 18 years.
It is not known how accurate or reliable these clocks would have been. They were probably adjusted manually every
day to compensate for errors caused by wear and imprecise manufacture.
Water clocks are sometimes still used today, and can be examined in places such as ancient castles and museums.
The Salisbury Cathedral clock, built in 1386, is considered to be the world's oldest surviving mechanical clock that
strikes the hours.[13]
Clock 53

Later developments
Clockmakers developed their art in various ways. Building smaller clocks was a technical challenge, as was
improving accuracy and reliability. Clocks could be impressive showpieces to demonstrate skilled craftsmanship, or
less expensive, mass-produced items for domestic use. The escapement in particular was an important factor
affecting the clock's accuracy, so many different mechanisms were tried.
Spring-driven clocks appeared during the 1400s,[14] [15] [16] although they are often erroneously credited to Nürnberg
watchmaker Peter Henlein (or Henle, or Hele) around 1511.[17] [18] [19] The earliest existing spring driven clock is
the chamber clock given to Peter the Good, Duke of Burgundy, around 1430, now in the Germanisches
Nationalmuseum.[15] Spring power presented clockmakers with a new problem; how to keep the clock movement
running at a constant rate as the spring ran down. This resulted in the invention of the stackfreed and the fusee in the
1400s, and many other innovations, down to the invention of the modern going barrel in 1760.
Early clock dials did not use minutes and seconds. A clock with a dial indicating minutes was illustrated in a 1475
manuscript by Paulus Almanus,[20] and some 15th-century clocks in Germany indicated minutes and seconds.[21] An
early record of a second hand on a clock dates back to about 1560, on a clock now in the Fremersdorf collection.
However, this clock could not have been accurate, and the second hand was probably for indicating that the clock
was working.
During the 15th and 16th centuries, clockmaking flourished, particularly in the metalworking towns of Nuremberg
and Augsburg, and in Blois, France. Some of the more basic table clocks have only one time-keeping hand, with the
dial between the hour markers being divided into four equal parts making the clocks readable to the nearest 15
minutes. Other clocks were exhibitions of craftsmanship and skill, incorporating astronomical indicators and musical
movements. The cross-beat escapement was invented in 1584 by Jost Bürgi, who also developed the remontoire.
Bürgi's clocks were a great improvement in accuracy as they were correct to within a minute a day.[22] [23] These
clocks helped the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe to observe astronomical events with much greater precision
than before.
A mechanical weight-driven astronomical clock with a verge-and-foliot escapement, a striking train of gears, an
alarm, and a representation of the moon's phases was described by the Ottoman engineer Taqi al-Din in his book,
The Brightest Stars for the Construction of Mechanical Clocks (Al-Kawākib al-durriyya fī wadh' al-bankāmat
al-dawriyya), published in 1556-1559.[24] [25] Similarly to earlier 15th-century European alarm clocks,[26] [27] it was
capable of sounding at a specified time, achieved by placing a peg on the dial wheel. At the requested time, the peg
activated a ringing device.[24] The clock had three dials which indicated hours, degrees and minutes.[24] He later
made an observational clock for the Istanbul observatory of Taqi al-Din (1577–1580), describing it as "a mechanical
clock with three dials which show the hours, the minutes, and the seconds." This was an important innovation in
16th-century practical astronomy, as at the start of the century clocks were not accurate enough to be used for
astronomical purposes.[28]
The next development in accuracy occurred after 1656 with the
invention of the pendulum clock. Galileo had the idea to use a
swinging bob to regulate the motion of a time telling device earlier in
the 17th century. Christiaan Huygens, however, is usually credited as
the inventor. He determined the mathematical formula that related
pendulum length to time (99.38 cm or 39.13 inches for the one second
movement) and had the first pendulum-driven clock made. In 1670, the
English clockmaker William Clement created the anchor escapement,
an improvement over Huygens' crown escapement . Within just one
French rococo bracket clocks, (Museum of Time,
generation, minute hands and then second hands were added.
Besançon)
Clock 54

A major stimulus to improving the accuracy and reliability of clocks was the importance of precise time-keeping for
navigation. The position of a ship at sea could be determined with reasonable accuracy if a navigator could refer to a
clock that lost or gained less than about 10 seconds per day. This clock could not contain a pendulum, which would
be virtually useless on a rocking ship. Many European governments offered a large prize for anyone that could
determine longitude accurately; for example, Great Britain offered 20,000 pounds, equivalent to millions of dollars
today. The reward was eventually claimed in 1761 by John Harrison, who dedicated his life to improving the
accuracy of his clocks. His H5 clock was in error by less than 5 seconds over 10 weeks.[29]
The excitement over the pendulum clock had attracted the attention of designers resulting in a proliferation of clock
forms. Notably, the longcase clock (also known as the grandfather clock) was created to house the pendulum and
works. The English clockmaker William Clement is also credited with developing this form in 1670 or 1671. It was
also at this time that clock cases began to be made of wood and clock faces to utilize enamel as well as hand-painted
ceramics.
On November 17, 1797, Eli Terry received his first patent for a clock.
Terry is known as the founder of the American clock-making industry.
Alexander Bain, Scottish clockmaker, patented the electric clock in
1840. The electric clock's mainspring is wound either with an electric
motor or with an electro-magnet and armature. In 1841, he first
patented the electromagnetic pendulum.
The development of electronics in the twentieth century led to clocks
with no clockwork parts at all. Time in these cases is measured in
several ways, such as by the vibration of a tuning fork, the behaviour
of quartz crystals, or the quantum vibrations of atoms. Even
mechanical clocks have since come to be largely powered by batteries,
French decimal clock from the time of the French
removing the need for winding.
Revolution

How clocks work

The invention of the mechanical clock in the 13th century initiated a change in timekeeping methods from
continuous processes, such as the motion of the gnomon's shadow on a sundial or the flow of liquid in a water clock,
to repetitive oscillatory processes, like the swing of a pendulum or the vibration of a quartz crystal, which were more
accurate.[30] All modern clocks use oscillation.
Although the methods they use vary, all oscillating clocks, mechanical and digital and atomic, work similarly and
can be divided into analogous parts.[31] [32] [33] They consist of an object that repeats the same motion over and over
again, an oscillator, with a precisely constant time interval between each repetition, or 'beat'. Attached to the
oscillator is a controller device, which sustains the oscillator's motion by replacing the energy it loses to friction, and
converts its oscillations into a series of pulses. The pulses are then added up in a chain of some type of counters to
express the time in convenient units, usually seconds, minutes, hours, etc. Then finally some kind of indicator
displays the result in a human-readable form.
Clock 55

Power source
This provides power to keep the clock going.
• In mechanical clocks, this is either a weight suspended from a cord wrapped around a pulley, or a spiral spring
called a mainspring.
• In electric clocks, it is either a battery or the AC power line.
Since clocks must run continuously, there is often a small secondary power source to keep the clock going
temporarily during interruptions in the main power. In old mechanical clocks, a maintaining power spring kept the
clock turning while the mainspring was being wound. In quartz clocks that use AC power, a small backup battery is
often included to keep the clock running if it is unplugged temporarily from the wall.

Oscillator
The timekeeping element in every modern clock is a harmonic oscillator, a physical object (resonator) that vibrates
or oscillates repetitively at a precisely constant frequency.[34]
• In mechanical clocks, this is either a pendulum or a balance wheel.
• In some early electronic clocks and watches such as the Accutron, it is a tuning fork.
• In quartz clocks and watches, it is a quartz crystal.
• In atomic clocks, it is the vibration of electrons in atoms as they emit microwaves.
• In early mechanical clocks before 1657, it was a crude balance wheel or foliot which was not a harmonic
oscillator because it lacked a balance spring. As a result they were very inaccurate, with errors of perhaps an hour
a day.[35]
The advantage of a harmonic oscillator over other forms of oscillator is that it employs resonance to vibrate at a
precise natural resonant frequency or 'beat' dependent only on its physical characteristics, and resists vibrating at
other rates. The possible precision achievable by a harmonic oscillator is measured by a parameter called its Q,[36]
[37]
or quality factor, which increases (other things being equal) with its resonant frequency.[38] This is why there has
been a long term trend toward higher frequency oscillators in clocks. Balance wheels and pendulums always include
a means of adjusting the rate of the timepiece. Quartz timepieces sometimes include a rate screw that adjusts a
capacitor for that purpose. Atomic clocks are primary standards, and their rate cannot be adjusted.

Synchronized or slave clocks

Some clocks rely for their accuracy on an external oscillator; that is, they are automatically synchronized to a more
accurate clock:
• Slave clocks, used in large institutions and schools from the 1860s to the 1970s, kept time with a pendulum, but
were wired to a master clock in the building, and periodically received a signal to synchronize them with the
master, often on the hour.[39] Later versions without pendulums were triggered by a pulse from the master clock
and certain sequences used to force rapid synchronization following a power failure.
• Synchronous electric clocks don't have an internal oscillator, but rely on the 50 or 60 Hz oscillation of the AC
power line, which is synchronized by the utility to a precision oscillator. This drives a synchronous motor in the
clock which rotates once for every cycle of the line voltage, and drives the gear train.
• Computer real time clocks keep time with a quartz crystal, but are periodically (usually weekly) synchronized
over the internet to atomic clocks (UTC), using a system called Network Time Protocol.
• Radio clocks keep time with a quartz crystal, but are periodically (often daily) synchronized to atomic clocks
(UTC) with time signals from government radio stations like WWV, WWVB, CHU, DCF77 and the GPS system.
Clock 56

Controller
This has the dual function of keeping the oscillator running by giving it 'pushes' to replace the energy lost to friction,
and converting its vibrations into a series of pulses that serve to measure the time.
• In mechanical clocks, this is the escapement, which gives precise pushes to the swinging pendulum or balance
wheel, and releases one gear tooth of the escape wheel at each swing, allowing all the clock's wheels to move
forward a fixed amount with each swing.
• In electronic clocks this is an electronic oscillator circuit that gives the vibrating quartz crystal or tuning fork tiny
'pushes', and generates a series of electrical pulses, one for each vibration of the crystal, which is called the clock
signal.
• In atomic clocks the controller is an evacuated microwave cavity attached to a microwave oscillator controlled by
a microprocessor. A thin gas of cesium atoms is released into the cavity where they are exposed to microwaves. A
laser measures how many atoms have absorbed the microwaves, and an electronic feedback control system called
a phase locked loop tunes the microwave oscillator until it is at the exact frequency that causes the atoms to
vibrate and absorb the microwaves. Then the microwave signal is divided by digital counters to become the clock
signal.[40]
In mechanical clocks, the low Q of the balance wheel or pendulum oscillator made them very sensitive to the
disturbing effect of the impulses of the escapement, so the escapement had a great effect on the accuracy of the
clock, and many escapement designs were tried. The higher Q of resonators in electronic clocks makes them
relatively insensitive to the disturbing effects of the drive power, so the driving oscillator circuit is a much less
critical component.[34]

Counter chain
This counts the pulses and adds them up to get traditional time units of seconds, minutes, hours, etc. It usually has a
provision for setting the clock by manually entering the correct time into the counter.
• In mechanical clocks this is done mechanically by a gear train, known as the wheel train. The gear train also has a
second function; to transmit mechanical power from the power source to run the oscillator. There is a friction
coupling called the 'cannon pinion' between the gears driving the hands and the rest of the clock, allowing the
hands to be turned by a knob on the back to set the time.[41]
• In digital clocks a series of integrated circuit counters or dividers add the pulses up digitally, using binary logic.
Often pushbuttons on the case allow the hour and minute counters to be incremented and decremented to set the
time.

Indicator
This displays the count of seconds, minutes, hours, etc. in a human readable form.
• The earliest mechanical clocks in the 13th century didn't have a visual indicator and signalled the time audibly by
striking bells. Many clocks to this day are striking clocks which strike the hour.
• Analog clocks, including almost all mechanical and some electronic clocks, have a traditional dial or clock face,
that displays the time in analog form with moving hour and minute hand. In quartz clocks with analog faces, a 1
Hz signal from the counters actuates a stepper motor which moves the second hand forward at each pulse, and the
minute and hour hands are moved by gears from the shaft of the second hand.
• Digital clocks display the time in periodically changing digits on a digital display.
• Talking clocks and the speaking clock services provided by telephone companies speak the time audibly, using
either recorded or digitally synthesized voices.
Clock 57

Types
Clocks can be classified by the type of time display, as well as by the method of timekeeping.

Time display methods

Analog clocks

Analog clocks usually indicate time using

angles. The most common clock face uses a
fixed numbered dial or dials and moving
hand or hands. It usually has a circular scale
of 12 hours, which can also serve as a scale
of 60 minutes, and 60 seconds if the clock
has a second hand. Many other styles and
designs have been used throughout the
years, including dials divided into 6, 8, 10,
and 24 hours. The only other widely used
clock face today is the 24 hour analog dial,
because of the use of 24 hour time in
military organizations and timetables. The
A linear clock at London's Piccadilly Circus tube station. The 24 hour band moves
10-hour clock was briefly popular during the
across the static map, keeping pace with the apparent movement of the sun above
French Revolution, when the metric system ground, and a pointer fixed on London points to the current time
was applied to time measurement, and an
Italian 6 hour clock was developed in the 18th century, presumably to save power (a clock or watch striking 24 times
uses more power).

Another type of analog clock is the sundial, which tracks the sun continuously, registering the time by the shadow
position of its gnomon. Sundials use some or part of the 24 hour analog dial. There also exist clocks which use a
digital display despite having an analog mechanism—these are commonly referred to as flip clocks.
Alternative systems have been proposed. For example, the Twelve o'clock indicates the current hour using one of
twelve colors, and indicates the minute by showing a proportion of a circular disk, similar to a moon phase.

Digital clocks

Digital clocks display a numeric representation of time. Two numeric

display formats are commonly used on digital clocks:
• the 24-hour notation with hours ranging 00–23;
• the 12-hour notation with AM/PM indicator, with hours indicated as
12AM, followed by 1AM–11AM, followed by 12PM, followed by
1PM–11PM (a notation mostly used in the United States).
Most digital clocks use an LCD, LED, or VFD display; many other
display technologies are used as well (cathode ray tubes, nixie tubes, Digital clock outside Kanazawa Station
etc.). After a reset, battery change or power failure, digital clocks displaying the time by controlling valves on a
without a backup battery or capacitor either start counting from 12:00, fountain

or stay at 12:00, often with blinking digits indicating that time needs to
be set. Some newer clocks will actually reset themselves based on radio or Internet time servers that are tuned to
national atomic clocks. Since the release of digital clocks in the mainstream, the use of analogue clocks has declined
significantly.
Clock 58

Auditory clocks

For convenience, distance, telephony or blindness, auditory clocks

present the time as sounds. The sound is either spoken natural
language, (e.g. "The time is twelve thirty-five"), or as auditory codes
(e.g. number of sequential bell rings on the hour represents the number
of the hour like the bell Big Ben). Most telecommunication companies
also provide a Speaking clock service as well.
Basic digital clock radio

Purposes
Clocks are in homes, offices and many other places; smaller ones
(watches) are carried on the wrist; larger ones are in public places, e.g.
a train station or church. A small clock is often shown in a corner of
computer displays, mobile phones and many MP3 players.
The purpose of a clock is not always to display the time. It may also be
used to control a device according to time, e.g. an alarm clock, a VCR,
or a time bomb (see: counter). However, in this context, it is more
appropriate to refer to it as a timer or trigger mechanism rather than
strictly as a clock.
A typical Deutsche Bahn Train station clock
Computers depend on an accurate internal clock signal to allow
synchronized processing. (A few research projects are developing CPUs based on asynchronous circuits.) Some
computers also maintain time and date for all manner of operations whether these be for alarms, event initiation, or
just to display the time of day. The internal computer clock is generally kept running by a small battery. Many
computers will still function even if the internal clock battery is dead, but the computer clock will need to be reset
each time the computer is restarted, since once power is lost, time is also lost.

Ideal clocks
An ideal clock is a scientific principle that measures the ratio of the duration of natural processes, and thus will give
the time measure for use in physical theories. Therefore, to define an ideal clock in terms of any physical theory
would be circular. An ideal clock is more appropriately defined in relationship to the set of all physical processes.
This leads to the following definitions:
• A clock is a recurrent process and a counter.
• A good clock is one which, when used to measure other recurrent processes, finds many of them to be periodic.
• An ideal clock is a clock (i.e., recurrent process) that makes the most other recurrent processes periodic.
The recurrent, periodic process (e.g. a metronome) is an oscillator and typically generates a clock signal. Sometimes
that signal alone is (confusingly) called "the clock", but sometimes "the clock" includes the counter, its indicator, and
everything else supporting it.
This definition can be further improved by the consideration of successive levels of smaller and smaller error
tolerances. While not all physical processes can be surveyed, the definition should be based on the set of physical
processes which includes all individual physical processes which are proposed for consideration. Since atoms are so
numerous and since, within current measurement tolerances they all beat in a manner such that if one is chosen as
periodic then the others are all deemed to be periodic also, it follows that atomic clocks represent ideal clocks to
Clock 59

within present measurement tolerances and in relation to all presently known physical processes. However, they are
not so designated by fiat. Rather, they are designated as the current ideal clock because they are currently the best
instantiation of the definition.

Navigation
Navigation by ships and planes depends on the ability to measure
latitude and longitude. Latitude is fairly easy to determine through
celestial navigation, but the measurement of longitude requires
accurate measurement of time. This need was a major motivation for
the development of accurate mechanical clocks. John Harrison created
the first highly accurate marine chronometer in the mid-18th century.
The Noon gun in Cape Town still fires an accurate signal to allow John Harrison's Chronometer H5
ships to check their chronometers.

Use of an atomic clock in radio signal producing satellites is fundamental to the operation of GPS (Global
Positioning System) navigation devices.

Seismology
In determining the location of an earthquake, the arrival time of several types of seismic wave at a minimum of four
dispersed observers is dependent upon each observer recording wave arrival times according to a common clock.

Specific types of clocks

by Mechanism: by Function: by Style:

• Astronomical clock • 10-hour clock • American clock

• Atomic clock • Alarm clock • Balloon clock
• Digital clock • Binary clock • Banjo clock
• Candle clock • Chiming clock • Bracket clock
• Congreve clock • Chronometer watch • Carriage clock
• Electric clock • Cuckoo clock • Cartel clock
• Flip clock • Game clock • French Empire mantel clock
• Hourglass • Japanese clock • Cat clock
• Incense clock • Master clock • Clock tower
• Mechanical watch • Musical clock • Doll's head clock
• Oil-lamp clock • Railroad • Floral clock
chronometer
• Pendulum clock • Slave clock • Grandfather clock
• Projection clock • Speaking clock • Lantern clock
• Quartz clock • Stopwatch • Lighthouse clock
• Radio clock • Striking clock • Longcase clock (or tall-case clock)
• Rolling ball clock • Talking clock • Mantel clock
• Spring drive watch • Tide clock • Skeleton clock
• Steam clock • Time ball • Tix clock
• Sundial • Time clock • Tower clock
• Torsion pendulum clock • World clock • Turret clock
• Water clock • Watch
Clock 60

See also
• Allan variance • Cosmo Clock 21, world's largest • List of biggest clock faces
clock
• American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute • Cox's timepiece • List of clocks
• BaselWorld • Cuckooland Museum • List of international common standards
• Biological clock • Death Clock • Metrology
• Castle clock • Department of Defense master • Mora clock
clock (U.S.)
• Clock as herald of the Industrial Revolution (Lewis • Doomsday Clock • National Association of Watch and Clock
Mumford) Collectors
• Clock face • Earth clock • Replica watch
• Clock network • Federation of the Swiss Watch • Star clock
Industry FH
• Clock of the Long Now • Guard tour patrol system • System time
(watchclocks)
• Clockmaker • Humanclock • Timeline of time measurement technology
• Clock signal (digital circuits) • Iron Ring Clock • Timer
• Colgate Clock (New Jersey), largest clock in USA • Jens Olsen's World Clock • Time to digital converter
• Corpus Clock • Jewel bearing • Watchmaker

Newsgroup
• alt.horology

References
• Baillie, G.H., O. Clutton, & C.A. Ilbert. Britten’s Old Clocks and Watches and Their Makers (7th ed.). Bonanza
Books (1956).
• Bolter, David J. Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. The University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill, N.C. (1984). ISBN 0-8078-4108-0 pbk. Very good, readable summary of the role of "the clock" in its
setting the direction of philosophic movement for the "Western World". Cf. picture on p. 25 showing the verge
and foliot. Bolton derived the picture from Macey, p. 20.
• Bruton, Eric. The History of Clocks and Watches. London: Black Cat (1993).
• Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard (1996). History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders. Trans. Thomas
Dunlap. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226155102.
• Edey, Winthrop. French Clocks. New York: Walker & Co. (1967).
• Kak, Subhash, Ph.D. Babylonian and Indian Astronomy: Early Connections. February 17, 2003.
• Kumar, Narendra "Science in Ancient India" (2004). ISBN 8126120568.
• Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press (1983).
• Landes, David S. Clocks & the Wealth of Nations, Daedalus journal, Spring 2003.
• Lloyd, Alan H. “Mechanical Timekeepers”, A History of Technology, Vol. III. Edited by Charles Joseph Singer et
al. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1957), pp. 648–675.
• Macey, Samuel L., Clocks and the Cosmos: Time in Western Life and Thought, Archon Books, Hamden, Conn.
(1980).
• Needham, Joseph (2000) [1965]. Science & Civilisation in China, Vol. 4, Part 2: Mechanical Engineering.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521058031.
• North, John. God's Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time. London: Hambledon and
London (2005).
 63

Definitions and standards

Time standard
A time standard is a specification for measuring time: either the rate at which time passes; or points in time; or
both. In modern times, several time specifications have been officially recognized as standards, where formerly they
were matters of custom and practice. An example of a kind of time standard can be a time scale, specifying a method
for measuring divisions of time. A standard for civil time can specify both time intervals and time-of-day.
Standardized time measurements are made using a clock to count periods of some cyclic change, which may be
either the changes of a natural phenomenon or of an artificial machine.
Historically, time standards were often based on the Earth's rotational period. From the late 17th century to the 19th
century it was assumed that the Earth's daily rotational rate was constant.[1] Astronomical observations of several
kinds, including eclipse records, studied in the 19th century, raised suspicions that the rate at which Earth rotates is
gradually slowing and also shows small-scale irregularities, and this was confirmed in the early twentieth century.[2]
Time standards based on Earth rotation were replaced (or initially supplemented) for astronomical use from 1952
onwards by an ephemeris time standard based on the Earth's orbital period and in practice on the motion of the
Moon. The invention in 1955 of the cesium atomic clock has led to the replacement of older and purely astronomical
time standards, for most practical purposes, by newer time standards based wholly or partly on atomic time.
Various types of second and day are used as the basic time interval for most time scales. Other intervals of time
(minutes, hours, and years) are usually defined in terms of these two.

Time standards based on Earth rotation

Apparent solar time ('apparent' is often used in English-language sources, but 'true' in French astronomical
literature[3] ) is based on the solar day, which is the period between one solar noon (passage of the real Sun across
the meridian) and the next. A solar day is approximately 24 hours of mean time. Because the Earth's orbit around the
sun is elliptical, and because of the obliquity of the Earth's axis relative to the plane of the orbit (the ecliptic), the
apparent solar day varies a few dozen seconds above or below the mean value of 24 hours. As the variation
accumulates over a few weeks, there are differences as large as 16 minutes between apparent solar time and mean
solar time (see Equation of time). However, these variations cancel out over a year. There are also other
perturbations such as Earth's wobble, but these are less than a second per year.
Sidereal time is time by the stars. A sidereal day is the time it takes the Earth to make one revolution with respect to
the stars. A sidereal day is approximately 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds. For accurate astronomical work on land, it
was usual to observe sidereal time rather than solar time in order to arrive at a measure of mean solar time, because
the observations of 'fixed' stars could be measured and reduced more accurately than observations of the Sun (in
spite of the need to make various small compensations, for refraction, aberration, precession, nutation and proper
motion). It is well known that observations of the Sun pose substantial obstacles to the achievement of accuracy in
measurement.[4] In former times, before the distribution of accurate time signals, it was part of the routine work at
any observatory to observe the sidereal times of meridian transit of selected 'clock stars' (of well-known position and
movement), and to use these to correct observatory clocks running local mean sidereal time; but nowadays local
sidereal time is usually generated by computer, based on time signals.[5]
Mean solar time was originally apparent solar time corrected by the equation of time. Mean solar time was
sometimes derived, especially at sea for navigational purposes, by observing apparent solar time and then adding to
it a calculated correction, the equation of time, which compensated for two known irregularities, caused by the
Time standard 64

ellipticity of the Earth's orbit and the obliquity of the Earth's equator and polar axis to the ecliptic (which is the plane
of the Earth's orbit around the sun).
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was originally mean time deduced from meridian observations made at the Royal
Greenwich Observatory (RGO). The principal meridian of that observatory was chosen in 1884 by the International
Meridian Conference to be the Prime Meridian. GMT either by that name or as 'mean time at Greenwich' used to be
an international time standard, but is no longer so; it was initially renamed in 1928 as Universal Time (UT) (partly as
a result of ambiguities arising from the changed practice of starting the astronomical day at midnight instead of at
noon, adopted as from 1 January 1925). The more current refined version of UT, UT1, is still in reality mean time at
Greenwich. Greenwich Mean Time is still the legal time in the UK (in winter, and as adjusted by one hour for
summer time). But Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) (an atomic-based time scale which is always kept within 0.9
second of UT1) is in common actual use in the UK, and the name GMT is often inaccurately used to refer to it. (See
articles Greenwich Mean Time, Universal Time, Coordinated Universal Time and the sources they cite.)
Universal Time (UT) is a time scale based on the mean solar day, defined to be as uniform as possible despite
variations in Earth's rotation.
• UT0 is the rotational time of a particular place of observation. It is observed as the diurnal motion of stars or
extraterrestrial radio sources.
• UT1 is computed by correcting UT0 for the effect of polar motion on the longitude of the observing site. It varies
from uniformity because of the irregularities in Earth's rotation.

Time standards for planetary motion calculations

Ephemeris time and its successor time scales described below have all been intended for astronomical use, e.g. in
planetary motion calculations, with aims including uniformity, in particular, freedom from irregularities of Earth
rotation. Some of these standards are examples of dynamical time scales and/or of coordinate time scales.
• Ephemeris Time (ET) was from 1952 to 1976 an official time scale standard of the International Astronomical
Union; it was a dynamical time scale based on the orbital motion of the Earth around the Sun, from which the
ephemeris second was derived as a defined fraction of the tropical year. This ephemeris second was the standard
for the SI second from 1956 to 1967, and it was also the source for calibration of the cesium atomic clock; its
length has been closely duplicated, to within 1 part in 1010, in the size of the current SI second referred to atomic
time.[6] This Ephemeris Time standard was non-relativistic and did not fulfil growing needs for relativistic
coordinate time scales. It was in use for the official almanacs and planetary ephemerides from 1960 to 1983, and
was replaced in official almanacs for 1984 and after, by numerically integrated Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Development Ephemeris DE200 (based on the JPL relativistic coordinate time scale Teph).
For applications at the Earth's surface, ET's official replacement was TDT, since redefined as TT. For the calculation
of ephemerides, TDB was officially recommended to replace ET, but deficiencies were found in the definition of
TDB (though not affecting Teph), and these led to the IAU defining and recommending further time scales, TCB for
use in the solar system as a whole, and TCG for use in the vicinity of the Earth. As defined, TCB (as observed from
the Earth's surface) is of divergent rate relative to all of ET, Teph and TDT/TT;[7] and the same is true, to a lesser
extent, of TCG. The ephemerides of sun, moon and planets in current widespread and official use continue to be
those calculated at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (updated as from 2003 to DE405) using as argument Teph.
• Terrestrial Dynamic Time (TDT) replaced Ephemeris Time and maintained continuity with it. TDT is a uniform
atomic time scale, whose unit is the SI second. TDT is tied in its rate to the SI second, as is International Atomic
Time (TAI), but because TAI was somewhat arbitrarily defined at its inception in 1958 to be initially equal to a
refined version of UT, TT is offset from TAI, by a constant 32.184 seconds. The offset provided a continuity from
Ephemeris Time to TDT. TDT has since been redefined as Terrestrial Time (TT).
• Barycentric Dynamical Time (TDB) is similar to TDT but includes relativistic corrections that move the origin
to the barycenter. TDB differs from TT only in periodic terms. The difference is at most 2 milliseconds.
Time standard 65

In 1991, in order to clarify the relationships between space-time coordinates, new time scales were introduced, each
with a different frame of reference. Terrestrial Time is time at Earth's surface. Geocentric Coordinate Time is a
coordinate time scale at Earth's center. Barycentric Coordinate Time is a coordinate time scale at the center of mass
of the solar system, which is called the barycenter. Barycentric Dynamical Time is a dynamical time at the
barycenter.
• Terrestrial Time (TT) is the time scale which had formerly been called Terrestrial Dynamical Time. It is now
defined as a coordinate time scale at Earth's surface.
• Geocentric Coordinate Time (TCG) is a coordinate time having its spatial origin at the center of Earth's mass.
TCG is linearly related to TT as: TCG - TT = LG * (JD -2443144.5) * 86400 seconds, with the scale difference LG
defined as 6.969290134e-10 exactly.
• Barycentric Coordinate Time (TCB) is a coordinate time having its spatial origin at the solar system barycenter.
TCB differs from TT in rate and other mostly periodic terms. Neglecting the periodic terms, in the sense of an
average over a long period of time the two are related by: TCB - TT = LB * (JD -2443144.5) * 86400 seconds.
According to IAU the best estimate of the scale difference LB is 1.55051976772e-08.

Constructed time standards

International Atomic Time ( TAI [8]) is the primary international time standard from which other time standards,
including UTC, are calculated. TAI is kept by the BIPM (International Bureau of Weights and Measures), and is
based on the combined input of many atomic clocks around the world [9], each corrected for environmental and
relativistic effects. It is the primary realisation of Terrestrial Time.
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is an atomic time scale designed to approximate Universal Time. UTC differs
from TAI by an integral number of seconds. UTC is kept within 0.9 second of UT1 by the introduction of
one-second steps to UTC, the "leap second". To date these steps have always been positive.
Standard time or civil time in a region deviates a fixed, round amount, usually a whole number of hours, from some
form of Universal Time, now usually UTC. The offset is chosen such that a new day starts approximately while the
sun is at the nadir. See Time zone. Alternatively the difference is not really fixed, but it changes twice a year a round
amount, usually one hour, see Daylight saving time.

Other time scales

Julian day number is a count of days elapsed since Greenwich mean noon on 1 January 4713 B.C., Julian proleptic
calendar. The Julian Date is the Julian day number followed by the fraction of the day elapsed since the preceding
noon. Conveniently for astronomers, this avoids the date skip during an observation night.
Modified Julian day (MJD) is defined as MJD = JD - 2400000.5. An MJD day thus begins at midnight, civil date.
Julian dates can be expressed in UT, TAI, TDT, etc. and so for precise applications the timescale should be
specified, e.g. MJD 49135.3824 TAI.

See also
• Radio clock
• Orbital period as unit of time

Further reading
[1] Before the time of John Flamsteed it was widely believed that the Earth's rotation had seasonal variations comparable in size with what is
now called the equation of time. See articles on Vincent Wing and Thomas Streete for examples of astronomers before Flamsteed who
believed this. The equation of time, correctly based on the two major components of the Sun's irregularity of apparent motion, i.e. the effect of
the obliquity of the ecliptic and the effect of the Earth's orbital eccentricity, was not generally adopted until after John Flamsteed's tables of
Orders of magnitude 67

Orders of magnitude
Seconds

Orders of magnitude (time)

Factor Multiple Symbol Definition Comparative examples & common units Orders of
(s) magnitude

tP Planck time is the unit of time of the

10−44 Planck time = √ħ G/c^5 ≈ 5.4 × 10−44 s. 10−44 s
natural units system known as Planck
units.

1 yoctosecond [1] Yoctosecond, (yocto- + second), is one [2] [3] 1 ys and less,
10−24 ys 0.3 ys: mean life of the W and Z bosons. [a]
quadrillionth (in the long scale) or one 10 ys, 100 ys
0.5 ys: time for top quark decay, according to the
septillionth (in the short scale) of a Standard Model.
second. 1 ys: time taken for a quark to emit a gluon.
23 ys: half-life of 7H.

1 zeptosecond zs Zeptosecond, (zepto- + second), is one 7 zs: half-life of helium-9's outer neutron in the 1 zs, 10 zs, 100
10−21
sextillionth of one second (short scale). second nuclear halo. zs
17 zs: approximate period of electromagnetic
radiation at the boundary between gamma rays and
X-rays.
300 zs: approximate typical cycle time of X-rays,
on the boundary between hard and soft X-rays

1 attosecond as 1 as, 10 as, 100

10−18 100 attoseconds: shortest measured period of
[4] [5] as
time.

1 femtosecond fs cycle time for 390 nanometre light, transition from 1 fs, 10 fs, 100
10−15
visible light to ultraviolet fs

1 picosecond ps 1 ps: half-life of a bottom quark 1 ps, 10 ps, 100

10−12
4 ps: Time to execute one machine cycle by an ps
IBM Silicon-Germanium transistor

1 nanosecond ns 1 ns: Time to execute one machine cycle by a 1 ns, 10 ns, 100
10−9
1GHz microprocessor ns
1 ns: Light travels 12 inches (30 cm)

1 microsecond µs sometimes also abbreviated µsec 1 µs, 10 µs, 100

10−6
1 µs: Time to execute one machine cycle by an Intel µs
80186 microprocessor
4–16 µs: Time to execute one machine cycle by a
1960s minicomputer

1 millisecond ms 4–8 ms: typical seek time for a computer hard disk 1 ms, 10 ms,
10−3
50–80 ms: Blink of an eye 100 ms
150–300 ms: Human reflex response to visual
stimuli

1 centisecond cs
10−2

1 second s 1 s, 10 s, 100 s
100 1 s: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation
corresponding to the transition between the two
hyperfine levels of the ground state of the
[6]
cesium-133 atom.
60 s: 1 minute
Orders of magnitude 68

1 kilosecond ks 3.6 ks: 3600 s or 1 hour

103 103 s, 104 s, 105
(16.7 minutes) 86.4 ks: 86 400 s or 1 day s
604.8 ks: 1 week

1 megasecond Ms
106 month = 2.6 x 106 s 106 s, 107 s, 108
(11.6 days) year = 31.6 Ms = 107.50 s s

1 gigasecond Gs
109 century = 3.16 Gs ≈ 3.16 × 109 s 109 s, 1010 s,
(32 years) millennium = 31.6 Gs ≈ 3.16 × 1010 s 1011 s

1 terasecond Ts
1012 eon = 31.6 Ts ≈ 3.16 × 1013 s 1012 s, 1013 s,
(32 000 years) 1014 s

1 petasecond Ps
1015 aeon = 31.6 Ps ≈ 3.16 × 1016 s 1015 s, 1016 s,
(32 million 1017 s
years)

1 exasecond Es 0.43 Es ≈ the approximate age of the Universe

1018 1018 s, 1019 s,
(32 billion 1020 s
years)

1 zettasecond Zs
1021 1021 s, 1022 s,
(32 trillion 1023 s
years)

1 yottasecond Ys
1024 1024 s, 1025 s,
(32 1026 s and
quadrillion more
years)

See also
• Heat Death
• Second law of thermodynamics
• Big Rip
• Big Crunch
• Big Bounce
• Big Bang
• Cyclic model
• Dyson's eternal intelligence
• Final anthropic principle
• Ultimate fate of the Universe
• Graphical timeline of the Stelliferous Era
• Graphical timeline from Big Bang to Heat Death. This timeline uses the loglog scale for comparison with the
graphical timeline included in this article.
• Graphical timeline of our universe. This timeline uses the more intuitive linear time, for comparison with this
article.
• Timeline of the Big Bang
• Graphical timeline of the Big Bang
• The Last Question, a short story by Isaac Asimov which considers the inevitable outcome of heat death in the
universe and how it may be reversed.
Orders of magnitude 69

Years

Orders of magnitude (time)

Factor Multiple common units orders of magnitude
(a)

10−50 Planck time, the shortest physically meaningful interval of time ≈ 1.71 × 10−50 a 10−50 a

1 yoctoannum -- 1 ya and less, 10 ya, 100 ya

10−24

1 zeptoannum -- 1 za, 10 za, 100 za

10−21

1 attoannum -- 1 aa, 10 aa, 100 aa

10−18

1 femtoannum -- 1 fa, 10 fa, 100 fa

10−15

1 picoannum -- 1 pa, 10 pa, 100 pa

10−12

1 nanoannum 1 na, 10 na, 100 na

10−9 1 second = 3.17 × 10-8 a ≈ 10-7.50 a

1 microannum 1 minute = 1.90 × 10-6 a 1 ua, 10 ua, 100 ua

10−6
1 hour = 1.40 × 10-4 a

1 milliannum 1 ma, 10 ma, 100 ma

10−3 1 day = 2.73 × 10-3 a
1 week = 1.91 × 10-2 a

1 annum 1 average year = 1 annum (= 365.24219 SI days) 1 a, 10 a, 100 a

100
decade = 10 anna
century = 100 anna

1 kiloannum millennium = 1000 anna

103 103 a, 104 a, 105 a

1 megaannum epoch = 1,000,000 anna

106 106 a, 107 a, 108 a

1 gigaannum
109 aeon = 1,000,000,000 anna 109 a, 1010 a, 1011 a
10
13.7 Ga = 1.37×10 a ≈ 13.7 billion years, the approximate age of the Universe

1 teraannum ---
1012 1012 a, 1013 a, 1014 a

1 petaannum ---
1015 1015 a, 1016 a, 1017 a

1 exaannum --
1018 1018 a, 1019 a, 1020 a

1 zettaannum --
1021 1021 a, 1022 a, 1023 a

1 yottaannum --
1024 1024 a, 1025 a, 1026 and more

The pages linked in the right-hand column contain lists of times that are of the same order of magnitude (power of
ten). Rows in the table represent increasing powers of a thousand (3 orders of magnitude).
Conversion from year to second is year × 31 557 600 using the Julian year. Conversion from to
is approximately . Example conversion;
.
Orders of magnitude 70

See also
• Annum • Planck units
• Geologic timescale • Second
• Human timescales • Temporal resolution
• Logarithmic timeline • Timeline of evolution
• Natural history • Timeline of the Big Bang
• Physical unit

External links
• Exploring Time [81] from Planck time to the lifespan of the universe

Footnotes
[1] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. Available at: http:/ / www. bartleby. com/ 61/ 21/
Y0022100. html. Accessed December 19, 2007. note: abbr. ys or ysec
[2] C. Amsler et al. (2009): Particle listings – W boson (http:/ / pdg. lbl. gov/ 2009/ listings/ rpp2009-list-w-boson. pdf)
[3] C. Amsler et al. (2009): Particle listings – Z boson (http:/ / pdg. lbl. gov/ 2009/ listings/ rpp2009-list-z-boson. pdf)
[4] "Shortest time interval measured" (http:/ / news. bbc. co. uk/ 2/ hi/ science/ nature/ 3486160. stm). BBC News. 25 February 2004. .
[5] "Fastest view of molecular motion" (http:/ / news. bbc. co. uk/ 1/ hi/ sci/ tech/ 4766842. stm). BBC News. 4 March 2006. .
[6] http:/ / tycho. usno. navy. mil/ leapsec. html
[a]
  PDG reports the resonance width (Γ). Here the conversion τ = ħ⁄Γ is given instead.

Orders of magnitude
area angular velocity charge currency data density energy
force frequency length magnetic field mass numbers power
pressure specific energy specific heat capacity speed temperature time voltage
density
volume entropy radiation dose
equivalent
Conversion of units
physical SI SI base unit SI derived unit SI prefix Planck units
unit
Chronology 71

Chronology
Chronology (from Latin chronologia, from Ancient Greek
χρόνος, chronos, "time"; and -λογία, -logia) is a chronicle or
arrangement of events in their order of occurrence in time,[2]
such as a timeline. It is also "the determination of the actual
temporal sequence of past events".[2]
Chronology is part of periodization. It is also part of the
discipline of history, including earth history, the earth
sciences, and study of the geologic time scale (see Prehistoric
chronologies below).

Definition
A chronology may be either relative—that is, locating related
events relative to each other—or absolute—locating these
events to specific dates in a chronological era. Even this
distinction may be blurred by use of different calendars. In
Judeo-Christian cultures, historical dates in an absolute
Joseph Scaliger's De emendatione temporum (1583) began
chronology are understood to be referred to the Christian era, [1]
the modern science of chronology
in combination with the proleptic Julian calendar (originally)
and the Gregorian calendar respectively.

Related fields
Chronology is the science of locating historical events in time, and is distinct from, but relies upon chronometry or
timekeeping, and historiography, which examines the writing of history and the use of historical methods.
Radiocarbon dating estimates the age of formerly living things by measuring the proportion of carbon-14 isotope in
their carbon content. Dendrochronology estimates the age of trees by correlation of the various growth rings in their
wood to known year-by-year reference sequences in the region to reflect year-to-year climatic variation.
Dendrochronology is used in turn as a calibration reference for radiocarbon dating curves.

Calendar and era

The familiar terms calendar and era (within the meaning of a coherent system of numbered calendar years) concern
two complementary fundamental concepts of chronology. For example during eight centuries the calendar belonging
to the Christian era, which era was taken in use in the eighth century by Bede, was the Julian calendar, but after the
year 1582 it was the Gregorian calendar. Dionysius Exiguus (about the year 500) was the founder of that era, which
is nowadays the most widespread dating system on earth.

Ab Urbe condita Era

Ab Urbe condita is Latin for "from the founding of the City (Rome)",[3] traditionally set in 753 BC. It was used to
identify the Roman year by a few Roman historians. Modern historians use it much more frequently than the Romans
themselves did; the dominant method of identifying Roman years was to name the two consuls who held office that
year. Before the advent of the modern critical edition of historical Roman works, AUC was indiscriminately added to
them by earlier editors, making it appear more widely used than it actually was.
Chronology 72

It was used systematically for the first time only about the year 400, by the Iberian historian Orosius. Pope Boniface
IV, in about the year 600, seems to have been the first who made a connection between these this era and Anno
Domini. (AD 1 = AUC 754.)

Astronomical Era
Dionysius Exiguus’ Anno Domini era (which contains only calendar years AD) was extended by Bede to the
complete Christian era (which contains, in addition all calendar years BC, but no year zero). Ten centuries after
Bede, the French astronomers Philippe de la Hire (in the year 1702) and Jacques Cassini (in the year 1740), purely to
simplify certain calculations, put the Julian Dating System (proposed in the year 1583 by Joseph Scaliger) and with it
an astronomical era into use, which contains a leap year zero, which the year 1 (AD) precedes but does not exactly
coincide with the year 1 BC. Astronomers never preposed seriously to replace our era with their astronomical era
(which for that matter coincides exactly with the Christian era where it concerns the calendar years after the year 4).

Prehistoric chronologies
While of critical importance to the historian, methods of determining chronology are used in most disciplines of
science, especially astronomy, geology, paleontology and archaeology.
In the absence of written history, with its chronicles and king lists, late 19th century archaeologists found that they
could develop relative chronologies based on pottery techniques and styles. In the field of Egyptology, William
Flinders Petrie pioneered sequence dating to penetrate pre-dynastic Neolithic times, using groups of contemporary
artefacts deposited together at a single time in graves and working backwards methodically from the earliest
historical phases of Egypt. This method of dating is known as seriation.
Known wares discovered at strata in sometimes quite distant sites, the product of trade, helped extend the network of
chronologies. Some cultures have retained the name applied to them in reference to characteristic forms, for lack of
an idea of what they called themselves: "The Beaker People" in northern Europe during the 3rd millennium BCE, for
example. The study of the means of placing pottery and other cultural artifacts into some kind of order proceeds in
two phases, classification and typology: Classification creates categories for the purposes of description, and
typology seeks to identify and analyse changes that allow artifacts to be placed into sequences.[4]
Laboratory techniques developed particularly after mid-20th century helped constantly revise and refine the
chronologies developed for specific cultural areas. Unrelated dating methods help reinforce a chronology, an axiom
of corroborative evidence. Ideally, archaeological materials used for dating a site should complement each other and
provide a means of cross-checking. Conclusions drawn from just one unsupported technique are usually regarded as
unreliable.

Chronological analysis
Several legendary sources tend to assign unrealistically long lifespans to pre-historical heroes and monarchs (e.g.,
Egypt, Hebrews, Japanese), if the number of years there reported are understood as years of more than 340 days.
Though chronologies formulated before the 1960s are subject to serious skepticism today, more recent results are
more robust than readily appears to journalists and enthusiastic amateurs. Bayesian inference can be applied in the
analysis of chronological information, including radiocarbon-derived dates.
 75

Religion

Time Cycles
Time cycles signify a 360 degree circular or elliptical rotation, orbit or journey in time typically of an object such as
a planet or moon. In the case of the precession of the equinoxes, the cycle is determined by the 360 degree shifting of
the equinoctal axis. Time cycles can also refer to larger rotations or orbits such as the time it takes for the Earth to
make one complete revolution about the Galactic Center of the Milky Way.

The Earth's day

The Earth's 360 degree rotation upon its axis in 24 hours is the measure of one day.

The Earth's year

The Earth's 360 degree rotation around the Sun in 365 days is the measure of one year.

The precession of the equinoxes

The 360 degree rotation of the equinoctal axis against the backdrop of the constellations and other stars in 25,920
years is the measure of the precession of the equinoxes.

Ancient methods of measuring cycles of time

• Aztec sun stone
• Maya calendar
• Chinese calendar
• Yugas of Hindu philosophy
• Zodiac
• Astrological ages
• Wheel of time

See also
• Calendar
Wheel of time 76

Wheel of time
The wheel of time or wheel of history is a concept in several religions and philosophies, notably religions of Indian
origin such as Hinduism later adopted by Buddhism, which regard time as cyclical and consisting of repeating ages.
Many other notable cultures also believe in this Wheel of Time: notably, the Q'ero Indians in Peru who are the direct
descendants of the Incan empire, as well as the Hopi Indians of Arizona, believe in this cyclical idea of time.

Buddhism
See Kalachakra for details.
The Wheel of Time or Kalachakra is a Tantric deity that is associated with Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, which
encompasses all four main schools of Sakya, Nyingma, Kagyu and Gelug, and is especially important within the
lesser-known Jonang tradition.
The Kalachakra tantra prophecies a world within which (religious) conflict is prevalent. A worldwide war will be
waged which will see the expansion of the mystical Kingdom of Shambhala led by a messianical king.

Modern Usage

Literature
In the interview included at the end of the audio versions of his books, author Robert Jordan has stated that his
internationally bestselling fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, borrows this concept from Hindu mythology.

Television
The ABC TV series Lost features on its island setting a literal wheel which various characters physically turn to
manipulate time. In one instance, the wheel has fallen off of its axis, causing the Island to skip violently back and
forth through time.

See also
• Kalachakra
• Wheel of the Year
 77

Philosophy

Philosophy of space and time

Philosophy of space and time is the branch of philosophy concerned with the issues surrounding the ontology,
epistemology, and character of space and time. While such ideas have been central to philosophy from its inception,
the philosophy of space and time was both an inspiration for and a central aspect of early analytic philosophy. The
subject focuses on a number of basic issues, including—but not limited to—whether or not time and space exist
independently of the mind, whether they exist independently of one another, what accounts for time's apparently
unidirectional flow, whether times other than the present moment exist, and questions about the nature of identity
(particularly the nature of identity over time).

Ancient and medieval views

The earliest recorded Western philosophy of time was expounded by the ancient Egyptian thinker Ptahhotep (c.
2650–2600 BC), who said: "Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to
the spirit." The Vedas, the earliest texts on Indian philosophy and Hindu philosophy dating back to the late 2nd
millennium BC, describe ancient Hindu cosmology, in which the universe goes through repeated cycles of creation,
destruction and rebirth, with each cycle lasting 4,320,000 years. Ancient Greek philosophers, including Parmenides
and Heraclitus, wrote essays on the nature of time.[1]
In Book 11 of St. Augustine's Confessions, he ruminates on the nature of time, asking, "What then is time? If no one
asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." He settles on time being defined more by
what it is not than what it is.[2]
In contrast to ancient Greek philosophers who believed that the universe had an infinite past with no beginning,
medieval philosophers and theologians developed the concept of the universe having a finite past with a beginning.
This view was inspired by the creation myth shared by the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and
Islam. The Christian philosopher, John Philoponus, presented the first such argument against the ancient Greek
notion of an infinite past. His were adopted by many including, most notably, early Muslim philosopher, Al-Kindi
(Alkindus); the Jewish philosopher, Saadia Gaon (Saadia ben Joseph); and the Muslim theologian, Al-Ghazali
(Algazel). They used his two logical arguments against an infinite past, the first being the "argument from the
impossibility of the existence of an actual infinite", which states:[3]
"An actual infinite cannot exist."
"An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite."
"∴ An infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist."
The second argument, the "argument from the impossibility of completing an actual infinite by successive addition",
states:[3]
"An actual infinite cannot be completed by successive addition."
"The temporal series of past events has been completed by successive addition."
"∴ The temporal series of past events cannot be an actual infinite."
Both arguments were adopted by later Christian philosophers and theologians, and the second argument in particular
became more famous after it was adopted by Immanuel Kant in his thesis of the first antinomy concerning time.[3]
Philosophy of space and time 78

In the early 11th century, the Muslim physicist, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen or Alhazen), discussed space perception
and its epistemological implications in his Book of Optics (1021). His experimental proof of the intromission model
of vision led to changes in the way the visual perception of space was understood, contrary to the previous emission
theory of vision supported by Euclid and Ptolemy. In "tying the visual perception of space to prior bodily experience,
Alhacen unequivocally rejected the intuitiveness of spatial perception and, therefore, the autonomy of vision.
Without tangible notions of distance and size for correlation, sight can tell us next to nothing about such things."[4]

Realism and anti-realism

A traditional realist position in ontology is that time and space have existence apart from the human mind. Idealists
deny or doubt the existence of objects independent of the mind. Some anti-realists whose ontological position is that
objects outside the mind do exist, nevertheless doubt the independent existence of time and space.
Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, described time as an a priori notion that, together with other a priori notions
such as space, allows us to comprehend sense experience. For Kant, neither space nor time are conceived as
substances, but rather both are elements of a systematic framework we use to structure our experience. Spatial
measurements are used to quantify how far apart objects are, and temporal measurements are used to quantitatively
compare the interval between (or duration of) events.
Idealist writers such as J. M. E. McTaggart in The Unreality of Time have argued that time is an illusion (see also
The flow of time below).
The writers discussed here are for the most part realists in this regard; for instance, Gottfried Leibniz held that his
monads existed, at least independently of the mind of the observer.

Absolutism and relationalism

Leibniz and Newton

The great debate between defining notions of space and time as real objects themselves (absolute), or whether they
are merely orderings upon actual objects (relational), began between physicists Isaac Newton (via his spokesman,
Samuel Clarke) and Gottfried Leibniz in the papers of the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence.
Arguing against the absolutist position, Leibniz offers a number of thought experiments with the purpose of showing
that there is contradiction in assuming the existence of facts such as absolute location and velocity. These arguments
trade heavily on two principles central to his philosophy: the principle of sufficient reason and the identity of
indiscernibles. The principle of sufficient reason holds that for every fact there is a reason that is sufficient to explain
what and why it is the way it is and not otherwise. The identity of indiscernibles states that if there is no way of
telling two entities apart then they are one and the same thing.
The example Leibniz uses involves two proposed universes situated in absolute space. The only discernible
difference between them is that the latter is positioned five feet to the left of the first. The possibility of the example
is only available if such a thing as absolute space exists. Such a situation, however, is not possible according to
Leibniz, for if it were, where a universe was positioned in absolute space would have no sufficient reason, as it might
very well have been anywhere else. Therefore, it is contradicting the principle of sufficient reason, and there could
exist two distinct universes that were in all ways indiscernible, thus contradicting the identity of indiscernibles.
Standing out in Clarke’s (and Newton’s) response to Leibniz arguments is the bucket argument: Water in a bucket,
hung from a rope and set to spin, will start with a flat surface. As the water begins to spin in the bucket, the surface
of the water will become concave. If the bucket is stopped, the water will continue to spin, and while the spin
continues the surface will remain concave. The concave surface is apparently not the result of the interaction of the
bucket and the water, since the water is flat when the bucket first starts to spin, becomes concave as the water starts
to spin, and remains concave as the bucket stops.
Philosophy of space and time 79

In this response, Clarke argues for the necessity of the existence of absolute space to account for phenomena like
rotation and acceleration that cannot be accounted for on a purely relationalist account. Clarke argues that since the
curvature of the water occurs in the rotating bucket as well as in the stationary bucket containing spinning water, it
can only be explained by stating that the water is rotating in relation to the presence of some third thing—absolute
space.
Leibniz describes a space that exists only as a relation between objects, and which has no existence apart from the
existence of those objects. Motion exists only as a relation between those objects. Newtonian space provided the
absolute frame of reference within which objects can have motion. In Newton’s system the frame of reference exists
independently of the objects which are contained in it. These objects can be described as moving in relation to space
itself. For many centuries, the evidence of a concave water surface held authority.

Mach
Another important figure in this debate is 19th century physicist, Ernst Mach. While he did not deny the existence of
phenomena like that seen in the bucket argument, he still denied the absolutist conclusion by offering a different
answer as to what the bucket was rotating in relation to: the fixed stars.
Mach suggested that thought experiments like the bucket argument are problematic. If we were to imagine a universe
that only contains a bucket, on Newton’s account, this bucket could be set to spin relative to absolute space, and the
water it contained would form the characteristic concave surface. But, in the absence of anything else in the universe
it would be difficult to confirm that the bucket was indeed spinning. It seems equally possible that the surface of the
water in the bucket would remain flat.
Mach argued that, in effect, the water experiment in an otherwise empty universe would remain flat. But if another
object was introduced into this universe, perhaps a distant star, there is now something relative to which the bucket
could be seen as rotating. The water inside the bucket could possibly have a slight curve. To account for the curve
that we observe, an increase in the number of objects in the universe also increases the curvature in the water. Mach
argued that the momentum of an object, whether angular or linear, exists as a result of the sum of the effects of other
objects in the universe (Mach's Principle).

Einstein
Einstein, a prominent physicist in the 20th century, proposed that relativistics are based on the principle of relativity.
This theory holds that the rules of physics must be the same for all observers, regardless of the frame of reference
that is used, and that light propagates at the same speed in all reference frames. This theory was motivated by
Maxwell’s equations. These equations show that electromagnetic waves propagate in a vacuum at the speed of light.
However, Maxwell's equations give no indication of what this speed is relative to. Prior to Einstein, it was thought
that this speed was relative to a fixed medium, called the luminiferous ether. In contrast, the theory of special
relativity postulates that light propagates at the speed of light in all inertial frames, and examines the implications of
this postulate.
All attempts to measure any speed relative to this ether failed, which can be seen as a confirmation of Einstein's
postulate that light propagates at the same speed in all reference frames. Special relativity is a formalization of the
principle of relativity which does not contain a privileged inertial frame of reference such as the luminiferous ether
or absolute space, from which Einstein inferred that no such frame exists.
Einstein generalized relativity to frames of reference that were non-inertial. He achieved this by positing the
Equivalence Principle, which states that the force felt by an observer in a given gravitational field and that felt by an
observer in an accelerating frame of reference are indistinguishable. This led to the conclusion that the mass of an
object warps the geometry of the space-time surrounding it, as described in Einstein’s field equations.
In classical physics, an inertial reference frame is one in which an object that experiences no forces does not
accelerate. In general relativity, an inertial frame of reference is one that is following a geodesic of space-time. An
Philosophy of space and time 80

object that moves against a geodesic experiences a force. An object in free fall does not experience a force, because
it is following a geodesic. An object standing on the earth, however, will experience a force, as it is being held
against the geodesic by the surface of the planet. In light of this, the bucket of water rotating in empty space will
experience a force because it rotates with respect to the geodesic. The water will become concave, not because it is
rotating with respect to the distant stars, but because it is rotating with respect to the geodesic.
Einstein partially advocates Mach’s principle in that distant stars explain inertia because they provide the
gravitational field against which acceleration and inertia occur. But contrary to Leibniz’ account, this warped
space-time is as integral a part of an object as are its other defining characteristics such as volume and mass. If one
holds, contrary to idealist beliefs, that objects exist independently of the mind, it seems that Relativistics commits
them to also hold that space and temporality have the exact same type of independent existence.

Conventionalism
The position of conventionalism states that there is no fact of the matter as to the geometry of space and time, but
that it is decided by convention. The first proponent of such a view, Henri Poincaré, reacting to the creation of the
new non-euclidean geometry, argued that which geometry applied to a space was decided by convention, since
different geometries will describe a set of objects equally well, based on considerations from his sphere-world.
This view was developed and updated to include considerations from relativistic physics by Hans Reichenbach.
Reichenbach's conventionalism, applying to space and time, focuses around the idea of coordinative definition.
Coordinative definition has two major features. The first has to do with coordinating units of length with certain
physical objects. This is motivated by the fact that we can never directly apprehend length. Instead we must choose
some physical object, say the Standard Metre at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (International Bureau
of Weights and Measures), or the wavelength of cadmium to stand in as our unit of length. The second feature deals
with separated objects. Although we can, presumably, directly test the equality of length of two measuring rods
when they are next to one another, we can not find out as much for two rods distant from one another. Even
supposing that two rods, whenever brought near to one another are seen to be equal in length, we are not justified in
stating that they are always equal in length. This impossibility undermines our ability to decide the equality of length
of two distant objects. Sameness of length, to the contrary, must be set by definition.
Such a use of coordinative definition is in effect, on Reichenbach's conventionalism, in the General Theory of
Relativity where light is assumed, i.e. not discovered, to mark out equal distances in equal times. After this setting of
coordinative definition, however, the geometry of spacetime is set.
As in the absolutism/relationalism debate, contemporary philosophy is still in disagreement as to the correctness of
the conventionalist doctrine. While conventionalism still holds many proponents, cutting criticisms concerning the
coherence of Reichenbach's doctrine of coordinative definition have led many to see the conventionalist view as
untenable.
Philosophy of space and time 81

The structure of spacetime

Building from a mix of insights from the historical debates of absolutism and conventionalism as well as reflecting
on the import of the technical apparatus of the General Theory of Relativity, details as to the structure of spacetime
have made up a large proportion of discussion within the philosophy of space and time, as well as the philosophy of
physics. The following is a short list of topics.

The relativity of simultaneity

According to special relativity each point in the universe can have a different set of events that compose its present
instant. This has been used in the Rietdijk-Putnam argument to demonstrate that relativity predicts a block universe
in which events are fixed in four dimensions. If there is a box and it is shrinking over time then there is a line
connected from each corner point that will explain the fourth dimension of time. this is called a hypercube.

Invariance vs. covariance

Bringing to bear the lessons of the absolutism/relationalism debate with the powerful mathematical tools invented in
the 19th and 20th century, Michael Friedman draws a distinction between invariance upon mathematical
transformation and covariance upon transformation.
Invariance, or symmetry, applies to objects, i.e. the symmetry group of a space-time theory designates what features
of objects are invariant, or absolute, and which are dynamical, or variable.
Covariance applies to formulations of theories, i.e. the covariance group designates in which range of coordinate
systems the laws of physics hold.
This distinction can be illustrated by revisiting Leibniz's thought experiment, in which the universe is shifted over
five feet. In this example the position of an object is seen not to be a property of that object, i.e. location is not
invariant. Similarly, the covariance group for classical mechanics will be any coordinate systems that are obtained
from one another by shifts in position as well as other translations allowed by a Galilean transformation.
In the classical case, the invariance, or symmetry, group and the covariance group coincide, but, interestingly
enough, they part ways in relativistic physics. The symmetry group of the GTR includes all differentiable
transformations, i.e. all properties of an object are dynamical, in other words there are no absolute objects. The
formulations of the GTR, unlike that of classical mechanics, do not share a standard, i.e. there is no single
formulation paired with transformations. As such the covariance group of the GTR is just the covariance group of
every theory.

Historical frameworks
A further application of the modern mathematical methods, in league with the idea of invariance and covariance
groups, is to try to interpret historical views of space and time in modern, mathematical language.
In these translations, a theory of space and time is seen as a manifold paired with vector spaces, the more vector
spaces the more facts there are about objects in that theory. The historical development of spacetime theories is
generally seen to start from a position where many facts about objects or incorporated in that theory, and as history
progresses, more and more structure is removed.
For example, Aristotle's theory of space and time holds that not only is there such a thing as absolute position, but
that there are special places in space, such as a center to the universe, a sphere of fire, etc. Newtonian spacetime has
absolute position, but not special positions. Galilean spacetime has absolute acceleration, but not absolute position or
velocity. And so on.
Philosophy of space and time 82

Holes
With the GTR, the traditional debate between absolutism and relationalism has been shifted to whether or not
spacetime is a substance, since the GTR largely rules out the existence of, e.g., absolute positions. One powerful
argument against spacetime substantivalism, offered by John Earman is known as the "hole argument".
This is a technical mathematical argument but can be paraphrased as follows:
Define a function d as the identity function over all elements over the manifold M, excepting a small neighbourhood
H belonging to M. Over H d comes to differ from identity by a smooth function.
With use of this function d we can construct two mathematical models, where the second is generated by applying d
to proper elements of the first, such that the two models are identical prior to the time t=0, where t is a time function
created by a foliation of spacetime, but differ after t=0.
These considerations show that, since substantivalism allows the construction of holes, that the universe must, on
that view, be indeterministic. Which, Earman argues, is a case against substantivalism, as the case between
determinism or indeterminism should be a question of physics, not of our commitment to substantivalism.

The direction of time

The problem of the direction of time arises directly from two contradictory facts. First, the fundamental physical
laws are time-reversal invariant. In other words, anything that can happen moving forward through time is just as
possible moving backwards in time. Or, put in another way, through the eyes of physics, there will be no distinction,
in terms of possibility, between what happens in a movie if the film is run forward, or if the film is run backwards.
Second, our experience of time, at the macroscopic level, is not time-reversal invariant. Glasses fall and break all the
time, but shards of glass do not put themselves back together and fly up on tables. We have memories of the past,
and none of the future. We feel we can't change the past but can influence the future.

The causation solution

One solution to this problem takes a metaphysical view, in which the direction of time follows from an asymmetry of
causation. We know more about the past because the elements of the past are causes for the effect that is our
perception. We feel we can't affect the past and can affect the future because we can't affect the past and can affect
the future.
There are two main objections to this view. First is the problem of distinguishing the cause from the effect in a
non-arbitrary way. The use of causation in constructing a temporal ordering could easily become circular. The
second problem with this view is its explanatory power. While the causation account, if successful, may account for
some time-asymmetric phenomena like perception and action, it does not account for many others.
However, asymmetry of causation can be observed in a non-arbitrary way which is not metaphysical in the case of a
human hand dropping a cup of water which smashes into fragments on a hard floor, spilling the liquid. In this order,
the causes of the resultant pattern of cup fragments and water spill is easily attributable in terms of the trajectory of
the cup, irregularities in its structure, angle of its impact on the floor, etc. However, applying the same event in
reverse, it is difficult to explain why the various pieces of the cup should fly up into the human hand and reassemble
precisely into the shape of a cup, or why the water should position itself entirely within the cup. The causes of the
resultant structure and shape of the cup and the encapsulation of the water by the hand within the cup are not easily
attributable, as neither hand nor floor can achieve such formations of the cup or water. This asymmetry is
perceivable on account of two features:- i) the relationship between the agent capacities of the human hand (ie, what
it is and is not capable of & what it is for) and non-animal agency (ie, what floors are and are not capable of and
what they are for) and ii) that the pieces of cup came to possess exactly the nature and number of those of a cup
before assembling. In short, such asymmetry is attributable to the relationship between temporal direction on the one
hand and the implications of form and functional capacity on the other.
Philosophy of space and time 83

The application of these ideas of form and functional capacity only dictates temporal direction in relation to complex
scenarios involving specific, non-metaphysical agency which is not merely dependent on human perception of time.
However, this last observation in itself is not sufficient to invalidate the implications of the example for the
progressive nature of time in general.

The thermodynamics solution

The second major family of solutions to this problem, and by far the one that has generated the most literature, finds
the existence of the direction of time as relating to the nature of thermodynamics.
The answer from classical thermodynamics states that while our basic physical theory is, in fact, time-reversal
symmetric, thermodynamics is not. In particular, the second law of thermodynamics states that the net entropy of a
closed system never decreases, and this explains why we often see glass breaking, but not coming back together.
But in statistical mechanics things get more complicated. On one hand, statistical mechanics is far superior to
classical thermodynamics, in that thermodynamic behavior, glass breaking, can be explained by the fundamental
laws of physics paired with a statistical postulate. But statistical mechanics, unlike classical thermodynamics, is
time-reversal symmetric. The second law of thermodynamics, as it arises in statistical mechanics, merely states that
it is overwhelmingly likely that net entropy will increase, but it is not an absolute law.
Current thermodynamic solutions to the problem of the direction of time aim to find some further fact, or feature of
the laws of nature to account for this discrepancy.

The laws solution

A third type of solution to the problem of the direction of time, although much less represented, argues that the laws
are not time-reversal symmetric. For example, certain processes in quantum mechanics, relating to the weak nuclear
force, are not time-reversible, keeping in mind that when dealing with quantum mechanics time-reversibility
comprises a more complex definition.
But this type of solution is insufficient because 1) the time-asymmetric phenomena in QM are too few to account for
the uniformity of macroscopic time-asymmetry and 2) it relies on the assumption that QM is the final or correct
description of physical processes.
One recent proponent of the laws solution is Tim Maudlin who argues that, in addition to quantum mechanical
phenomena, our basic spacetime physics (general relativity) is time-reversal asymmetric. He denies the definitions,
often quite complicated, that underlie time-reversal symmetries, arguing that these definitions themselves cause the
appearance of a problem of the direction of time.

The flow of time

The problem of the flow of time, as it has been treated in analytic philosophy, owes its beginning to a paper written
by J. M. E. McTaggart. In this paper McTaggart proposes two "temporal series". The first series, which means to
account for our intuitions about temporal becoming, or the moving Now, is called the A-series. The A-series orders
events according to their being in the past, present or future, simpliciter and in comparison to each other. The
B-series eliminates all reference to the present, and the associated temporal modalities of past and future, and orders
all events by the temporal relations earlier than and later than.
McTaggart, in his paper The Unreality of Time, argues that time is unreal since a) the A-series is inconsistent and b)
the B-series alone cannot account for the nature of time as the A-series describes an essential feature of it.
Building from this framework, two camps of solution have been offered. The first, the A-theorist solution, takes
becoming as the central feature of time, and tries to construct the B-series from the A-series by offering an account
of how B-facts come to be out of A-facts. The second camp, the B-theorist solution, takes as decisive McTaggart's
arguments against the A-series and tries to construct the A-series out of the B-series, for example, by temporal
Philosophy of space and time 84

indexicals.

Dualities
Quantum field theory models have shown that it is possible for theories in two different spacetime backgrounds, like
AdS/CFT or T-duality, to be equivalent.

Presentism and Eternalism

According to Presentism, time is an ordering of various realities. At a certain time some things exist and others do
not. This is the only reality we can deal with and we cannot for example say that Homer exists because at the present
time he does not. An Eternalist, on the other hand, holds that time is a dimension of reality on a par with the three
spatial dimensions, and hence that all things—past present and future—can be said to be just as real as things in the
present are. According to this theory, then, Homer really does exist, though we must still use special language when
talking about somebody who exists at a distant time—just as we would use special language when talking about
something a long way away (the very words near, far, above, below, over there, and such are directly comparable to
phrases such as in the past, a minute ago, and so on).

Endurantism and perdurantism

The positions on the persistence of objects are somewhat similar. An endurantist holds that for an object to persist
through time is for it to exist completely at different times (each instance of existence we can regard as somehow
separate from previous and future instances, though still numerically identical with them). A perdurantist on the
other hand holds that for a thing to exist through time is for it to exist as a continuous reality, and that when we
consider the thing as a whole we must consider an aggregate of all its "temporal parts" or instances of existing.
Endurantism is seen as the conventional view and flows out of our innate ideas (when I talk to somebody I think I
am talking to that person as a complete object, and not just a part of a cross-temporal being), but perduranists have
attacked this position. (An example of a perdurantist is David Lewis.) One argument perdurantists use to state the
superiority of their view is that perdurantism is able to take account of change in objects.
The relations between these two questions mean that on the whole Presentists are also endurantists and Eternalists
are also perdurantists (and vice versa), but this is not a necessary connection and it is possible to claim, for instance,
that time's passage indicates a series of ordered realities, but that objects within these realities somehow exist outside
of the reality as a whole, even though the realities as wholes are not related. However, such positions are rarely
adopted.

See also
• Arrow of time
• Metaphysics
• Time travel in science and Time travel in fiction
• Zeno's paradoxes

References
• Albert, David (2000) Time and Chance. Harvard Univ. Press.
• Earman, John (1989) World Enough and Space-Time. MIT Press.
• Friedman, Michael (1983) Foundations of Space-Time Theories. Princeton Univ. Press.
• Grunbaum, Adolf (1974) Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, 2nd ed. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of
Science. Vol XII. D. Reidel Publishing
Temporal finitism 86

Temporal finitism
Temporal finitism is the idea that time is finite.
The philosophy of Aristotle, expressed in such works as his Physics, held that although space was finite, with only
void existing beyond the outermost sphere of the heavens, time was infinite. This caused problems for mediaeval
Islamic, Jewish and Christian philosophers, who were unable to reconcile the Aristotelian conception of the eternal
with the Abrahamic view of Creation.[1]

Medieval philosophy
In contrast to ancient Greek philosophers who believed that the universe had an infinite past with no beginning,
medieval philosophers and theologians developed the concept of the universe having a finite past with a beginning.
This view was inspired by the creation doctrine shared by the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and
Islam.[2]
Prior to Maimonides, it was held that it was possible to prove, philosophically, creation theory. The Kalam
cosmological argument held that creation was provable, for example. Maimonides himself held that neither creation
nor Aristotle's infinite time were provable, or at least that no proof was available. (According to scholars of his work,
he didn't make a formal distinction between unprovability and the simple absence of proof.) Thomas Aquinas was
influenced by this belief, and held in his Summa Theologica that neither hypothesis was demonstrable. Some of
Maimonides' Jewish successors, including Gersonides and Crescas, conversely held that the question was decidable,
philosophically.[1]
John Philoponus was probably the first to use the argument that infinite time is impossible, establishing temporal
finitism. He was followed by many others including Al-Kindi, Saadia Gaon, Al-Ghazali, St. Bonaventure and
Immanuel Kant (in his First Antinomy). The argument was revisited once again by William Lane Craig in light of
the idea of transfinite numbers in modern mathematics.[3]
Philoponus' arguments for temporal finitism were severalfold. Contra Aristotlem has been lost, and is chiefly known
through the citations used by Simplicius of Cilicia in his commentaries on Aristotle's Physics and De Caelo.
Philoponus' refutation of Aristotle extended to six books, the first five addressing De Caelo and the sixth addressing
Physics, and from comments on Philoponus made by Simplicius can be deduced to have been quite lengthy.[4]
A full exposition of Philoponus' several arguments, as reported by Simplicius, can be found in Sorabji, listed in
Further reading. One such argument was based upon Aristotle's own theorem that there were not multiple infinities,
and ran as follows: If time were infinite, then as the universe continued in existence for another hour, the infinity of
its age since creation at the end of that hour must be one hour greater than the infinity of its age since creation at the
start of that hour. But since Aristotle holds that such treatments of infinity are impossible and ridiculous, the world
cannot have existed for infinite time.[5]
Philoponus' works were adopted by many, most notably; early Muslim philosopher, Al-Kindi (Alkindus); the Jewish
philosopher, Saadia Gaon (Saadia ben Joseph); and the Muslim theologian, Al-Ghazali (Algazel). They used his two
logical arguments against an infinite past, the first being the "argument from the impossibility of the existence of an
actual infinite", which states:[2]
"An actual infinite cannot exist."
"An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite."
"∴ An infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist."
The second argument, the "argument from the impossibility of completing an actual infinite by successive addition",
states:[2]
"An actual infinite cannot be completed by successive addition."
Temporal finitism 87

"The temporal series of past events has been completed by successive addition."
"∴ The temporal series of past events cannot be an actual infinite."
Both arguments were adopted by later Christian philosophers and theologians, and the second argument in particular
became more famous after it was adopted by Immanuel Kant in his thesis of the first antinomy concerning time.[2]

Modern philosophy
Immanuel Kant's argument for temporal finitism, at least in one direction, from his First Antinomy, runs as
follows:[3] [6]
If we assume that the world has no beginning in time, then up to every given moment an eternity has elapsed,
and there has passed away in that world an infinite series of successive states of things. Now the infinity of a
series consists in the fact that it can never be completed through successive synthesis. It thus follows that it is
impossible for an infinite world-series to have passed away, and that a beginning of the world is therefore a
necessary condition of the world's existence.
—Immanuel Kant, First Antinomy, of Space and Time
Viney argues that it is a mistake to conclude, because philosophers have been unable to answer the problems posed
by the idea of an actual infinite, expounded by Kant and others, that one should not believe in an infinite past,
pointing out that both metaphysical world views, that time is finite and infinite, incur paradoxes. He invokes Charles
Hartshorne's principle of least paradox (As long as the problems in one's own position are fewer than those in the
positions of others, there is no justification for capitulating to the arguments of opponents.) and points out several
problems with the idea of temporal finitism.[3]
One such problem is given by Hartshorne's argument against the existence of a first moment in time:[3]
Even a beginning is a change, and all change requires something changing that does not come to exist through
that same change. The beginning of the world would have to happen to something other than the world,
something which as the subject of happening would be in a time that did not begin with the world.
—Charles Harshorne, Man's Vision of God, p. 233
Another, subtler, problem is that a first moment would never appear to be a first moment. Pointing to the similar
arguments given by the defenders of Creation Science, and similar arguments made by Bertrand Russell, he argues
that there is a paradox that infects the view that a first moment of time existed: Because every event appears to have
been caused by some previous event, any first event cannot look like a first event, and so the universe must always
appear to be older than it actually is. In Hartshorne's words:[3]
A first moment of time would be an ontological lie through and through, a joke of existence upon itself.
—Charles Harshorne, Man's Vision of God, p. 234
A third problem is that the notion of a first moment implies that it is impossible to conceive the idea of the universe
being older than it is. Viney's argument, which he notes was also recognized as a problem by St Bonaventure, runs as
follows: To claim that the universe could have begun, say, 2 seconds earlier is to imply that there is some measure of
time that is outside and independent of the universe. However, since the first moment of time, by definition, marks
the beginning of time, there can be no such independent and external measure of time.[3]
Viney thus declares the debate between the finitist position and the infinitist position on time to be a stalemate, since
the former is no less paradoxical than the latter.[3]
 89

Physical definition

Time in physics
In physics, the treatment of time is a central issue. It has been treated
as a question of geometry. One can measure time and treat it as a
geometrical dimension, such as length, and perform mathematical
operations on it. It is a scalar quantity and, like length, mass, and
charge, is usually listed in most physics books as a fundamental
quantity. Time can be combined mathematically with other
fundamental quantities to derive other concepts such as motion, energy
and fields. Time is largely defined by its measurement in physics.
Timekeeping is a complex of technological and scientific issues, and
Foucault's pendulum in the Panthéon of Paris can
part of the foundation of recordkeeping.
measure time as well as demonstrate the rotation
of Earth.

Prerequisites
scientific notation
natural units
algebra
geometry
vector notation
optics
operators
differential equations
partial differential equations
electrical engineering
signal processing

The unit of measurement of time: the second

In the International System of Units (SI), the unit of time is the second (symbol: ). It is a SI base unit, and it is
currently defined as "the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between
the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom." [1]

The state of the art in timekeeping

Time in physics 90

Prerequisites
Measurement
Scientific notation
Natural units

The UTC timestamp in use worldwide is an atomic time standard. The relative accuracy of such a time standard is
currently on the order of 10−15[2] (corresponding to 1 second in approximately 30 million years). The smallest time
step considered observable is called the Planck time, which is approximately 5.391×10−44 seconds - many orders of
magnitude below the resolution of current time standards.

Conceptions of time
Both Galileo and Newton and most people
up until the 20th century thought that time
was the same for everyone everywhere. This
is the basis for timelines, where time is a
parameter. Our modern conception of time
is based on Einstein's theory of relativity, in
Andromeda galaxy (M31) is two million light-years away. Thus we are viewing which rates of time run differently
[3]
M31's light from two million years ago, a time before humans existed.
depending on relative motion, and space and
time are merged into spacetime, where we
live on a world line rather than a timeline. Thus time is part of a coordinate, in this view. Physicists believe the entire
Universe and therefore time itself began about 13.7 billion years ago in the big bang. (See Time in Cosmology
below) Whether it will ever come to an end is an open question. (See philosophy of physics.)

Regularities in nature
In order to measure time, one can record the number of occurrences (events) of some periodic phenomenon. The
regular recurrences of the seasons, the motions of the sun, moon and stars were noted and tabulated for millennia,
before the laws of physics were formulated. The sun was the arbiter of the flow of time, but time was known only to
the hour for millennia, hence, the use of the gnomon was known across most of the world, especially Eurasia, and at
least as far southward as the jungles of Southeast Asia.[4]
I farm the land from which I take my food.
I watch the sun rise and sun set.
Kings can ask no more.
-- as quoted by Joseph Needham Science and Civilisation in China
In particular, the astronomical observatories maintained for religious purposes became accurate enough to ascertain
the regular motions of the stars, and even some of the planets.
At first, timekeeping was done by hand by priests, and then for commerce, with watchmen to note time as part of
their duties. The tabulation of the equinoxes, the sandglass, and the water clock became more and more accurate, and
finally reliable. For ships at sea, boys were used to turn the sandglasses and to call the hours.
Time in physics 91

Mechanical clocks
Richard of Wallingford (1292–1336), abbot of St. Alban's abbey, famously built a mechanical clock as an
astronomical orrery about 1330.[5] [6]
By the time of Richard of Wallingford, the use of ratchets and gears allowed the towns of Europe to create
mechanisms to display the time on their respective town clocks; by the time of the scientific revolution, the clocks
became miniaturized enough for families to share a personal clock, or perhaps a pocket watch. At first, only kings
could afford them. Pendulum clocks were widely used in the 18th and 19th century. They have largely been replaced
in general use by quartz and digital clocks. Atomic clocks can theoretically keep accurate time for millions of years.
They are appropriate for standards and scientific use.

Galileo: the flow of time

In 1583, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) discovered that a pendulum's harmonic motion has a constant period, which he
learned by timing the motion of a swaying lamp in harmonic motion at mass at the cathedral of Pisa, with his
pulse.[7]
In his Two New Sciences (1638), Galileo used a water clock to measure the time taken for a bronze ball to roll a
known distance down an inclined plane; this clock was
"a large vessel of water placed in an elevated position; to the bottom of this vessel was soldered a pipe of small
diameter giving a thin jet of water, which we collected in a small glass during the time of each descent,
whether for the whole length of the channel or for a part of its length; the water thus collected was weighed,
after each descent, on a very accurate balance; the differences and ratios of these weights gave us the
differences and ratios of the times, and this with such accuracy that although the operation was repeated many,
many times, there was no appreciable discrepancy in the results."[8]
Galileo's experimental setup to measure the literal flow of time, in order to describe the motion of a ball, preceded
Isaac Newton's statement in his Principia:
I do not define time, space, place and motion, as being well known to all.[9]
The Galilean transformations assume that time is the same for all reference frames.

Newton's physics: linear time

In or around 1665, when Isaac Newton (1643–1727) derived the motion of objects falling under gravity, the first
clear formulation for mathematical physics of a treatment of time began: linear time, conceived as a universal clock.
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to
anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some
sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is
commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.[10]
The water clock mechanism described by Galileo was engineered to provide laminar flow of the water during the
experiments, thus providing a constant flow of water for the durations of the experiments, and embodying what
Newton called duration.
In this section, the relationships listed below treat time as a parameter which serves as an index to the behavior of the
physical system under consideration. Because Newton's fluents treat a linear flow of time (what he called
mathematical time), time could be considered to be a linearly varying parameter, an abstraction of the march of the
hours on the face of a clock. Calendars and ship's logs could then be mapped to the march of the hours, days,
months, years and centuries.
Time in physics 92

Prerequisites
differential equations
partial differential equations

Lagrange (1736–1813) would aid in the formulation of a simpler version[11] of Newton's equations. He started with
an energy term, L, named the Lagrangian in his honor, and formulated Lagrange's equations:

The dotted quantities, denote a function which corresponds to a Newtonian fluxion, whereas denote a function
which corresponds to a Newtonian fluent. But linear time is the parameter for the relationship between the and the
of the physical system under consideration. Some decades later, it was found that the second order equation of
Lagrange or Newton can be more easily solved or visualized by suitable transformation to sets of first order
differential equations.
Lagrange's equations can be transformed, under a Legendre transformation, to Hamilton's equations; the
Hamiltonian formulation for the equations of motion of some conjugate variables p,q (for example, momentum p and
position q) is:

Prerequisites
Operators
Poisson
brackets

in the Poisson bracket notation and clearly shows the dependence of the time variation of conjugate variables p,q on
an energy expression.
This relationship, it was to be found, also has corresponding forms in quantum mechanics as well as in the classical
mechanics shown above. These relationships bespeak a conception of time which is reversible.

Thermodynamics and the paradox of irreversibility

By 1798, Benjamin Thompson (1753–1814) had discovered that work could be transformed to heat without limit - a
precursor of the conservation of energy or
• 1st law of thermodynamics
In 1824 Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) scientifically analyzed the steam engines with his Carnot cycle, an abstract engine.
Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) noted a measure of disorder, or entropy, which affects the continually decreasing
amount of free energy which is available to a Carnot engine in the:
• 2nd law of thermodynamics
Thus the continual march of a thermodynamic system, from lesser to greater entropy, at any given temperature,
defines an arrow of time. In particular, Stephen Hawking identifies three arrows of time:[12]
• Psychological arrow of time - our perception of an inexorable flow.
• Thermodynamic arrow of time - distinguished by the growth of entropy.
• Cosmological arrow of time - distinguished by the expansion of the universe.
Time in physics 93

Entropy is maximum in an isolated thermodynamic system, and increases. In contrast, Erwin Schrödinger
(1887–1961) pointed out that life depends on a "negative entropy flow".[13] Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) stated that
other thermodynamic systems which, like life, are also far from equilibrium, can also exhibit stable spatio-temporal
structures. Soon afterward, the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions[14] were reported, which demonstrate oscillating
colors in a chemical solution.[15] These nonequilibrium thermodynamic branches reach a bifurcation point, which is
unstable, and another thermodynamic branch becomes stable in its stead.[16]

Electromagnetism and the speed of light

In 1864, James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) presented a combined theory of electricity and magnetism. He
combined all the laws then known relating to those two phenomenon into four equations. These vector calculus
equations which use the del operator ( ) are known as Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism. In free space
(that is, space not containing electric charges), the equations take the form (using SI units):

Prerequisites
vector notation
partial differential equations

where
ε0 and μ0 are the electric permittivity and the magnetic permeability of free space;
c= is the speed of light in free space, 299 792 458 m/s;
E is the electric field;
B is the magnetic field.
These equations allow for solutions in the form of electromagnetic waves. The wave is formed by an electric field
and a magnetic field oscillating together, perpendicular to each other and to the direction of propagation. These
waves always propagate at the speed of light c, regardless of the velocity of the electric charge that generated them.
The fact that light is predicted to always travel at speed c would be incompatible with Galilean relativity if Maxwell's
equations were assumed to hold in any inertial frame (reference frame with constant velocity), because the Galilean
transformations predict the speed to decrease (or increase) in the reference frame of an observer traveling parallel (or
antiparallel) to the light.
It was expected that there was one absolute reference frame, that of the luminiferous aether, in which Maxwell's
equations held unmodified in the known form.
The Michelson-Morley experiment failed to detect any difference in the relative speed of light due to the motion of
the Earth relative to the luminiferous aether, suggesting that Maxwell's equations did, in fact, hold in all frames. In
1875, Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) discovered Lorentz transformations, which left Maxwell's equations unchanged,
allowing Michelson and Morley's negative result to be explained. Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) noted the importance
of Lorentz' transformation and popularized it. In particular, the railroad car description can be found in Science and
Hypothesis,[17] which was published before Einstein's articles of 1905.
The Lorentz transformation predicted space contraction and time dilation; until 1905, the former was interpreted as a
physical contraction of objects moving with respect to the aether, due to the modification of the intermolecular
Time in physics 94

forces (of electric nature), while the latter was thought to be just a mathematical stipulation.

Einstein's physics: spacetime

Main articles: special relativity (1905), general relativity (1915).
Albert Einstein's 1905 special relativity challenged the notion of absolute time, and could only formulate a definition
of synchronization for clocks that mark a linear flow of time:
If at the point A of space there is a clock, an observer at A can determine the time values of events in the
immediate proximity of A by finding the positions of the hands which are simultaneous with these events. If
there is at the point B of space another clock in all respects resembling the one at A, it is possible for an
observer at B to determine the time values of events in the immediate neighbourhood of B. But it is not
possible without further assumption to compare, in respect of time, an event at A with an event at B. We have
so far defined only an "A time" and a "B time." We have not defined a common "time" for A and B, for the
latter cannot be defined at all unless we establish by definition that the "time" required by light to travel from
A to B equals the "time" it requires to travel from B to A. Let a ray of light start at the "A time" tA from A
towards B, let it at the "B time" tB be reflected at B in the direction of A, and arrive again at A at the “A time”
t′A.
In accordance with definition the two clocks synchronize if

We assume that this definition of synchronism is free from contradictions, and possible for any number of
points; and that the following relations are universally valid:—
1. If the clock at B synchronizes with the clock at A, the clock at A synchronizes with the clock at B.
2. If the clock at A synchronizes with the clock at B and also with the clock at C, the clocks at B and C also
synchronize with each other.
—Albert Einstein, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" [18]
Einstein showed that if the speed of light is not changing between reference frames, space and time must be so that
the moving observer will measure the same speed of light as the stationary one because velocity is defined by space
and time:

where r is position and t is time.

Indeed, the Lorentz transformation (for two reference frames in relative motion, whose x axis is directed in the
direction of the relative velocity)

Prerequisites
algebra
trigonometry

can be said to "mix" space and time in a way similar to the way a Euclidean rotation around the z axis mixes x and y
coordinates. Consequences of this include relativity of simultaneity.
Time in physics 95

Event B is simultaneous with A in the green

reference frame, but it occurred before in the blue
frame, and will occur later in the red frame.

More specifically, the Lorentz transformation is a hyperbolic rotation

which is a change of coordinates in the

four-dimensional Minkowski space, a dimension of which is ct. (In Euclidean space an ordinary rotation

is the corresponding change of coordinates.) The speed of light c can be seen

as just a conversion factor needed because we measure the dimensions of spacetime in different units; since the
metre is currently defined in terms of the second, it has the exact value of 299 792 458 m/s. We would need a similar
factor in Euclidean space if, for example, we measured width in nautical miles and depth in feet. In physics,
sometimes units of measurement in which c = 1 are used to simplify equations.
Time in a "moving" reference frame is shown to run more slowly than in a "stationary" one by the following relation
(which can be derived by the Lorentz transformation by putting ∆x′ = 0, ∆τ = ∆t′):

where:
• ∆τ is the time between two events as measured in the moving reference frame in which they occur at the same
place (e.g. two ticks on a moving clock); it is called the proper time between the two events;
• ∆t is the time between these same two events, but as measured in the stationary reference frame;
• v is the speed of the moving reference frame relative to the stationary one;
• c is the speed of light.
Moving objects therefore are said to show a slower passage of time. This is known as time dilation.
These transformations are only valid for two frames at constant relative velocity. Naively applying them to other
situations gives rise to such paradoxes as the twin paradox.
That paradox can be resolved using for instance Einstein's General theory of relativity, which uses Riemannian
geometry, geometry in accelerated, noninertial reference frames. Employing the metric tensor which describes
Minkowski space:

Einstein developed a geometric solution to Lorentz's transformation that preserves Maxwell's equations. His field
equations give an exact relationship between the measurements of space and time in a given region of spacetime and
the energy density of that region.
Time in physics 96

Einstein's equations predict that time should be altered by the presence of gravitational fields (see the Schwarzschild
metric):

Where:
is the gravitational time dilation of an object at a distance of .
is the change in coordinate time, or the interval of coordinate time.
is the gravitational constant
is the mass generating the field

is the change in proper

time , or the interval of proper time.

Or one could use the following simpler approximation:

Time runs slower the stronger the gravitational field, and hence acceleration, is. The predictions of time dilation are
confirmed by particle acceleration experiments and cosmic ray evidence, where moving particles decay slower than
their less energetic counterparts. Gravitational time dilation gives rise to the phenomenon of gravitational redshift
and delays in signal travel time near massive objects such as the sun. The Global Positioning System must also
adjust signals to account for this effect.
According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, a freely moving particle traces a history in spacetime that
maximises its proper time. This phenomenon is also referred to as the principle of maximal aging, and was described
by Taylor and Wheeler as[19] :
"Principle of Extremal Aging: The path a free object takes between two events in spacetime is the path
for which the time lapse between these events, recorded on the object's wristwatch, is an extremum."
Einstein's theory was motivated by the assumption that every point in the universe can be treated as a 'center', and
that correspondingly, physics must act the same in all reference frames. His simple and elegant theory shows that
time is relative to an inertial frame. In an inertial frame, Newton's first law holds; it has its own local geometry, and
therefore its own measurements of space and time; there is no 'universal clock'. An act of synchronization must be
performed between two systems, at the least.

Time in quantum mechanics

There is a time parameter in the equations of quantum mechanics. The Schrödinger equation[20] is
Time in physics 97

Prerequisites
physics
quantum mechanics

One solution can be

.
where is called the time evolution operator, and H is the Hamiltonian.
But the Schrödinger picture shown above is equivalent to the Heisenberg picture, which enjoys a similarity to the
Poisson brackets of classical mechanics. The Poisson brackets are superseded by a nonzero commutator, say [H,A]
for observable A, and Hamiltonian H:

This equation denotes an uncertainty relation in quantum physics. For example, with time (the observable A), the
energy E (from the Hamiltonian H) gives:

where
is the uncertainty in energy
is the uncertainty in time
is Planck's constant
The more precisely one measures the duration of a sequence of events the less precisely one can measure the energy
associated with that sequence and vice versa. This equation is different from the standard uncertainty principle
because time is not an operator in quantum mechanics.
Corresponding commutator relations also hold for momentum p and position q, which are conjugate variables of
each other, along with a corresponding uncertainty principle in momentum and position, similar to the energy and
time relation above.
Quantum mechanics explains the properties of the periodic table of the elements. Starting with Otto Stern's and
Walter Gerlach's experiment with molecular beams in a magnetic field, Isidor Rabi (1898–1988), was able to
modulate the magnetic resonance of the beam. In 1945 Rabi then suggested that this technique be the basis of a
clock[21] using the resonant frequency of an atomic beam.
John Cramer is preparing an experiment [22] to determine whether quantum entanglement is also nonlocal in time as
it is in space. This can also be stated as 'sending a signal back in time'. Cramer has recently published an update [23]
indicating that the final experiment will take more time to prepare.

Dynamical systems
See dynamical systems and chaos theory, dissipative structures
One could say that time is a parameterization of a dynamical system that allows the geometry of the system to be
manifested and operated on. It has been asserted that time is an implicit consequence of chaos (i.e.
nonlinearity/irreversibility): the characteristic time, or rate of information entropy production, of a system.
Mandelbrot introduces intrinsic time in his book Multifractals and 1/f noise.
Time in physics 98

Signalling

Prerequisites
electrical
engineering
signal processing

Signalling is one application of the electromagnetic waves described above. In general, a signal is part of
communication between parties and places. One example might be a yellow ribbon tied to a tree, or the ringing of a
church bell. A signal can be part of a conversation, which involves a protocol. Another signal might be the position
of the hour hand on a town clock or a railway station. An interested party might wish to view that clock, to learn the
time. See: Time ball, an early form of Time signal.
We as observers can still signal different parties and places as long as
we live within their past light cone. But we cannot receive signals from
those parties and places outside our past light cone.
Along with the formulation of the equations for the electromagnetic
wave, the field of telecommunication could be founded. In 19th
century telegraphy, electrical circuits, some spanning continents and
oceans, could transmit codes - simple dots, dashes and spaces. From
this, a series of technical issues have emerged; see
Category:Synchronization. But it is safe to say that our signalling
systems can be only approximately synchronized, a plesiochronous
condition, from which jitter need be eliminated.
Evolution of a world line of an accelerated
That said, systems can be synchronized (at an engineering
massive particle. This worldline is restricted to
the timelike top and bottom sections of this approximation), using technologies like GPS. The GPS satellites must
spacetime figure and can not cross the top account for the effects of gravitation and other relativistic factors in
(future) nor the bottom (past) light cone. The left their circuitry. See: Self-clocking signal.
and right sections, outside the light cones are
spacelike.
Technology for timekeeping standards
The primary time standard in the U.S. is currently NIST-F1, a laser-cooled Cs fountain,[24] the latest in a series of
time and frequency standards, from the ammonia-based atomic clock (1949) to the caesium-based NBS-1 (1952) to
NIST-7 (1993). The respective clock uncertainty declined from 10,000 nanoseconds per day to 0.5 nanoseconds per
day in 5 decades.[25] In 2001 the clock uncertainty for NIST-F1 was 0.1 nanoseconds/day. Development of
increasingly accurate frequency standards is underway.
In this time and frequency standard, a population of caesium atoms is laser-cooled to temperatures of one
microkelvin. The atoms collect in a ball shaped by six lasers, two for each spatial dimension, vertical (up/down),
horizontal (left/right), and back/forth. The vertical lasers push the caesium ball through a microwave cavity. As the
ball is cooled, the caesium population cools to its ground state and emits light at its natural frequency, stated in the
definition of second above. Eleven physical effects are accounted for in the emissions from the caesium population,
which are then controlled for in the NIST-F1 clock. These results are reported to BIPM.

Additionally, a reference hydrogen maser is also reported to BIPM as a frequency standard for TAI (international
atomic time).
The measurement of time is overseen by BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures), located in Sèvres,
France, which ensures uniformity of measurements and their traceability to the International System of Units (SI)
worldwide. BIPM operates under authority of the Metre Convention, a diplomatic treaty between fifty-one nations,
Time in physics 99

the Member States of the Convention, through a series of Consultative Committees, whose members are the
respective national metrology laboratories.

Time in cosmology
The equations of general relativity predict a non-static universe. However, Einstein accepted only a static universe,
and modified the Einstein field equation to reflect this by adding the cosmological constant, which he later described
as the biggest mistake of his life. But in 1927, Georges LeMaître (1894–1966) argued, on the basis of general
relativity, that the universe originated in a primordial explosion. At the fifth Solvay conference, that year, Einstein
brushed him off with "Vos calculs sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable."[26] In 1929, Edwin Hubble
(1889–1953) announced his discovery of the expanding universe. The current generally accepted cosmological
model, the Lambda-CDM model, has a positive cosmological constant and thus not only an expanding universe but
an accelerating expanding universe.
If the universe were expanding, then it must have been much smaller and therefore hotter and denser in the past.
George Gamow (1904–1968) hypothesized that the abundance of the elements in the Periodic Table of the Elements,
might be accounted for by nuclear reactions in a hot dense universe. He was disputed by Fred Hoyle (1915–2001),
who invented the term 'Big Bang' to disparage it. Fermi and others noted that this process would have stopped after
only the light elements were created, and thus did not account for the abundance of heavier elements.
Gamow's prediction was a 5–10 kelvin black body radiation
temperature for the universe, after it cooled during the expansion. This
was corroborated by Penzias and Wilson in 1965. Subsequent
experiments arrived at a 2.7 kelvin temperature, corresponding to an
age of the universe of 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang.
This dramatic result has raised issues: what happened between the
singularity of the Big Bang and the Planck time, which, after all, is the
WMAP fluctuations of the cosmic microwave
smallest observable time. When might have time separated out from background radiation.
[27]
[28]
the spacetime foam; there are only hints based on broken
symmetries (see Spontaneous symmetry breaking, Timeline of the Big Bang, and the articles in Category:Physical
cosmology).

General relativity gave us our modern notion of the expanding universe that started in the big bang. Using relativity
and quantum theory we have been able to roughly reconstruct the history of the universe. In our epoch, during which
electromagnetic waves can propagate without being disturbed by conductors or charges, we can see the stars, at great
distances from us, in the night sky. (Before this epoch, there was a time, 300,000 years after the big bang, during
which starlight would not have been visible.)
Time in physics 100

Reprise
Ilya Prigogine's reprise is "Time precedes existence". He contrasts the views of Newton, Einstein and quantum
physics which offer a symmetric view of time (as discussed above) with his own views, which point out that
statistical and thermodynamic physics can explain irreversible phenomena[29] as well as the arrow of time and the
Big Bang.

See also
• Relativistic dynamics
• Category:systems of units

Further reading
• Boorstein, Daniel J., The Discoverers. Vintage. February 12, 1985. ISBN 0-394-72625-1
• Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. ISBN 0-226-45808-3
• Mandelbrot, Benoît, Multifractals and 1/f noise. Springer Verlag. February 1999. ISBN 0-387-98539-5
• Prigogine, Ilya (1984), Order out of Chaos. ISBN 0-394-54204-5
• Serres, Michel, et al., "Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Studies in Literature and Science)". March,
1995. ISBN 0-472-06548-3
• Stengers, Isabelle, and Ilya Prigogine, Theory Out of Bounds. University of Minnesota Press. November 1997.
ISBN 0-8166-2517-4

References
[1] "Unit of time (second)" (http:/ / www. bipm. org/ en/ si/ si_brochure/ chapter2/ 2-1/ second. html). SI brochure. International Bureau of
Weights and Measures (BIPM). pp. Section 2.1.1.3. . Retrieved 2008-06-08.
[2] S. R. Jefferts et al., "Accuracy evaluation of NIST-F1". (http:/ / tf. nist. gov/ general/ pdf/ 1823. pdf)
[3] Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin (1999), Five Ages of the Universe ISBN 0-684-86576-9 p.35.
[4] Fred Hoyle (1955), Frontiers of Astronomy. New York: Harper & Brothers
[5] North, J. (2004) God's Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time. Oxbow Books. ISBN 1-85285-451-0
[6] Watson, E (1979) "The St Albans Clock of Richard of Wallingford". Antiquarian Horology 372-384.
[7] Jo Ellen Barnett, Time's Pendulum ISBN 0-306-45787-3 p.99.
[8] Galileo 1638 Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, intorno á due nuoue scienze 213, Leida, Appresso gli Elsevirii (Louis Elsevier), or
Mathematical discourses and demonstrations, relating to Two New Sciences, English translation by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio 1914.
Section 213 is reprinted on pages 534-535 of On the Shoulders of Giants:The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy (works by Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein). Stephen Hawking, ed. 2002 ISBN 0-7624-1348-4
[9] Newton 1687 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Londini, Jussu Societatis Regiae ac Typis J. Streater, or The Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy, London, English translation by Andrew Motte 1700s. From part of the Scholium, reprinted on page 737 of
On the Shoulders of Giants:The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy (works by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein).
Stephen Hawking, ed. 2002 ISBN 0-7624-1348-4
[10] Newton 1687 page 738.
[11] "Dynamics is a four-dimensional geometry." --Lagrange (1796), Thèorie des fonctions analytiques, as quoted by Ilya Prigogine (1996), The
End of Certainty ISBN 0-684-83705-6 p.58
[12] pp. 182-195. Stephen Hawking 1996. The Illustrated Brief History of Time: updated and expanded edition ISBN 0-553-10374-1
[13] Erwin Schrödinger (1945) What is Life?
[14] G. Nicolis and I. Prigogine (1989), Exploring Complexity
[15] R. Kapral and K. Showalter, eds. (1995), Chemical Waves and Patterns
[16] Ilya Prigogine (1996) The End of Certainty pp. 63-71
[17] Henri Poincaré, (1902). Science and Hypothesis Eprint (http:/ / spartan. ac. brocku. ca/ ~lward/ Poincare/ Poincare_1905_toc. html)
[18] Einstein 1905, Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper [On the electrodynamics of moving bodies] reprinted 1922 in Das Relativitätsprinzip,
B.G. Teubner, Leipzig. The Principles of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special Theory of Relativity, by H.A. Lorentz,
A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, and W. H. Weyl, is part of Fortschritte der mathematischen Wissenschaften in Monographien, Heft 2. The English
translation is by W. Perrett and G.B. Jeffrey, reprinted on page 1169 of On the Shoulders of Giants:The Great Works of Physics and
Astronomy (works by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein). Stephen Hawking, ed. 2002 ISBN 0-7624-1348-4
Time in physics 101

[19] Taylor (2000). "Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity" (http:/ / www. eftaylor. com/ pub/ chapter1. pdf). Addison
Wesley Longman.. .
[20] E. Schrödinger, Phys. Rev. 28 1049 (1926)
[21] A Brief History of Atomic Clocks at NIST (http:/ / tf. nist. gov/ timefreq/ cesium/ atomichistory. htm)
[22] http:/ / seattlepi. nwsource. com/ local/ 292378_timeguy15. html
[23] http:/ / faculty. washington. edu/ jcramer/ Nonlocal_2007. pdf
[24] D. M. Meekhof, S. R. Jefferts, M. Stepanovíc, and T. E. Parker (2001) "Accuracy Evaluation of a Cesium Fountain Primary Frequency
Standard at NIST", IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. 50, no. 2, (April 2001) pp. 507-509
[25] James Jespersen and Jane Fitz-Randolph (1999). From sundials to atomic clocks : understanding time and frequency. Washington, D.C. :
U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Technology Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology. 308 p. : ill. ; 28 cm. ISBN
0-16-050010-9
[26] John C. Mather and John Boslough (1996), The Very First Light ISBN 0-465-01575-1 p.41.
[27] George Smoot and Keay Davidson (1993) Wrinkles in Time ISBN 0-688-12330-9 A memoir of the experiment program for detecting the
predicted fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation
[28] Martin Rees (1997), Before the Beginning ISBN 0-201-15142-1 p.210
[29] Prigogine, Ilya (1996), The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature. ISBN 0-684-83705-6 On pages 163 and 182.

Spacetime
In physics, spacetime (or space–time; or
space/time) is any mathematical model that
combines space and time into a single
continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted
with space being three-dimensional and time
playing the role of a fourth dimension that is
of a different sort from the spatial
dimensions. According to certain Euclidean
space perceptions, the universe has three
Two-dimensional analogy of space–time distortion. Matter changes the geometry
dimensions of space and one dimension of of spacetime, this (curved) geometry being interpreted as gravity. White lines do
time. By combining space and time into a not represent the curvature of space but instead represent the coordinate system
single manifold, physicists have imposed on the curved spacetime, which would be rectilinear in a flat spacetime.

significantly simplified a large number of

physical theories, as well as described in a more uniform way the workings of the universe at both the supergalactic
and subatomic levels.

In classical mechanics, the use of Euclidean space instead of spacetime is appropriate, as time is treated as universal
and constant, being independent of the state of motion of an observer. In relativistic contexts, however, time cannot
be separated from the three dimensions of space, because the rate at which time passes depends on an object's
velocity relative to the speed of light and also on the strength of intense gravitational fields, which can slow the
passage of time.

Concept with dimensions

The concept of spacetime combines space and time to a single abstract "space", for which a unified coordinate
system is chosen. Typically three spatial dimensions (length, width, height), and one temporal dimension (time) are
required. Dimensions are independent components of a coordinate grid needed to locate a point in a certain defined
"space". For example, on the globe the latitude and longitude are two independent coordinates which together
uniquely determine a location. In spacetime, a coordinate grid that spans the 3+1 dimensions locates events (rather
than just points in space), i.e. time is added as another dimension to the coordinate grid. This way the coordinates
specify where and when events occur. However, the unified nature of spacetime and the freedom of coordinate
Spacetime 102

choice it allows, imply that to express the temporal coordinate in one coordinate system requires both temporal and
spatial coordinates in another coordinate system. Unlike in normal spatial coordinates, there are still some
restrictions for how measurements can be made spatially and temporally (see Spacetime intervals). These restrictions
correspond roughly to a particular mathematical model which differs from Euclidean space in its manifest symmetry.
Until the beginning of the 20th century, time was believed to be independent of motion, progressing at a fixed rate in
all reference frames; however, later experiments revealed that time slowed down at higher speeds (with such slowing
called "time dilation" explained in the theory of "special relativity" ). Many experiments have confirmed time
dilation, such as atomic clocks onboard a Space Shuttle running slower than synchronized Earth-bound inertial
clocks and the relativistic decay of muons from cosmic ray showers. The duration of time can therefore vary for
various events and various reference frames. When dimensions are understood as mere components of the grid
system, rather than physical attributes of space, it is easier to understand the alternate dimensional views as being
simply the result of coordinate transformations.
The term spacetime has taken on a generalized meaning beyond treating spacetime events with the normal 3+1
dimensions. It is really the combination of space and time. Other proposed spacetime theories include additional
dimensions—normally spatial but there exist some speculative theories that include additional temporal dimensions
and even some that include dimensions that are neither temporal nor spatial. How many dimensions are needed to
describe the universe is still an open question. Speculative theories such as string theory predict 10 or 26 dimensions
(with M-theory predicting 11 dimensions: 10 spatial and 1 temporal), but the existence of more than four dimensions
would only appear to make a difference at the subatomic level.

Historical origin

Non-mathematical notions of unified spacetime

Philo noted that time is a result of space (universe/world) and that God created space which resulted in time also
being created either simultaneously with space or immediately thereafter.[1]
Incas regarded space and time as a single concept, named pacha (Quechua: pacha, Aymara: pacha)[2] [3] [4]
. The
peoples of the Andes have kept this understanding until now[5] .
The idea of a unified spacetime is stated by Edgar Allan Poe in his essay on cosmology titled Eureka (1848) that
"Space and duration are one." In 1895, in his novel The Time Machine, H.G. Wells wrote, "There is no difference
between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it."

Mathematical concept
The first reference to spacetime as a mathematical concept was in 1754 by Jean le Rond d'Alembert in the article
Dimension in Encyclopedie. Another early venture was by Joseph Louis Lagrange in his Theory of Analytic
Functions (1797, 1813). He said, "One may view mechanics as a geometry of four dimensions, and mechanical
analysis as an extension of geometric analysis".[6]
After discovering quaternions, William Rowan Hamilton commented, "Time is said to have only one dimension, and
space to have three dimensions. ... The mathematical quaternion partakes of both these elements; in technical
language it may be said to be 'time plus space', or 'space plus time': and in this sense it has, or at least involves a
reference to, four dimensions. And how the One of Time, of Space the Three, Might in the Chain of Symbols girdled
be." Hamilton's biquaternions, which have algebraic properties sufficient to model spacetime and its symmetry, were
in play for more than a half-century before formal relativity. For instance, William Kingdon Clifford noted their
relevance.
Another important antecedent to spacetime was the work of Clerk Maxwell as he used partial differential equations
to develop electrodynamics with the four parameters. Lorentz discovered some invariances of Maxwell's equations
Spacetime 103

late in the 19th century which were to become the basis of Einstein's theory of special relativity. Fiction authors were
also on the game as mentioned above. It has always been the case that time and space are measured using real
numbers, and the suggestion that the dimensions of space and time are comparable could have been raised by the
first people to have formalized physics, but ultimately, the contradictions between Maxwell's laws and Galilean
relativity had to come to a head with the realization of the import of finitude of the speed of light.
While spacetime can be viewed as a consequence of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, it was first
explicitly proposed mathematically by one of his teachers, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, in a 1908
essay[7] building on and extending Einstein's work. His concept of Minkowski space is the earliest treatment of space
and time as two aspects of a unified whole, the essence of special relativity. The idea of Minkowski space also led to
special relativity being viewed in a more geometrical way, this geometric viewpoint of spacetime being important in
general relativity too. (For an English translation of Minkowski's article, see Lorentz et al. 1952.) The 1926
thirteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica included an article by Einstein titled "Space–Time".[8]

Basic concepts
Spacetimes are the arenas in which all physical events take place—an event is a point in spacetime specified by its
time and place. For example, the motion of planets around the sun may be described in a particular type of
spacetime, or the motion of light around a rotating star may be described in another type of spacetime. The basic
elements of spacetime are events. In any given spacetime, an event is a unique position at a unique time. Examples
of events include the explosion of a star or the single beat of a drum.
A spacetime is independent of any observer.[9] However, in describing physical phenomena (which occur at certain
moments of time in a given region of space), each observer chooses a convenient coordinate system. Events are
specified by four real numbers in any coordinate system. The worldline of a particle or light beam is the path that
this particle or beam takes in the spacetime and represents the history of the particle or beam. The worldline of the
orbit of the Earth is depicted in two spatial dimensions x and y (the plane of the Earth's orbit) and a time dimension
orthogonal to x and y. The orbit of the Earth is an ellipse in space alone, but its worldline is a helix in spacetime.
The unification of space and time is exemplified by the common practice of expressing distance in units of time, by
dividing the distance measurement by the speed of light.

Spacetime intervals
In a Euclidean space, the separation between two points is measured by the distance between the two points. A
distance is purely spatial, and is always positive. In spacetime, the separation between two events is measured by the
interval between the two events, which takes into account not only the spatial separation between the events, but also
their temporal separation. The interval between two events is defined as:
   (spacetime interval),
where c is the speed of light, and Δt and Δr denote differences of the time and space coordinates, respectively,
between the events.
(Note that the choice of signs for above follows the space-like convention (-+++). Other treatments reverse the
sign of .)
Spacetime intervals may be classified into three distinct types based on whether the temporal separation ( )
or the spatial separation ( ) of the two events is greater.
Certain types of worldlines (called geodesics of the spacetime) are the shortest paths between any two events, with
distance being defined in terms of spacetime intervals. The concept of geodesics becomes critical in general
relativity, since geodesic motion may be thought of as "pure motion" (inertial motion) in spacetime, that is, free from
any external influences.
Spacetime 104

Time-like interval

For two events separated by a time-like interval, enough time passes between them for there to be a cause-effect
relationship between the two events. For a particle traveling at less than the speed of light, any two events which
occur to or by the particle must be separated by a time-like interval. Event pairs with time-like separation define a
negative squared spacetime interval ( ) and may be said to occur in each other's future or past. There exists a
reference frame such that the two events are observed to occur in the same spatial location, but there is no reference
frame in which the two events can occur at the same time.
The measure of a time-like spacetime interval is described by the proper time:

   (proper time).

The proper time interval would be measured by an observer with a clock traveling between the two events in an
inertial reference frame, when the observer's path intersects each event as that event occurs. (The proper time defines
a real number, since the interior of the square root is positive.)

Light-like interval

In a light-like interval, the spatial distance between two events is exactly balanced by the time between the two
events. The events define a squared spacetime interval of zero ( ).
Events which occur to or by a photon along its path (i.e., while travelling at , the speed of light) all have light-like
separation. Given one event, all those events which follow at light-like intervals define the propagation of a light
cone, and all the events which preceded from a light-like interval define a second light cone.

Space-like interval

When a space-like interval separates two events, not enough time passes between their occurrences for there to exist
a causal relationship crossing the spatial distance between the two events at the speed of light or slower. Generally,
the events are considered not to occur in each other's future or past. There exists a reference frame such that the two
events are observed to occur at the same time, but there is no reference frame in which the two events can occur in
the same spatial location.
For these space-like event pairs with a positive squared spacetime interval ( ), the measurement of
space-like separation is the proper distance:
   (proper distance).
Like the proper time of time-like intervals, the proper distance ( ) of space-like spacetime intervals is a real
number value.
Spacetime 105

Mathematics of spacetimes
For physical reasons, a spacetime continuum is mathematically defined as a four-dimensional, smooth, connected
Lorentzian manifold . This means the smooth Lorentz metric has signature . The metric
determines the geometry of spacetime, as well as determining the geodesics of particles and light beams. About each
point (event) on this manifold, coordinate charts are used to represent observers in reference frames. Usually,
Cartesian coordinates are used. Moreover, for simplicity's sake, the speed of light is usually assumed
to be unity.
A reference frame (observer) can be identified with one of these coordinate charts; any such observer can describe
any event . Another reference frame may be identified by a second coordinate chart about . Two observers (one
in each reference frame) may describe the same event but obtain different descriptions.
Usually, many overlapping coordinate charts are needed to cover a manifold. Given two coordinate charts, one
containing (representing an observer) and another containing (representing another observer), the intersection
of the charts represents the region of spacetime in which both observers can measure physical quantities and hence
compare results. The relation between the two sets of measurements is given by a non-singular coordinate
transformation on this intersection. The idea of coordinate charts as local observers who can perform measurements
in their vicinity also makes good physical sense, as this is how one actually collects physical data—locally.
For example, two observers, one of whom is on Earth, but the other one who is on a fast rocket to Jupiter, may
observe a comet crashing into Jupiter (this is the event ). In general, they will disagree about the exact location
and timing of this impact, i.e., they will have different 4-tuples (as they are using different coordinate
systems). Although their kinematic descriptions will differ, dynamical (physical) laws, such as momentum
conservation and the first law of thermodynamics, will still hold. In fact, relativity theory requires more than this in
the sense that it stipulates these (and all other physical) laws must take the same form in all coordinate systems. This
introduces tensors into relativity, by which all physical quantities are represented.
Geodesics are said to be time-like, null, or space-like if the tangent vector to one point of the geodesic is of this
nature. The paths of particles and light beams in spacetime are represented by time-like and null (light-like)
geodesics (respectively).

Topology
The assumptions contained in the definition of a spacetime are usually justified by the following considerations.
The connectedness assumption serves two main purposes. First, different observers making measurements
(represented by coordinate charts) should be able to compare their observations on the non-empty intersection of the
charts. If the connectedness assumption were dropped, this would not be possible. Second, for a manifold, the
properties of connectedness and path-connectedness are equivalent and, one requires the existence of paths (in
particular, geodesics) in the spacetime to represent the motion of particles and radiation.
Every spacetime is paracompact. This property, allied with the smoothness of the spacetime, gives rise to a smooth
linear connection, an important structure in general relativity. Some important theorems on constructing spacetimes
from compact and non-compact manifolds include the following:
• A compact manifold can be turned into a spacetime if, and only if, its Euler characteristic is 0. (Proof idea: the
existence of a Lorentzian metric is shown to be equivalent to the existence of a nonvanishing vector field.)
• Any non-compact 4-manifold can be turned into a spacetime.
Spacetime 106

Spacetime symmetries
Often in relativity, spacetimes that have some form of symmetry are studied. As well as helping to classify
spacetimes, these symmetries usually serve as a simplifying assumption in specialized work. Some of the most
popular ones include:
• Axisymmetric spacetimes
• Spherically symmetric spacetimes
• Static spacetimes
• Stationary spacetimes

Causal structure
The causal structure of a spacetime describes causal relationships between pairs of points in the spacetime based on
the existence of certain types of curves joining the points.

Spacetime in special relativity

The geometry of spacetime in special relativity is described by the Minkowski metric on R4. This spacetime is called
Minkowski space. The Minkowski metric is usually denoted by and can be written as a four-by-four matrix:

where the Landau–Lifshitz space-like convention is being used. A basic assumption of relativity is that coordinate
transformations must leave spacetime intervals invariant. Intervals are invariant under Lorentz transformations. This
invariance property leads to the use of four-vectors (and other tensors) in describing physics.
Strictly speaking, one can also consider events in Newtonian physics as a single spacetime. This is
Galilean-Newtonian relativity, and the coordinate systems are related by Galilean transformations. However, since
these preserve spatial and temporal distances independently, such a spacetime can be decomposed into spatial
coordinates plus temporal coordinates, which is not possible in the general case.

Spacetime in general relativity

In general relativity, it is assumed that spacetime is curved by the presence of matter (energy), this curvature being
represented by the Riemann tensor. In special relativity, the Riemann tensor is identically zero, and so this concept of
"non-curvedness" is sometimes expressed by the statement Minkowski spacetime is flat.
Many spacetime continua have physical interpretations which most physicists would consider bizarre or unsettling.
For example, a compact spacetime has closed, time-like curves, which violate our usual ideas of causality (that is,
future events could affect past ones). For this reason, mathematical physicists usually consider only restricted subsets
of all the possible spacetimes. One way to do this is to study "realistic" solutions of the equations of general
relativity. Another way is to add some additional "physically reasonable" but still fairly general geometric
restrictions and try to prove interesting things about the resulting spacetimes. The latter approach has led to some
important results, most notably the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems.

Quantized spacetime
In general relativity, spacetime is assumed to be smooth and continuous—and not just in the mathematical sense. In
the theory of quantum mechanics, there is an inherent discreteness present in physics. In attempting to reconcile
these two theories, it is sometimes postulated that spacetime should be quantized at the very smallest scales. Current
theory is focused on the nature of spacetime at the Planck scale. Causal sets, loop quantum gravity, string theory, and
black hole thermodynamics all predict a quantized spacetime with agreement on the order of magnitude. Loop
quantum gravity makes precise predictions about the geometry of spacetime at the Planck scale.
Spacetime 107

Privileged character of 3+1 spacetime

There are two kinds of dimensions, spatial (bidirectional) and temporal (unidirectional). Let the number of spatial
dimensions be N and the number of temporal dimensions be T. That N = 3 and T = 1, setting aside the compactified
dimensions invoked by string theory and undetectable to date, can be explained by appealing to the physical
consequences of letting N differ from 3 and T differ from 1. The argument is often of an anthropic character.
Immanuel Kant argued that 3-dimensional space was a consequence of the inverse square law of universal
gravitation. While Kant's argument is historically important, John D. Barrow says that it "...gets the punch-line back
to front: it is the three-dimensionality of space that explains why we see inverse-square force laws in Nature, not
vice-versa." (Barrow 2002: 204). This is because the law of gravitation (or any other inverse-square law) follows
from the concept of flux and the proportional relationship of flux density and the strength of field. If N = 3, then
3-dimensional solid objects have surface areas proportional to the square of their size in any selected spatial
dimension. In particular, a sphere of radius r has area of 4πr². More generally, in a space of N dimensions, the
strength of the gravitational attraction between two bodies separated by a distance of r would be inversely
proportional to rN−1.
In 1920, Paul Ehrenfest showed that if we fix T = 1 and let N > 3, the orbit of a planet about its sun cannot remain
stable. The same is true of a star's orbit around the center of its galaxy.[10] Ehrenfest also showed that if N is even,
then the different parts of a wave impulse will travel at different speeds. If N > 3 and odd, then wave impulses
become distorted. Only when N = 3 or 1 are both problems avoided. In 1922, Hermann Weyl showed that Maxwell's
theory of electromagnetism works only when N = 3 and T = 1, writing that this fact "...not only leads to a deeper
understanding of Maxwell's theory, but also of the fact that the world is four dimensional, which has hitherto always
been accepted as merely 'accidental,' become intelligible through it."[11] Finally, Tangherlini[12] showed in 1963 that
when N > 3, electron orbitals around nuclei cannot be stable; electrons would either fall into the nucleus or disperse.
Max Tegmark[13] expands on the preceding
argument in the following anthropic manner.
If T differs from 1, the behavior of physical
systems could not be predicted reliably from
knowledge of the relevant partial differential
equations. In such a universe, intelligent life
capable of manipulating technology could
not emerge. Moreover, if T > 1, Tegmark
maintains that protons and electrons would
be unstable and could decay into particles
having greater mass than themselves. (This
is not a problem if the particles have a
sufficiently low temperature.) If N > 3,
Ehrenfest's argument above holds; atoms as
we know them (and probably more complex
structures as well) could not exist. If N < 3,
gravitation of any kind becomes
problematic, and the universe is probably
too simple to contain observers. For
Properties of n+m-dimensional spacetimes
example, when N < 3, nerves cannot cross
without intersecting.

In general, it is not clear how physical law could function if T differed from 1. If T > 1, subatomic particles which
decay after a fixed period would not behave predictably, because time-like geodesics would not be necessarily
Spacetime 108

maximal.[14] N = 1 and T = 3 has the peculiar property that the speed of light in a vacuum is a lower bound on the
velocity of matter; all matter consists of tachyons.
Hence anthropic and other arguments rule out all cases except N = 3 and T = 1—which happens to describe the world
about us. Curiously, the cases N = 3 or 4 have the richest and most difficult geometry and topology. There are, for
example, geometric statements whose truth or falsity is known for all N except one or both of 3 and 4. N = 3 was the
last case of the Poincaré conjecture to be proved.
For an elementary treatment of the privileged status of N = 3 and T = 1, see chpt. 10 (esp. Fig. 10.12) of Barrow;[15]
for deeper treatments, see §4.8 of Barrow and Tipler (1986) and Tegmark.[13] Barrow has repeatedly cited the work
of Whitrow.[16]
String theory hypothesizes that matter and energy are composed of tiny vibrating strings of various types, most of
which are embedded in dimensions that exist only on a scale no larger than the Planck length. Hence N = 3 and T = 1
do not characterize string theory, which embeds vibrating strings in coordinate grids having 10, or even 26,
dimensions.

See also
• Basic introduction to the mathematics of curved spacetime
• Four-vector
• Fourth dimension
• Frame-dragging
• Global spacetime structure
• List of mathematical topics in relativity
• Local spacetime structure
• Lorentz invariance
• Manifold
• Mathematics of general relativity
• Metric space
• Philosophy of space and time
• Relativity of simultaneity

References
[ Edit this reference [17]]
•
Barrow, John D.; Tipler, Frank J. (19 May 1988). The Anthropic Cosmological Principle [18]. foreword by John A.
Wheeler. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LC 87-28148 [19]. ISBN 9780192821478. Retrieved 31 December 2009.
• Ehrenfest, Paul (1920) "How do the fundamental laws of physics make manifest that Space has 3 dimensions?"
Annalen der Physik 61: 440.
• George F. Ellis and Ruth M. Williams (1992) Flat and curved space-times. Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN
0-19-851164-7
• Isenberg, J. A. (1981) "Wheeler-Einstein-Mach spacetimes," Phys. Rev. D 24(2): 251–256.
• Kant, Immanuel (1929) "Thoughts on the true estimation of living forces" in J. Handyside, trans., Kant's
Inaugural Dissertation and Early Writings on Space. Univ. of Chicago Press.
• Lorentz, H. A., Einstein, Albert, Minkowski, Hermann, and Weyl, Hermann (1952) The Principle of Relativity: A
Collection of Original Memoirs. Dover.
• Lucas, John Randolph (1973) A Treatise on Time and Space. London: Methuen.
• Penrose, Roger (2004). The Road to Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chpts. 17–18.
Time dilation 110

Time dilation
Time dilation is a phenomenon (or two phenomena, as mentioned below) described by the theory of relativity. It can
be illustrated by supposing that two observers are in motion relative to each other, and/or differently situated with
regard to nearby gravitational masses. They each carry a clock of identically similar construction and function. Then,
the point of view of each observer will generally be that the other observer's clock is in error (has changed its rate).
Both causes (distance to gravitational mass and relative speed) can operate together.

Overview of time dilation

Time dilation can arise from (1) relative velocity of motion between the observers, and (2) difference in their
distance from gravitational mass.
(1) In the case that the observers are in relative uniform motion, and far away from any gravitational mass, the point
of view of each will be that the other's (moving) clock is ticking at a slower rate than the local clock. The faster the
relative velocity, the more is the rate of time dilation. This case is sometimes called special relativistic time dilation.
It is often interpreted as time "slowing down" for the other (moving) clock. But that is only true from the physical
point of view of the local observer, and of others at relative rest (i.e. in the local observer's frame of reference). The
point of view of the other observer will be that again the local clock (this time the other clock) is correct, and it is the
distant moving one that is slow. From a local perspective, time registered by clocks that are at rest with respect to the
local frame of reference (and far from any gravitational mass) always appears to pass at the same rate.[1]
(2) There is another case of time dilation, where both observers are differently situated in their distance from a
significant gravitational mass, such as (for terrestrial observers) the Earth or the Sun. One may suppose for simplicity
that the observers are at relative rest (which is not the case of two observers both rotating with the Earth -- an extra
factor described below). In the simplified case, the general theory of relativity describes how, for both observers, the
clock that is closer to the gravitational mass, i.e. deeper in its "gravity well", appears to go slower than the clock that
is more distant from the mass (or higher in altitude away from the center of the gravitational mass). That does not
mean that the two observers fully agree: each still makes the local clock to be correct; the observer more distant from
the mass (higher in altitude) measures the other clock (closer to the mass, lower in altitude) to be slower than the
local correct rate, and the observer situated closer to the mass (lower in altitude) measures the other clock (farther
from the mass, higher in altitude) to be faster than the local correct rate. They agree at least that the clock nearer the
mass is slower in rate, and on the ratio of the difference. This is gravitational time dilation.
In Albert Einstein's theories of relativity, time dilation in these two circumstances can be summarized:
• In special relativity (or, hypothetically far from all gravitational mass), clocks that are moving with respect to an
inertial system of observation are measured to be running slower. This effect is described precisely by the Lorentz
transformation.
• In general relativity, clocks at lower potentials in a gravitational field — such as in closer proximity to a planet —
are found to be running slower. The articles gravitational time dilation and gravitational red shift give a more
detailed discussion. Special and general relatistic effects can combine, for example in some time-scale
applications mentioned below.
Thus, in special relativity, the time dilation effect is reciprocal: as observed from the point of view of either of two
clocks which are in motion with respect to each other, it will be the other clock that is time dilated. (This presumes
that the relative motion of both parties is uniform; that is, they do not accelerate with respect to one another during
the course of the observations.)
In contrast, gravitational time dilation (as treated in general relativity) is not reciprocal: an observer at the top of a
tower will observe that clocks at ground level tick slower, and observers on the ground will agree about that, i.e.
about the direction and the ratio of the difference. There is not full agreement, all the observers make their own local
Time dilation 111

clocks out to be correct, but the direction and ratio of gravitational time dilation is agreed by all observers,
independent of their altitude.

Simple inference of time dilation due to relative velocity

Time dilation can be inferred from the
observed fact of the constancy of the
speed of light in all reference frames.
[2] [3] [4] [5]

This constancy of the speed of light

means, counter to intuition, that speeds
of material objects and light are not
additive. It is not possible to make the
speed of light appear faster by
approaching at speed towards the
material source that is emitting light. It
is not possible to make the speed of
light appear slower by receding from
the source at speed. From one point of
Observer at rest sees time 2L/c
view, it is the implications of this
unexpected constancy that take away
from constancies expected elsewhere.
Consider a simple clock consisting of
two mirrors A and B, between which a
light pulse is bouncing. The separation
of the mirrors is L, and the clock ticks
once each time it hits a given mirror.
In the frame where the clock is at rest
(diagram at right), the light pulse traces
out a path of length 2L and the period
of the clock is 2L divided by the speed Observer moving parallel relative to setup, sees longer path, time > 2L/c, same speed c

of light:

From the frame of reference of a moving observer traveling at the speed v (diagram at lower right), the light pulse
traces out a longer, angled path. The second postulate of special relativity states that the speed of light is constant in
all frames, which implies a lengthening of the period of this clock from the moving observer's perspective. That is to
say, in a frame moving relative to the clock, the clock appears to be running more slowly. Straightforward
application of the Pythagorean theorem leads to the well-known prediction of special relativity:
The total time for the light pulse to trace its path is given by

The length of the half path can be calculated as a function of known quantities as
Time dilation 112

Substituting D from this equation into the previous, and solving for gives:

and thus, with the definition of :

which expresses the fact that for the moving observer the period of the clock is longer than in the frame of the clock
itself.

Time dilation due to relative velocity symmetric between observers

Common sense would dictate that if time passage has slowed for a moving object, the moving object would observe
the external world to be correspondingly "sped up". Counterintuitively, special relativity predicts the opposite.
A similar oddity occurs in everyday life. If Sam sees Abigail at a distance she appears small to him and at the same
time Sam appears small to Abigail. Experience has taught the human mind to accept the quirks of perspective but left
it unprepared for relativity.
One is accustomed to the notion of relativity with respect to distance: the distance from Los Angeles to New York is
by convention the same as the distance from New York to Los Angeles. On the other hand, when speeds are
considered, one thinks of an object as "actually" moving, overlooking that its motion is always relative to something
else — to the stars, the ground or to oneself. If one object is moving with respect to another, the latter is moving with
respect to the former and with equal relative speed.
In the special theory of relativity, a moving clock is found to be ticking slowly with respect to the observer's clock. If
Sam and Abigail are on different trains in near-lightspeed relative motion, Sam measures (by all methods of
measurement) clocks on Abigail's train to be running slowly and, similarly, Abigail measures clocks on Sam's train
to be running slowly.
Note that in all such attempts to establish "synchronization" within the reference system, the question of whether
something happening at one location is in fact happening simultaneously with something happening elsewhere, is of
key importance. Calculations are ultimately based on determining which events are simultaneous. Furthermore,
establishing simultaneity of events separated in space necessarily requires transmission of information between
locations, which by itself is an indication that the speed of light will enter the determination of simultaneity.
It is a natural and legitimate question to ask how, in detail, special relativity can be self-consistent if clock A is
time-dilated with respect to clock B and clock B is also time-dilated with respect to clock A. It is by challenging the
assumptions built into the common notion of simultaneity that logical consistency can be restored. Simultaneity is a
relationship between an observer in a particular frame of reference and a set of events. By analogy, left and right are
accepted to vary with the position of the observer, because they apply to a relationship. In a similar vein, Plato
explained that up and down describe a relationship to the earth and one would not fall off at the antipodes.
Within the framework of the theory and its terminology there is a relativity of simultaneity that affects how the
specified events are aligned with respect to each other by observers in relative motion. Because the pairs of
putatively simultaneous moments are identified differently by different observers (as illustrated in the twin paradox
article), each can treat the other clock as being the slow one without relativity being self-contradictory. This can be
explained in many ways, some of which follow.
Time dilation 113

Temporal coordinate systems and clock synchronization

In Relativity, temporal coordinate systems are set up using a procedure for synchronizing clocks, discussed by
Poincaré (1900) in relation to Lorentz's local time (see relativity of simultaneity). It is now usually called the
Einstein synchronization procedure, since it appeared in his 1905 paper.
An observer with a clock sends a light signal out at time t1 according to his clock. At a distant event, that light signal
is reflected back to, and arrives back to the observer at time t2 according to his clock. Since the light travels the same
path at the same rate going both out and back for the observer in this scenario, the coordinate time of the event of the
light signal being reflected for the observer tE is tE = (t1 + t2) / 2. In this way, a single observer's clock can be used to
define temporal coordinates which are good anywhere in the universe.
Symmetric time dilation occurs with respect to temporal coordinate systems set up in this manner. It is an effect
where another clock is being viewed as running slowly by an observer. Observers do not consider their own clock
time to be time-dilated, but may find that it is observed to be time-dilated in another coordinate system.

Overview of time dilation formulae

Time dilation due to relative velocity

The formula for determining time
dilation in special relativity is:

Lorentz factor as a function of speed (in natural units where c=1). Notice that for small
speeds (less than 0.1), γ is approximately 1

where
is the time interval between two co-local events (i.e. happening at the same place) for an observer in some
inertial frame (e.g. ticks on his clock) – this is known as the proper time,
Time dilation 114

is the time interval between those same events, as measured by another observer, inertially moving with
velocity v with respect to the former observer,
is the relative velocity between the observer and the moving clock,
is the speed of light, and

is the Lorentz factor.

Thus the duration of the clock cycle of a moving clock is found to be increased: it is measured to be "running slow".
The range of such variances in ordinary life, where , even considering space travel, are not great enough
to produce easily detectable time dilation effects, and such vanishingly small effects can be safely ignored. It is only
when an object approaches speeds on the order of 30,000 km/s (1/10 the speed of light) that time dilation becomes
important.
Time dilation by the Lorentz factor was predicted by Joseph Larmor (1897), at least for electrons orbiting a nucleus.
Thus "... individual electrons describe corresponding parts of their orbits in times shorter for the [rest] system in the
ratio : " (Larmor 1897). Time dilation of magnitude corresponding to this (Lorentz) factor has been

experimentally confirmed, as described below.

Time dilation due to gravitation and motion together

Astronomical time scales and the GPS system represent significant practical applications, presenting problems that
call for consideration of the combined effects of mass and motion in producing time dilation.
Relativistic time dilation effects, for the solar system and the Earth, have been evaluated from the starting point of an
approximation to the Schwarzschild solution to the Einstein field equations. A timelike interval dtE in this metric can
be approximated, when expressed in rectangular coordinates, and when truncated of higher powers in 1/c2, in the
form:-
dtE2 = ( 1 - 2GMi/ric2 )dtc2 - ( dx2 + dy2 + dz2 )/c2 . . . . . (1),[6] [7]
in which:
dtE (expressed as a time-like interval) is a small increment forming part of an interval in the proper time tE (an
interval that could be recorded on an atomic clock);
dtc is a small increment in the timelike coordinate tc ("coordinate time") of the clock's position in the chosen
reference frame;
dx, dy and dz are small increments in three orthogonal space-like coordinates x, y, z of the clock's position in
the chosen reference frame; and
GMi/ri represents a sum, to be designated U, of gravitational potentials due to the masses in the neighborhood,
based on their distances ri from the clock. This sum of the GMi/ri is evaluated approximately, as a sum of
Newtonian gravitational potentials (plus any tidal potentials considered), and is represented below as U (using
the positive astronomical sign convention for gravitational potentials). The scope of the approximation may be
extended to a case where U further includes effects of external masses other than the Mi, in the form of tidal
gravitational potentials that prevail (due to the external masses) in a suitably small region of space around a
point of the reference frame located somewhere in a gravity well due to those external masses, where the size
of 'suitably small' remains to be investigated.[8]
From this, after putting the velocity of the clock (in the coordinates of the chosen reference frame) as
v2 = (dx2 + dy2 + dz2)/dtc2 . . . . . (2) ,
(then taking the square root, and truncating after binomial expansion, neglecting terms beyond the first power in
1/c2), a relation between the rate of the proper time and the rate of the coordinate time can be obtained as the
Time dilation 115

differential equation
dtE/dtc = 1 - U/c2 - v2/2c2 . . . . . (3).[9]
Equation (3) represents combined time dilations due to mass and motion, approximated to the first order in powers of
1/c2. The approximation can be applied to a number of the weak-field situations found around the Earth and in the
solar-system. It can be thought of as relating the rate of proper time tE that can be measured by a clock, with the rate
of a coordinate time tc.
In particular, for explanatory purposes, the time-dilation equation (3) provides a way of conceiving coordinate time,
by showing that the rate of the clock would be exactly equal to the rate of the coordinate time if this "coordinate
clock" could be situated
(a) hypothetically outside all relevant 'gravity wells', e.g. remote from all gravitational masses Mi, (so that
U=0), and also
(b) at rest in relation to the chosen system of coordinates (so that v=0).
Equation (3) has been developed and integrated for the case where the reference frame is the solar system barycentric
('ssb') reference frame, to show the (time-varying) time dilation between the ssb coordinate time and local time at the
Earth's surface: the main effects found included a mean time dilation of about 0.49 second per year (slower at the
Earth's surface than for the ssb coordinate time), plus periodic modulation terms of which the largest has an annual
period and an amplitude of about 1.66 millisecond.[10] [11]
Equation (3) has also been developed and integrated for the case of clocks at or near the Earth's surface. For clocks
fixed to the rotating Earth's surface at mean sea level, regarded as a surface of the geoid, the sum ( U + v2/2 ) is a
very nearly constant geopotential, and decreases with increasing height above sea level approximately as the product
of the change in height and the gradient of the geopotential. This has been evaluated as a fractional increase in clock
rate of about 1.1x10-13 per kilometer of height above sea level due to a decrease in combined rate of time dilation
with increasing altitude. The value of dtE/dtc at height falls to be compared with the corresponding value at mean sea
level.[12] (Both values are slightly below 1, the value at height being a little larger (closer to 1) than the value at sea
level.)
This gravitational time dilation relationship has been used in the synchronization or correlation of atomic clocks used
to implement and maintain the atomic time scale TAI, where the different clocks are located at different heights
above sea level, and since 1977 have had their frequencies steered to compensate for the differences of rate with
height.[13]
A fuller development of equation (3) for the near-Earth situation has been used to evaluate the combined time
dilations relative to the Earth's surface experienced along the trajectories of satellites of the GPS global positioning
system. The resulting values (in this case they are relativistic increases in the rate of the satellite-borne clocks, by
about 38 microseconds per day) form the basis for adjustments essential for the functioning of the system.[14]

Experimental confirmation
Time dilation has been tested a number of times. The routine work carried on in particle accelerators since the 1950s,
such as those at CERN, is a continuously running test of the time dilation of special relativity. The specific
experiments include:

Velocity time dilation tests

• Ives and Stilwell (1938, 1941), “An experimental study of the rate of a moving clock”, in two parts. The stated
purpose of these experiments was to verify the time dilation effect, predicted by Lamor-Lorentz ether theory, due
to motion through the ether using Einstein's suggestion that Doppler effect in canal rays would provide a suitable
experiment. These experiments measured the Doppler shift of the radiation emitted from cathode rays, when
viewed from directly in front and from directly behind. The high and low frequencies detected were not the
Time dilation 116

classical values predicted.

and and

i.e. for sources with invariant frequencies The high and low frequencies of the radiation
from the moving sources were measured as
and
as deduced by Einstein (1905) from the Lorentz transformation, when the source is running slow by the
Lorentz factor.
• Rossi and Hall (1941) compared the population of cosmic-ray-produced muons at the top of a mountain to that
observed at sea level. Although the travel time for the muons from the top of the mountain to the base is several
muon half-lives, the muon sample at the base was only moderately reduced. This is explained by the time dilation
attributed to their high speed relative to the experimenters. That is to say, the muons were decaying about 10
times slower than if they were at rest with respect to the experimenters.
• Hasselkamp, Mondry, and Scharmann[15] (1979) measured the Doppler shift from a source moving at right angles
to the line of sight (the transverse Doppler shift). The most general relationship between frequencies of the
radiation from the moving sources is given by:

as deduced by Einstein (1905)[16]. For ( ) this reduces to . Thus

there is no transverse Doppler shift, and the lower frequency of the moving source can be attributed to the time
dilation effect alone.

Gravitational time dilation tests

• Pound, Rebka in 1959 measured the very slight gravitational red shift in the frequency of light emitted at a lower
height, where Earth's gravitational field is relatively more intense. The results were within 10% of the predictions
of general relativity. Later Pound and Snider (in 1964) derived an even closer result of 1%. This effect is as
predicted by gravitational time dilation.

Velocity and gravitational time dilation combined-effect tests

• Hafele and Keating, in 1971, flew caesium atomic clocks east and west around the Earth in commercial airliners,
to compare the elapsed time against that of a clock that remained at the US Naval Observatory. Two opposite
effects came into play. The clocks were expected to age more quickly (show a larger elapsed time) than the
reference clock, since they were in a higher (weaker) gravitational potential for most of the trip (c.f. Pound,
Rebka). But also, contrastingly, the moving clocks were expected to age more slowly because of the speed of
their travel. The gravitational effect was the larger, and the clocks suffered a net gain in elapsed time. To within
experimental error, the net gain was consistent with the difference between the predicted gravitational gain and
the predicted velocity time loss. In 2005, the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom reported their
limited replication of this experiment.[17] The NPL experiment differed from the original in that the caesium
clocks were sent on a shorter trip (London–Washington D.C. return), but the clocks were more accurate. The
reported results are within 4% of the predictions of relativity.
• The Global Positioning System can be considered a continuously operating experiment in both special and
general relativity. The in-orbit clocks are corrected for both special and general relativistic time dilation effects as
described above, so that (as observed from the Earth's surface) they run at the same rate as clocks on the surface
of the Earth. In addition, but not directly time dilation related, general relativistic correction terms are built into
the model of motion that the satellites broadcast to receivers — uncorrected, these effects would result in an
Time dilation 117

approximately 7-metre (23 ft) oscillation in the pseudo-ranges measured by a receiver over a cycle of 12 hours.

Muon lifetime
A comparison of muon lifetimes at different speeds is possible. In the laboratory, slow muons are produced, and in
the atmosphere very fast moving muons are introduced by cosmic rays. Taking the muon lifetime at rest as the
laboratory value of 2.22 μs, the lifetime of a cosmic ray produced muon traveling at 98% of the speed of light is
about five times longer, in agreement with observations.[18] In this experiment the "clock" is the time taken by
processes leading to muon decay, and these processes take place in the moving muon at its own "clock rate", which
is much slower than the laboratory clock.

Time dilation and space flight

Time dilation would make it possible for passengers in a fast-moving vehicle to travel further into the future while
aging very little, in that their great speed slows down the rate of passage of on-board time. That is, the ship's clock
(and according to relativity, any human travelling with it) shows less elapsed time than the clocks of observers on
Earth. For sufficiently high speeds the effect is dramatic. For example, one year of travel might correspond to ten
years at home. Indeed, a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel as far as light has been able to
travel since the big bang (some 13.7 billion light years) in one human lifetime. The space travellers could return to
Earth billions of years in the future. A scenario based on this idea was presented in the novel Planet of the Apes by
Pierre Boulle.
A more likely use of this effect would be to enable humans to travel to nearby stars without spending their entire
lives aboard the ship. However, any such application of time dilation during Interstellar travel would require the use
of some new, advanced method of propulsion.
Current space flight technology has fundamental theoretical limits based on the practical problem that an increasing
amount of energy is required for propulsion as a craft approaches the speed of light. The likelihood of collision with
small space debris and other particulate material is another practical limitation. At the velocities presently attained,
however, time dilation is not a factor in space travel. Travel to regions of space-time where gravitational time
dilation is taking place, such as within the gravitational field of a black hole but outside the event horizon (perhaps
on a hyperbolic trajectory exiting the field), could also yield results consistent with present theory.

Time dilation at constant acceleration

In special relativity, time dilation is most simply described in circumstances where relative velocity is unchanging.
Nevertheless, the Lorentz equations allow one to calculate proper time and movement in space for the simple case of
a spaceship whose acceleration, relative to some referent object in uniform (i.e. constant velocity) motion, equals g
throughout the period of measurement.
Let t be the time in an inertial frame subsequently called the rest frame. Let x be a spatial coordinate, and let the
direction of the constant acceleration as well as the spaceship's velocity (relative to the rest frame) be parallel to the
x-axis. Assuming the spaceship's position at time t = 0 being x = 0 and the velocity being v0 and defining the
following abbreviation

the following formulas hold:[19]

Position:
Time dilation 118

Velocity:

Proper time:

The spacetime geometry of velocity time dilation

The green dots and red dots in the animation represent spaceships. The
ships of the green fleet have no velocity relative to each other, so for
the clocks onboard the individual ships the same amount of time
elapses relative to each other, and they can set up a procedure to
maintain a synchronized standard fleet time. The ships of the "red
fleet" are moving with a velocity of 0.866 of the speed of light with
respect to the green fleet.
The blue dots represent pulses of light. One cycle of light-pulses
between two green ships takes two seconds of "green time", one
second for each leg.
As seen from the perspective of the reds, the transit time of the light
pulses they exchange among each other is one second of "red time" for
each leg. As seen from the perspective of the greens, the red ships'
cycle of exchanging light pulses travels a diagonal path that is two
Time dilation in transverse motion.
light-seconds long. (As seen from the green perspective the reds travel
1.73 ( ) light-seconds of distance for every two seconds of green
time.)
One of the red ships emits a light pulse towards the greens every second of red time. These pulses are received by
ships of the green fleet with two-second intervals as measured in green time. Not shown in the animation is that all
aspects of physics are proportionally involved. The light pulses that are emitted by the reds at a particular frequency
as measured in red time are received at a lower frequency as measured by the detectors of the green fleet that
measure against green time, and vice versa.
The animation cycles between the green perspective and the red perspective, to emphasize the symmetry. As there is
no such thing as absolute motion in relativity (as is also the case for Newtonian mechanics), both the green and the
red fleet are entitled to consider themselves motionless in their own frame of reference.
Again, it is vital to understand that the results of these interactions and calculations reflect the real state of the ships
as it emerges from their situation of relative motion. It is not a mere quirk of the method of measurement or
communication.
Arrow of time 121

Arrow of time
This article is an overview of the subject. For a more technical discussion and for information related to
current research, see Entropy (arrow of time).
In the natural sciences, arrow of time, or time’s arrow, is a term coined in 1927 by British astronomer Arthur
Eddington to distinguish a direction of time on a four-dimensional relativistic map of the world, which, according to
Eddington, can be determined by a study of organizations of atoms, molecules, and bodies.
Physical processes at the microscopic level are believed to be either entirely or mostly time symmetric, meaning that
the theoretical statements that describe them remain true if the direction of time is reversed; yet when we describe
things at the macroscopic level it often appears that this is not the case: there is an obvious direction (or flow) of
time. An arrow of time is anything that exhibits such time-asymmetry.

History of term
From the 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World, which helped to popularize the term, Eddington states:
Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random
element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element
decreases the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics. This follows
at once if our fundamental contention is admitted that the introduction of randomness is the only thing
which cannot be undone. I shall use the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to express this one-way property of time
which has no analogue in space.
Eddington then gives three points to note about this arrow:
1. It is vividly recognized by consciousness.
2. It is equally insisted on by our reasoning faculty, which tells us that a reversal of the arrow would render the
external world nonsensical.
3. It makes no appearance in physical science except in the study of organization of a number of individuals.
Here, according to Eddington, the arrow indicates the direction of progressive increase of the random element.
Following a lengthy argument into the nature of thermodynamics, Eddington concludes that in so far as physics is
concerned time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.

Overview
The symmetry of time (T-symmetry) can be understood by a simple analogy: if time were perfectly symmetric then
it would be possible to watch a movie taken of real events and everything that happens in the movie would seem
realistic whether it was played forwards or backwards.[1]
An obvious objection to this assertion is gravity: after all, things fall down, not up. Consider first, some bodies
interacting in space. Perhaps one asteroid approaches another, loops part-way around it, and slingshots off in another
direction. In this case the forward-recording and the backward-recording look equally realistic.
One could film a tossed ball as it moves up, slows gradually to a stop, and then falls back down into the catcher's
hand. This is another case where the forward- and backward- recordings clearly look equally realistic. One might
expect it to take the same amount of time for the ball to go up in reverse as it did for it to go up going forward, but as
it turns out the film would show it taking slightly longer going forward than going backward. This is not because
gravity is asymmetric but because when the ball is going forward in time it loses energy to air molecules it bumps
into, but when the ball is going backwards in time the air molecules are bumping into it, giving it energy. Note that
this inequality doesn't contradict the definition of time reversal because forward-up is a different leg of the trip from
backward-up. So the system is strictly T-symmetrical, but we recognize that while going "forward," useful kinetic
Arrow of time 122

energy is dissipated into the environment: entropy is increasing. Entropy, which is a purely statistical observation,
may be one of the few processes in physics that is not time-reversible. According to the statistical notion of
increasing entropy, the flow of time is identified with the flow of energy that is decreasing the free energy.[2]
This kind of thinking turns out to be critical to understanding the final case of this example. What if you record
somebody simply dropping a ball? It falls for a meter and stops. Certainly someone watching this recording in
reverse would notice an unrealistic discrepancy: a ball falling upward! But imagine the forward-recording carefully.
When the ball lands, its kinetic energy is dispersed into sound, shaking the ground, and some heat. That is what
allows the ball to be moving one moment and still the next. Now think of the recording in reverse. Those sound
waves, those ground vibrations, and that heat, are all rushing back into the ball, imparting just enough energy to
propel it upward into the person's hand. With this understanding, the backward recording appears perfectly realistic.
The only way that someone can tell the video is in reverse is by making the statistical prediction that it's unlikely that
these forces could incidentally interact to propel the ball upward into your waiting hand.
This is an overview: see the main article for more on entropy, including another example.

Arrows

The thermodynamic arrow of time

The thermodynamic arrow of time is provided by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in an
isolated system, entropy tends to increase with time. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of microscopic
disorder; thus the Second Law implies that time is asymmetrical with respect to the amount of order in an isolated
system: as time increases, a system will statistically become more disordered. This asymmetry can be used
empirically to distinguish between future and past though measuring entropy does not accurately measure time.
There is also the complication that, locally, entropy can decrease with time: living systems decrease their entropy by
expenditure of energy at the expense of environmental entropy increase.
While Naturalistic Evolutionists claim that the Second Law is statistical, physicists assert otherwise. British Physicist
Sir Alfred Brian Pippard wrote, "There is thus no justification for the view, often glibly repeated, that the Second
Law of Thermodynamics is only statistically true, in the sense that microscopic violations repeatedly occur, but
never violations of any serious magnitude. On the contrary, no evidence has ever been presented that the Second
Law breaks down under any circumstances."[3] The Second Law is universal and seems to accurately describe the
overall trend in real systems toward higher entropy.
This arrow of time seems to be related to all other arrows of time and arguably underlies some of them, with the
exception of the weak arrow of time.

The cosmological arrow of time

The cosmological arrow of time points in the direction of the universe's expansion. It may be linked to the
thermodynamic arrow, with the universe heading towards a heat death (Big Chill) as the amount of usable energy
becomes negligible. Alternatively, it may be an artifact of our place in the universe's evolution (see the Anthropic
bias), with this arrow reversing as gravity pulls everything back into a Big Crunch.
If this arrow of time is related to the other arrows of time, then the future is by definition the direction towards which
the universe becomes bigger. Thus, the universe expands - rather than shrinks - by definition.
The thermodynamic arrow of time and the Second law of thermodynamics are thought to be a consequence of the
initial conditions in the early universe. Therefore they ultimately result from the cosmological set-up.
Arrow of time 123

The radiative arrow of time

Waves, from radio waves to sound waves to those on a pond from throwing a stone, expand outward from their
source, even though the wave equations allow for solutions of convergent waves as well as radiative ones. This
arrow has been reversed in carefully worked experiments which have created convergent waves, so this arrow
probably follows from the thermodynamic arrow in that meeting the conditions to produce a convergent wave
requires more order than the conditions for a radiative wave. Put differently, the probability for initial conditions that
produce a convergent wave is much lower than the probability for initial conditions that produce a radiative wave. In
fact, normally a radiative wave increases entropy, while a convergent wave decreases it, making the latter
contradictory to the Second Law of Thermodynamics in usual circumstances.
A unit travelling through space always follows rings of converging spiral. The waves on the pond expand, but with
decreasing velocity because of the effect of convergence. The difference lies in the velocity of the changes.

The causal arrow of time

A cause precedes its effect: the causal event occurs before the event it affects. Birth, for example, follows a
successful conception and not vice versa. Thus causality is intimately bound up with time's arrow.
An epistemological problem with using causality as an arrow of time is that, as David Hume pointed out, the causal
relation per se cannot be perceived; one only perceives sequences of events. Furthermore it is surprisingly difficult to
provide a clear explanation of what the terms "cause" and "effect" really mean, or to define the events to which they
refer. It does seem evident, however, that dropping the plate is the cause while the plate shattering is the effect.
Physically speaking, this is another manifestation of the thermodynamic arrow of time, and is a consequence of the
Second law of thermodynamics.[4] Controlling the future, or causing something to happen, creates correlations
between the doer and the effect,[5] and these can only be created as we move forwards in time, not backwards.

The particle physics (weak) arrow of time

Certain subatomic interactions involving the weak nuclear force violate the conservation of both parity and charge
conjugation, but only very rarely. An example is the kaon decay [6]. According to the CPT Theorem, this means they
should also be time irreversible, and so establish an arrow of time. Such processes should be responsible for matter
creation in the early universe.
This arrow is not linked to any other arrow by any proposed mechanism, and if it would have pointed to the opposite
time direction, the only difference would have been that our universe would be made of anti-matter rather than from
matter. More accurately, the definitions of matter and anti-matter would just be reversed.
That the combination of parity and charge conjugation is broken so rarely means that this arrow only "barely" points
in one direction, setting it apart from the other arrows whose direction is much more obvious.

The quantum arrow of time

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, quantum evolution is governed by the
Schrödinger equation, which is time-symmetric, and by wave function collapse, which is time irreversible. As the
mechanism of wave function collapse is philosophically obscure, it is not completely clear how this arrow links to
the others. While at the microscopic level, collapse seems to show no favor to increasing or decreasing entropy,
some believe there is a bias which shows up on macroscopic scales as the thermodynamic arrow. According to the
modern physical view of wave function collapse, the theory of quantum decoherence, the quantum arrow of time is a
consequence of the thermodynamic arrow of time.
Arrow of time 124

The psychological/perceptual arrow of time

Psychological time is, in part, the cataloguing of ever increasing items of memory from continuous changes in
perception. In other words, things we remember make up the past, while the future consists of those events that
cannot be remembered. The ancient method of comparing unique events to generalized repeating events such as the
apparent movement of the sun, moon, and stars provided a convenient grid work to accomplish this. The consistent
increase in memory volume creates one mental arrow of time. Another arises because one has the sense that one's
perception is a continuous movement from the known (Past) to the unknown (Future). Anticipating the unknown
forms the psychological future which always seems to be something one is moving towards, but, like a projection in
a mirror, it makes what is actually already a part of memory, such as desires, dreams, and hopes, seem ahead of the
observer.
The association of "behind = past" and "ahead = future" is itself culturally determined. For example, the Chinese and
the Aymara people both associate "ahead = past" and "behind = future".[7] In Chinese, for instance, the term "the day
after tomorrow" literally means "behind day" while "the day before yesterday" is referred to as "front day".
The other side of the psychological passage of time is in the realm of volition and action. We plan and often execute
actions intended to affect the course of events in the future. Hardly anyone tries to change past events. Indeed, in the
Rubaiyat it is written (sic):
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
  Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
  Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
- Omar Khayyám (Fitzgerald translation)
The psychological arrow of time is thought to be reducible to the thermodynamic arrow: it has deep connections with
Maxwell's demon and the physics of information; In fact, it is easy to understand its link to the Second Law of
Thermodynamics if we view memory as correlation between brain cells (or computer bits) and the outer world. Since
the Second Law of Thermodynamics is equivalent to the growth with time of such correlations, then it states that
memory will be created as we move towards the future (rather than towards the past).

See also
• Anthropic bias
• Loschmidt's paradox
• Maxwell's demon
• Philosophy of space and time
• Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 1999
• T-symmetry

Further reading
• Boltzmann, Ludwig (1964). Lectures On Gas Theory. University Of California Press. Translated from the original
German by Stephen G. Brush. Originally published 1896/1898.
• Carroll, Sean (2010). From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Dutton. Website [8]
• Feynman, Richard (1965). The Character of Physical Law. BBC Publications. Chapter 5.
• Halliwell, J.J. et al. (1994). Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry. Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-56837-4. (technical).
• Peierls, R (1979). Surprises in Theoretical Physics. Princeton. Section 3.8.
• Penrose, Roger (1989). The Emperor's New Mind. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-851973-7. Chapter 7.
• Penrose, Roger (2004). The Road to Reality. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-04447-8. Chapter 27.
• Price, Huw (1996). Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point. ISBN 0-19-510095-6. Website [57]
Chronon 126

Chronon
A chronon is a proposed quantum of time, that is, a discrete and indivisible "unit" of time as part of a theory that
proposes that time is not continuous. While time is a continuous quantity in both standard quantum mechanics and
general relativity, many physicists have suggested that a discrete model of time might work, especially when
considering the combination of quantum mechanics with general relativity to produce a theory of quantum gravity.
The term was introduced in this sense by Robert Lévi [1] . Henry Margenau [2] suggested that the chronon might be
the time for light to travel the classical radius of an electron. A quantum theory in which time is a quantum variable
with a discrete spectrum, and which is nevertheless consistent with special relativity, was proposed by C. N. Yang [3]
.
One such model was introduced by Piero Caldirola in 1980. In Caldirola's model, one chronon corresponds to about
6.97×10−24 seconds for an electron.[4] This is much longer than the Planck time, another proposed unit for the
quantization of time, which is only about 5.39×10-44 seconds. The Planck time is a universal quantization of time
itself, whereas the chronon is a quantization of the evolution in a system along its world line and consequently the
value of the chronon, like other quantized observables in quantum mechanics, is a function of the system under
consideration, particularly its boundary conditions.[5] The value for the chronon, θ0, is calculated from:

[6]

From this formula, it can be seen that the nature of the moving particle being considered must be specified since the
value of the chronon depends on the particle's charge and mass.
Caldirola claims the chronon has important implications for quantum mechanics, in particular that it allows for a
clear answer to the question of whether a free falling charged particle does or does not emit radiation. This model
supposedly avoids the difficulties met by Abraham-Lorentz's and Dirac's approaches to the problem, and provides a
natural explication of quantum decoherence.

See also
• Planck time
• Elementary particle
• Gravastar
• List of particles
• Particle physics
• Quantum mechanics
• Theoretical physics

References
• Lévi, Robert (1927). "Théorie de l'action universelle et discontinue". Journal de Physique et le Radium 8:
182–198.
• Margenau, Henry (1950). The Nature of Physical Reality. McGraw-Hill.
• Yang, C N (1947). "On quantized space-time". Physical Review 72: 874.
• Caldirola, P. (1980). "The introduction of the chronon in the electron theory and a charged lepton mass formula".
Lett. Nuovo Cim. 27: 225–228. doi:10.1007/BF02750348.
• Farias, Ruy A. H.; Recami, Erasmo (1997-06-27). Introduction of a Quantum of Time ("chronon"), and its
Consequences for Quantum Mechanics [7]. arXiv. Retrieved 2006-07-31.
• Albanese, Claudio; and Lawi, Stephan (2004). "Time Quantization and q-deformations" [8]. Journal of Physics A.
37: 2983–2987. doi:10.1088/0305-4470/37/8/009. Retrieved 2006-07-31.
 128

Time travel

Time travel
Unsolved problems in physics
Is time travel theoretically and practically possible? If so, how can paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox be avoided?

Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between
different points in space, either sending objects (or in some cases just information) backwards in time to some
moment before the present, or sending objects forward from the present to the future without the need to experience
the intervening period (at least not at the normal rate).
Although time travel has been a common plot device in fiction since the 19th century, and one-way travel into the
future is arguably possible given the phenomenon of time dilation based on velocity in the theory of special relativity
(exemplified by the twin paradox), as well as gravitational time dilation in the theory of general relativity, it is
currently unknown whether the laws of physics would allow backwards time travel.
Any technological device, whether fictional or hypothetical, that is used to achieve time travel is commonly known
as a time machine.
Some interpretations of time travel also suggest that an attempt to travel backwards in time might take one to a
parallel universe whose history would begin to diverge from the traveler's original history after the moment the
traveler arrived in the past.[1]

Origins of the concept

• 700s BCE to 300s CE - Mahabharata
• 200s to 400s CE - Talmud
• 720 CE - "Urashima Tarō"
• 1733 - Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century
• 1771 - Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fût jamais
• 1819 - Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle"
• 1838 - Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism
• 1843 - Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
• 1861 - Pierre Boitard’s Paris avant les hommes
• 1881 - Edward Page Mitchell’s The Clock That Went Backward
• 1887 - Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau's El anacronópete
• 1888 - H. G. Wells' The Chronic Argonauts
• 1889 - Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
• 1895 - H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine
There is no widespread agreement as to which written work should be recognized as the earliest example of a time
travel story, since a number of early works feature elements ambiguously suggestive of time travel. Ancient folk
tales and myths sometimes involved something akin to travelling forward in time; for example, in Hindu mythology,
the Mahabharata mentions the story of the King Revaita, who travels to heaven to meet the creator Brahma and is
shocked to learn that many ages have passed when he returns to Earth.[2] [3] Another one of the earliest known stories
Time travel 129

to involve traveling forwards in time to a distant future was the Japanese tale of "Urashima Tarō",[4] first described
in the Nihongi (720).[5] It was about a young fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea palace and
stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself three hundred years in the future,
where he is long forgotten, his house in ruins, and his family long dead. Another very old example of this type of
story can be found in the Talmud with the story of Honi HaM'agel who went to sleep for 70 years and woke up to a
world where his grandchildren were grandparents and where all his friends and family were deceased.[6] More
recently, Washington Irving's famous 1819 story "Rip Van Winkle" deals with a similar concept, telling the tale of a
man named Rip Van Winkle who takes a nap at a mountain and wakes up twenty years in the future, where he has
been forgotten, his wife deceased, and his daughter grown up.[4]
Another more recent story involving travel to the future is Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fût
jamais ("The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Were One"), a utopian novel in which the main character is
transported to the year 2440. An extremely popular work (it went through twenty-five editions after its first
appearance in 1771), the work describes the adventures of an unnamed man, who, after engaging in a heated
discussion with a philosopher friend about the injustices of Paris, falls asleep and finds himself in a Paris of the
future. Robert Darnton writes that "despite its self-proclaimed character of fantasy...L'An 2440 demanded to be read
as a serious guidebook to the future."[7]
Backwards time travel seems to be a more modern idea, but the origin of this notion is also somewhat ambiguous.
One early story with hints of backwards time travel is Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) by Samuel Madden,
which is mainly a series of letters from English ambassadors in various countries to the British "Lord High
Treasurer", along with a few replies from the British Foreign Office, all purportedly written in 1997 and 1998 and
describing the conditions of that era.[8] However, the framing story is that these letters were actual documents given
to the narrator by his guardian angel one night in 1728; for this reason, Paul Alkon suggests in his book Origins of
Futuristic Fiction that "the first time-traveler in English literature is a guardian angel who returns with state
documents from 1998 to the year 1728",[9] although the book does not explicitly show how the angel obtained these
documents. Alkon later qualifies this by writing, "It would be stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being
the first to show a traveler arriving from the future", but also says that Madden "deserves recognition as the first to
toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the form of an artifact sent backwards from the future to be discovered in the
present."[8]
In the science fiction anthology Far Boundaries (1951), the editor August Derleth identifies the short story "Missing
One's Coach: An Anachronism", written for the Dublin Literary Magazine [10] by an anonymous author in 1838, as a
very early time travel story.[11] In this story, the narrator is waiting under a tree to be picked up by a coach which
will take him out of Newcastle, when he suddenly finds himself transported back over a thousand years, where he
encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery, and gives him somewhat ironic explanations of the developments of
the coming centuries. It is never entirely clear whether these events actually occurred or were merely a dream—the
narrator says that when he initially found a comfortable-looking spot in the roots of the tree, he sat down, "and as my
sceptical reader will tell me, nodded and slept", but then says that he is "resolved not to admit" this explanation. A
number of dreamlike elements of the story may suggest otherwise to the reader, such as the fact that none of the
members of the monastery seem to be able to see him at first, and the abrupt ending where Bede has been delayed
talking to the narrator and so the other monks burst in thinking that some harm has come to him, and suddenly the
narrator finds himself back under the tree in the present (August 1837), with his coach having just passed his spot on
the road, leaving him stranded in Newcastle for another night.[12]
Charles Dickens' 1843 book A Christmas Carol is considered by some[13] to be one of the first depictions of time
travel, as the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is transported to Christmases past, present and yet to come. These
might be considered mere visions rather than actual time travel, though, since Scrooge only viewed each time period
passively, unable to interact with them.
Time travel 130

A clearer example of time travel is found in the popular 1861 book Paris avant les hommes (Paris before Men) by
the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard, published posthumously. In this story the main character is
transported into the prehistoric past by the magic of a "lame demon" (a French pun on Boitard's name), where he
encounters such extinct animals as a Plesiosaur, as well as Boitard's imagined version of an apelike human ancestor,
and is able to actively interact with some of them.[14]
Another clear early example of time travel in fiction is the short story The Clock That Went Backward
[15]
PDF (35.7 KB) by Edward Page Mitchell, which appeared in the New York Sun in 1881.
Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in which the protagonist finds himself in the
time of King Arthur after a fight in which he is hit with a sledge hammer, was another early time travel story which
helped bring the concept to a wide audience, and was also one of the first stories to show history being changed by
the time traveler's actions.
The first time travel story to feature time travel by means of a time machine was Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau's 1887
book El Anacronópete.[16] This idea gained popularity with the H. G. Wells story The Time Machine, published in
1895 (preceded by a less influential story of time travel Wells wrote in 1888, titled The Chronic Argonauts), which
also featured a time machine and which is often seen as an inspiration for all later science fiction stories featuring
time travel, using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively. The term "time machine",
coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle.
Since that time, both science and fiction (see Time travel in fiction) have expanded on the concept of time travel.

Time travel in theory

Some theories, most notably special and general relativity, suggest that suitable geometries of spacetime, or specific
types of motion in space, might allow time travel into the past and future if these geometries or motions are
possible.[17] In technical papers, physicists generally avoid the commonplace language of "moving" or "traveling"
through time ('movement' normally refers only to a change in spatial position as the time coordinate is varied), and
instead discuss the possibility of closed timelike curves, which are worldlines that form closed loops in spacetime,
allowing objects to return to their own past. There are known to be solutions to the equations of general relativity
that describe spacetimes which contain closed timelike curves (such as Gödel spacetime), but the physical
plausibility of these solutions is uncertain.
Relativity states that if one were to move away from the Earth at relativistic velocities and return, more time would
have passed on Earth than for the traveler, so in this sense it is accepted that relativity allows "travel into the future"
(although according to relativity there is no single objective answer to how much time has 'really' passed between the
departure and the return). On the other hand, many in the scientific community believe that backwards time travel is
highly unlikely. Any theory which would allow time travel would require that problems of causality be resolved. The
classic example of a problem involving causality is the "grandfather paradox": what if one were to go back in time
and kill one's own grandfather before one's father was conceived? But some scientists believe that paradoxes can be
avoided, either by appealing to the Novikov self-consistency principle or to the notion of branching parallel
universes (see the possibility of paradoxes below).

Tourism in time
Stephen Hawking once suggested that the absence of tourists from the future constitutes an argument against the
existence of time travel—a variant of the Fermi paradox. Of course this would not prove that time travel is
physically impossible, since it might be that time travel is physically possible but that it is never in fact developed (or
is cautiously never used); and even if it is developed, Hawking notes elsewhere that time travel might only be
possible in a region of spacetime that is warped in the right way, and that if we cannot create such a region until the
future, then time travelers would not be able to travel back before that date, so "This picture would explain why we
Time travel 131

haven't been over run by tourists from the future."[18] Carl Sagan also once suggested the possibility that time
travelers could be here, but are disguising their existence or are not recognized as time travelers.[19]

General relativity
However, the theory of general relativity does suggest scientific grounds for thinking backwards time travel could be
possible in certain unusual scenarios, although arguments from semiclassical gravity suggest that when quantum
effects are incorporated into general relativity, these loopholes may be closed.[20] These semiclassical arguments led
Hawking to formulate the chronology protection conjecture, suggesting that the fundamental laws of nature prevent
time travel,[21] but physicists cannot come to a definite judgment on the issue without a theory of quantum gravity to
join quantum mechanics and general relativity into a completely unified theory.[22]

Time travel to the past in physics

Time travel to the past is theoretically allowed using the following methods:[23]
• Travelling faster than the speed of light
• The use of cosmic strings and black holes
• Wormholes and Alcubierre drive

Time travel via faster-than-light travel

If one were able to move information or matter from one point to another faster than light, then according to special
relativity, there would be some inertial frame of reference in which the signal or object was moving backward in
time. This is a consequence of the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity, which says that in some cases
different reference frames will disagree on whether two events at different locations happened "at the same time" or
not, and they can also disagree on the order of the two events (technically, these disagreements occur when
spacetime interval between the events is 'space-like', meaning that neither event lies in the future light cone of the
other).[24] If one of the two events represents the sending of a signal from one location and the second event
represents the reception of the same signal at another location, then as long as the signal is moving at the speed of
light or slower, the mathematics of simultaneity ensures that all reference frames agree that the transmission-event
happened before the reception-event.[24]
However, in the case of a hypothetical signal moving faster than light, there would always be some frames in which
the signal was received before it was sent, so that the signal could be said to have moved backwards in time. And
since one of the two fundamental postulates of special relativity says that the laws of physics should work the same
way in every inertial frame, then if it is possible for signals to move backwards in time in any one frame, it must be
possible in all frames. This means that if observer A sends a signal to observer B which moves FTL (faster than
light) in A's frame but backwards in time in B's frame, and then B sends a reply which moves FTL in B's frame but
backwards in time in A's frame, it could work out that A receives the reply before sending the original signal, a clear
violation of causality in every frame. An illustration of such a scenario using spacetime diagrams can be found here
[25]
.
According to special relativity it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a slower-than-light object to
the speed of light, and although relativity does not forbid the theoretical possibility of tachyons which move faster
than light at all times, when analyzed using quantum field theory it seems that it would not actually be possible to
use them to transmit information faster than light,[26] and there is no evidence for their existence.
Time travel 132

Special spacetime geometries

The general theory of relativity extends the special theory to cover gravity, illustrating it in terms of curvature in
spacetime caused by mass-energy and the flow of momentum. General relativity describes the universe under a
system of field equations, and there exist solutions to these equations that permit what are called "closed time-like
curves," and hence time travel into the past.[17] The first of these was proposed by Kurt Gödel, a solution known as
the Gödel metric, but his (and many others') example requires the universe to have physical characteristics that it
does not appear to have.[17] Whether general relativity forbids closed time-like curves for all realistic conditions is
unknown.

Using wormholes
Wormholes are a hypothetical warped spacetime
which are also permitted by the Einstein field
equations of general relativity,[27] although it
would be impossible to travel through a
wormhole unless it was what is known as a
traversable wormhole.

A proposed time-travel machine using a

traversable wormhole would (hypothetically)
work in the following way: One end of the
wormhole is accelerated to some significant
fraction of the speed of light, perhaps with some
advanced propulsion system, and then brought A wormhole
back to the point of origin. Alternatively, another
way is to take one entrance of the wormhole and move it to within the gravitational field of an object that has higher
gravity than the other entrance, and then return it to a position near the other entrance. For both of these methods,
time dilation causes the end of the wormhole that has been moved to have aged less than the stationary end, as seen
by an external observer; however, time connects differently through the wormhole than outside it, so that
synchronized clocks at either end of the wormhole will always remain synchronized as seen by an observer passing
through the wormhole, no matter how the two ends move around.[28] This means that an observer entering the
accelerated end would exit the stationary end when the stationary end was the same age that the accelerated end had
been at the moment before entry; for example, if prior to entering the wormhole the observer noted that a clock at the
accelerated end read a date of 2007 while a clock at the stationary end read 2012, then the observer would exit the
stationary end when its clock also read 2007, a trip backwards in time as seen by other observers outside. One
significant limitation of such a time machine is that it is only possible to go as far back in time as the initial creation
of the machine;[29] in essence, it is more of a path through time than it is a device that itself moves through time, and
it would not allow the technology itself to be moved backwards in time. This could provide an alternative
explanation for Hawking's observation: a time machine will be built someday, but has not yet been built, so the
tourists from the future cannot reach this far back in time.

According to current theories on the nature of wormholes, construction of a traversable wormhole would require the
existence of a substance with negative energy (often referred to as "exotic matter") . More technically, the wormhole
spacetime requires a distribution of energy that violates various energy conditions, such as the null energy condition
along with the weak, strong, and dominant energy conditions.[30] However, it is known that quantum effects can lead
to small measurable violations of the null energy condition,[30] and many physicists believe that the required
negative energy may actually be possible due to the Casimir effect in quantum physics.[31] Although early
calculations suggested a very large amount of negative energy would be required, later calculations showed that the
Time travel 133

amount of negative energy can be made arbitrarily small.[32]

In 1993, Matt Visser argued that the two mouths of a wormhole with such an induced clock difference could not be
brought together without inducing quantum field and gravitational effects that would either make the wormhole
collapse or the two mouths repel each other.[33] Because of this, the two mouths could not be brought close enough
for causality violation to take place. However, in a 1997 paper, Visser hypothesized that a complex "Roman ring"
(named after Tom Roman) configuration of an N number of wormholes arranged in a symmetric polygon could still
act as a time machine, although he concludes that this is more likely a flaw in classical quantum gravity theory rather
than proof that causality violation is possible.[34]

Other approaches based on general relativity

Another approach involves a dense spinning cylinder usually referred to as a Tipler cylinder, a GR solution
discovered by Willem Jacob van Stockum[35] in 1936 and Kornel Lanczos[36] in 1924, but not recognized as
allowing closed timelike curves[37] until an analysis by Frank Tipler[38] in 1974. If a cylinder is infinitely long and
spins fast enough about its long axis, then a spaceship flying around the cylinder on a spiral path could travel back in
time (or forward, depending on the direction of its spiral). However, the density and speed required is so great that
ordinary matter is not strong enough to construct it. A similar device might be built from a cosmic string, but none
are known to exist, and it does not seem to be possible to create a new cosmic string.
Physicist Robert Forward noted that a naïve application of general relativity to quantum mechanics suggests another
way to build a time machine. A heavy atomic nucleus in a strong magnetic field would elongate into a cylinder,
whose density and "spin" are enough to build a time machine. Gamma rays projected at it might allow information
(not matter) to be sent back in time; however, he pointed out that until we have a single theory combining relativity
and quantum mechanics, we will have no idea whether such speculations are nonsense.
A more fundamental objection to time travel schemes based on rotating cylinders or cosmic strings has been put
forward by Stephen Hawking, who proved a theorem showing that according to general relativity it is impossible to
build a time machine of a special type (a "time machine with the compactly generated Cauchy horizon") in a region
where the weak energy condition is satisfied, meaning that the region contains no matter with negative energy
density (exotic matter). Solutions such as Tipler's assume cylinders of infinite length, which are easier to analyze
mathematically, and although Tipler suggested that a finite cylinder might produce closed timelike curves if the
rotation rate were fast enough,[39] he did not prove this. But Hawking points out that because of his theorem, "it can't
be done with positive energy density everywhere! I can prove that to build a finite time machine, you need negative
energy."[40] This result comes from Hawking's 1992 paper on the chronology protection conjecture, where he
examines "the case that the causality violations appear in a finite region of spacetime without curvature singularities"
and proves that "[t]here will be a Cauchy horizon that is compactly generated and that in general contains one or
more closed null geodesics which will be incomplete. One can define geometrical quantities that measure the
Lorentz boost and area increase on going round these closed null geodesics. If the causality violation developed from
a noncompact initial surface, the averaged weak energy condition must be violated on the Cauchy horizon."[41]
However, this theorem does not rule out the possibility of time travel 1) by means of time machines with the
non-compactly generated Cauchy horizons (such as the Deutsch-Politzer time machine) and 2) in regions which
contain exotic matter (which would be necessary for traversable wormholes or the Alcubierre drive). Because the
theorem is based on general relativity, it is also conceivable a future theory of quantum gravity which replaced
general relativity would allow time travel even without exotic matter (though it is also possible such a theory would
place even more restrictions on time travel, or rule it out completely as postulated by Hawking's chronology
protection conjecture).
Time travel 134

Experiments carried out

Certain experiments carried out give the impression of reversed causality but are interpreted in a different way by the
scientific community. For example, in the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment performed by Marlan Scully,
pairs of entangled photons are divided into "signal photons" and "idler photons", with the signal photons emerging
from one of two locations and their position later measured as in the double slit experiment, and depending on how
the idler photon is measured, the experimenter can either learn which of the two locations the signal photon emerged
from or "erase" that information. Even though the signal photons can be measured before the choice has been made
about the idler photons, the choice seems to retroactively determine whether or not an interference pattern is
observed when one correlates measurements of idler photons to the corresponding signal photons. However, since
interference can only be observed after the idler photons are measured and they are correlated with the signal
photons, there is no way for experimenters to tell what choice will be made in advance just by looking at the signal
photons, and under most interpretations of quantum mechanics the results can be explained in a way that does not
violate causality.
The experiment of Lijun Wang might also give the appearance of causality violation since it made it possible to send
packages of waves through a bulb of caesium gas in such a way that the package appeared to exit the bulb 62
nanoseconds before its entry. But a wave package is not a single well-defined object but rather a sum of multiple
waves of different frequencies (see Fourier analysis), and the package can appear to move faster than light or even
backwards in time even if none of the pure waves in the sum do so. This effect cannot be used to send any matter,
energy, or information faster than light,[42] so this experiment is understood not to violate causality either.
The physicists Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, claim to have violated Einstein's
theory of relativity by transmitting photons faster than the speed of light. They say they have conducted an
experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - traveled "instantaneously" between a pair of
prisms that had been moved up to 3 ft (0.91 m) apart, using a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. Nimtz told
New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of." However,
other physicists say that this phenomenon does not allow information to be transmitted faster than light. Aephraim
Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto, Canada, uses the analogy of a train traveling from
Chicago to New York, but dropping off train cars at each station along the way, so that the center of the train moves
forward at each stop; in this way, the center of the train exceeds the speed of any of the individual cars.[43]
Some physicists have attempted to perform experiments which would show genuine causality violations, but so far
without success. The Space-time Twisting by Light (STL) experiment run by physicist Ronald Mallett is attempting
to observe a violation of causality when a neutron is passed through a circle made up of a laser whose path has been
twisted by passing it through a photonic crystal. Mallett has some physical arguments which suggest that closed
timelike curves would become possible through the center of a laser which has been twisted into a loop. However,
other physicists dispute his arguments (see objections).

Non-physics based experiments

Several experiments have been carried out to try to entice future humans, who might invent time travel technology,
to come back and demonstrate it to people of the present time. Events such as Perth's Destination Day (2005) or
MIT's Time Traveler Convention heavily publicized permanent "advertisements" of a meeting time and place for
future time travelers to meet. Back in 1982, a group in Baltimore, MD., identifying itself as the Krononauts, hosted
an event of this type welcoming Visitors from the Futures.[44] [45] These experiments only stood the possibility of
generating a positive result demonstrating the existence of time travel, but have failed so far—no time travelers are
known to have attended either event. It is hypothetically possible that future humans have traveled back in time, but
have traveled back to the meeting time and place in a parallel universe.[46] Another factor is that for all the time
travel devices considered under current physics (such as those that operate using wormholes), it is impossible to
travel back to before the time machine was actually made.[47] [48]
Time travel 135

Time travel to the future in physics

There are various ways in which a person could "travel into the future"
in a limited sense: the person could set things up so that in a small
amount of his own subjective time, a large amount of subjective time
has passed for other people on Earth. For example, an observer might
take a trip away from the Earth and back at relativistic velocities, with
the trip only lasting a few years according to the observer's own clocks,
and return to find that thousands of years had passed on Earth. It
should be noted, though, that according to relativity there is no
objective answer to the question of how much time "really" passed
during the trip; it would be equally valid to say that the trip had lasted
only a few years or that the trip had lasted thousands of years, Twin paradox diagram

depending on your choice of reference frame.

This form of "travel into the future" is theoretically allowed using the
following methods:[23]
• Using velocity-based time dilation under the theory of special
relativity, for instance:
• Traveling at almost the speed of light to a distant star, then
slowing down, turning around, and traveling at almost the speed
of light back to Earth[51] (see the Twin paradox)
• Using gravitational time dilation under the theory of general
relativity, for instance: Relativistic rocket: This cockpit view of a
hypothetical spacecraft traveling at eight-tenths
• Residing inside of a hollow, high-mass object; the speed of light shows the visual distortions that
• Residing just outside of the event horizon of a black hole, or would be experienced at such high speeds. The
sufficiently near an object whose mass or density causes the star field is actually being wrapped toward the
front of the craft in addition to being significantly
gravitational time dilation near it to be larger than the time
blue-shifted. Somewhat more rigorous diagrams
dilation factor on Earth. of what would be seen by such a craft can be
[49] [50]
Additionally, it might be possible to see the distant future of the Earth found here Credit: NASA ; digital art by
Les Bossinas (Cortez III Service Corp.), 1998
using methods which do not involve relativity at all, although it is even
more debatable whether these should be deemed a form of "time
travel":
• Hibernation
• Suspended animation
Time travel 136

Time dilation
Time dilation is permitted by Albert Einstein's special and general
theories of relativity. These theories state that, relative to a given
observer, time passes more slowly for bodies moving quickly relative
to that observer, or bodies that are deeper within a gravity well.[52] For
example, a clock which is moving relative to the observer will be
measured to run slow in that observer's rest frame; as a clock
approaches the speed of light it will almost slow to a stop, although it
can never quite reach light speed so it will never completely stop. For
two clocks moving inertially (not accelerating) relative to one another,
this effect is reciprocal, with each clock measuring the other to be
ticking slower. However, the symmetry is broken if one clock
accelerates, as in the twin paradox where one twin stays on Earth while
the other travels into space, turns around (which involves acceleration),
and returns—in this case both agree the traveling twin has aged less.
General relativity states that time dilation effects also occur if one Transversal Time dilation
clock is deeper in a gravity well than the other, with the clock deeper in
the well ticking more slowly; this effect must be taken into account when calibrating the clocks on the satellites of
the Global Positioning System, and it could lead to significant differences in rates of aging for observers at different
distances from a black hole.

It has been calculated that, under general relativity, a person could travel forward in time at a rate four times that of
distant observers by residing inside a spherical shell with a diameter of 5 meters and the mass of Jupiter.[23] For such
a person, every one second of their "personal" time would correspond to four seconds for distant observers. Of
course, squeezing the mass of a large planet into such a structure is not expected to be within our technological
capabilities in the near future.
There is a great deal of experimental evidence supporting the validity of equations for velocity-based time dilation in
special relativity[53] and gravitational time dilation in general relativity.[54] [55] [56] However, with current
technologies it is only possible to cause a human traveller to age less than companions on Earth by a very small
fraction of a second, the current record being about 20 milliseconds for the cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev.

Time perception
Time perception can be apparently sped up for living organisms through hibernation, where the body temperature
and metabolic rate of the creature is reduced. A more extreme version of this is suspended animation, where the rates
of chemical processes in the subject would be severely reduced.
Time dilation and suspended animation only allow "travel" to the future, never the past, so they do not violate
causality, and it's debatable whether they should be called time travel. However time dilation can be viewed as a
better fit for our understanding of the term "time travel" than suspended animation, since with time dilation less time
actually does pass for the traveler than for those who remain behind, so the traveler can be said to have reached the
future faster than others, whereas with suspended animation this is not the case.
Time travel 137

Other ideas about time travel from mainstream physics

The possibility of paradoxes

The Novikov self-consistency principle and calculations by Kip S. Thorne indicate that simple masses passing
through time travel wormholes could never engender paradoxes—there are no initial conditions that lead to paradox
once time travel is introduced. If his results can be generalized, they would suggest, curiously, that none of the
supposed paradoxes formulated in time travel stories can actually be formulated at a precise physical level: that is,
that any situation you can set up in a time travel story turns out to permit many consistent solutions. The
circumstances might, however, turn out to be almost unbelievably strange.
Parallel universes might provide a way out of paradoxes. Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
suggests that all possible quantum events can occur in mutually exclusive histories.[57] These alternate, or parallel,
histories would form a branching tree symbolizing all possible outcomes of any interaction. If all possibilities exist,
any paradoxes could be explained by having the paradoxical events happening in a different universe. This concept
is most often used in science-fiction, but some physicists such as David Deutsch have suggested that if time travel is
possible and the many-worlds interpretation is correct, then a time traveler should indeed end up in a different
history than the one he started from.[1] On the other hand, Stephen Hawking has argued that even if the many-worlds
interpretation is correct, we should expect each time traveler to experience a single self-consistent timeline, so that
time travelers remain within their own world rather than traveling to a different one.[18]
Daniel Greenberger and Karl Svozil proposed that quantum theory gives a model for time travel without
paradoxes.[58] [59] In quantum theory observation causes possible states to 'collapse' into one measured state; hence,
the past observed from the present is deterministic (it has only one possible state), but the present observed from the
past has many possible states until our actions cause it to collapse into one state. Our actions will then be seen to
have been inevitable.

Using quantum entanglement

Quantum-mechanical phenomena such as quantum teleportation, the EPR paradox, or quantum entanglement might
appear to create a mechanism that allows for faster-than-light (FTL) communication or time travel, and in fact some
interpretations of quantum mechanics such as the Bohm interpretation presume that some information is being
exchanged between particles instantaneously in order to maintain correlations between particles.[60] This effect was
referred to as "spooky action at a distance" by Einstein.
Nevertheless, the fact that causality is preserved in quantum mechanics is a rigorous result in modern quantum field
theories, and therefore modern theories do not allow for time travel or FTL communication. In any specific instance
where FTL has been claimed, more detailed analysis has proven that to get a signal, some form of classical
communication must also be used.[61] The no-communication theorem also gives a general proof that quantum
entanglement cannot be used to transmit information faster than classical signals. The fact that these quantum
phenomena apparently do not allow FTL time travel is often overlooked in popular press coverage of quantum
teleportation experiments. How the rules of quantum mechanics work to preserve causality is an active area of
research.

Philosophical understandings of time travel

Theories of time travel are riddled with questions about causality and paradoxes. Compared to other fundamental
concepts in modern physics, time is still not understood very well. Philosophers have been theorizing about the
nature of time since the era of the ancient Greek philosophers and earlier. Some philosophers and physicists who
study the nature of time also study the possibility of time travel and its logical implications. The probability of
paradoxes and their possible solutions are often considered.
Time travel 138

For more information on the philosophical considerations of time travel, consult the work of David Lewis or Ted
Sider [62]. For more information on physics-related theories of time travel, consider the work of Kurt Gödel
(especially his theorized universe) and Lawrence Sklar.

Presentism vs. eternalism

The relativity of simultaneity in modern physics favors the philosophical view known as eternalism or four
dimensionalism (Sider, 2001), in which physical objects are either temporally extended space-time worms, or
space-time worm stages, and this view would be favored further by the possibility of time travel (Sider, 2001).
Eternalism, also sometimes known as "block universe theory", builds on a standard method of modeling time as a
dimension in physics, to give time a similar ontology to that of space (Sider, 2001). This would mean that time is just
another dimension, that future events are "already there", and that there is no objective flow of time. This view is
disputed by Tim Maudlin in his The Metaphysics Within Physics.
Presentism is a school of philosophy that holds that neither the future nor the past exist, and there are no non-present
objects. In this view, time travel is impossible because there is no future or past to travel to. However, some 21st
century presentists have argued that although past and future objects do not exist, there can still be definite truths
about past and future events, and thus it is possible that a future truth about a time traveler deciding to appear in the
present could explain the time traveler's actual existence in the present.[63] [64]

The grandfather paradox

One subject often brought up in philosophical discussion of time is the idea that, if one were to go back in time,
paradoxes could ensue if the time traveler were to change things. The best examples of this are the grandfather
paradox and the idea of autoinfanticide. The grandfather paradox is a hypothetical situation in which a time traveler
goes back in time and attempts to kill his grandfather at a time before his grandfather met his grandmother. If he did
so, then his father never would have been born, and neither would the time traveler himself, in which case the time
traveler never would have gone back in time to kill his grandfather.
Autoinfanticide works the same way, where a traveler goes back and attempts to kill himself as an infant. If he were
to do so, he never would have grown up to go back in time to kill himself as an infant.
This discussion is important to the philosophy of time travel because philosophers question whether these paradoxes
make time travel impossible. Some philosophers answer the paradoxes by arguing that it might be the case that
backwards time travel could be possible but that it would be impossible to actually change the past in any way,[65] an
idea similar to the proposed Novikov self-consistency principle in physics.

Theory of compossibility
David Lewis’ analysis of compossibility and the implications of changing the past is meant to account for the
possibilities of time travel in a one-dimensional conception of time without creating logical paradoxes. Consider
Lewis’ example of Tim. Tim hates his grandfather and would like nothing more than to kill him. The only problem
for Tim is that his grandfather died years ago. Tim wants so badly to kill his grandfather himself that he constructs a
time machine to travel back to 1955 when his grandfather was young and kill him then. Assuming that Tim can
travel to a time when his grandfather is still alive, the question must then be raised; Can Tim kill his grandfather?
For Lewis, the answer lies within the context of the usage of the word "can". Lewis explains that the word "can"
must be viewed against the context of pertinent facts relating to the situation. Suppose that Tim has a rifle, years of
rifle training, a straight shot on a clear day and no outside force to restrain Tim’s trigger finger. Can Tim shoot his
grandfather? Considering these facts, it would appear that Tim can in fact kill his grandfather. In other words, all of
the contextual facts are compossible with Tim killing his grandfather. However, when reflecting on the
compossibility of a given situation, we must gather the most inclusive set of facts that we are able to.
Time travel 139

Consider now the fact that Tim’s grandfather died in 1993 and not in 1955. This new fact about Tim’s situation
reveals that him killing his grandfather is not compossible with the current set of facts. Tim cannot kill his
grandfather because his grandfather died in 1993 and not when he was young. Thus, Lewis concludes, the statements
"Tim doesn’t but can, because he has what it takes," and, "Tim doesn’t, and can’t, because it is logically impossible to
change the past," are not contradictions, they are both true given the relevant set of facts. The usage of the word
"can" is equivocal: he "can" and "can not" under different relevant facts. So what must happen to Tim as he takes
aim? Lewis believes that his gun will jam, a bird will fly in the way, or Tim simply slips on a banana peel. Either
way, there will be some logical force of the universe that will prevent Tim every time from killing his grandfather.

Ideas from fiction

Rules of time travel

Time travel themes in science fiction and the media can generally be grouped into two general categories (based on
effect—methods are extremely varied and numerous), each of which can be further subdivided.[66] [67] [68] [69]
However, there are no formal names for these two categories, so concepts rather than formal names will be used with
notes regarding what categories they are placed under. Note: These classifications do not address the method of time
travel itself, i.e. how to travel through time, but instead call to attention differing rules of what happens to history.
1. There is a single fixed history, which is self-consistent and unchangeable. In this version, everything
happens on a single timeline which doesn't contradict itself and can't interact with anything potentially existing
outside of it.
1.1 This can be simply achieved by applying the Novikov
self-consistency principle, named after Dr. Igor
Dmitrievich Novikov, Professor of Astrophysics at
Copenhagen University. The principle states that the
timeline is totally fixed, and any actions taken by a time
traveler were part of history all along, so it is impossible
for the time traveler to "change" history in any way. The
A man travelling a few seconds into the past in a
time traveler's actions may be the cause of events in their
single self-consistent timeline.
own past though, which leads to the potential for circular
causation and the predestination paradox; for examples of
circular causation, see Robert A. Heinlein's story "By His Bootstraps". The Novikov self-consistency
principle proposes that the local laws of physics in a region of spacetime containing time travelers
cannot be any different from the local laws of physics in any other region of spacetime.[70]

1.2 Alternatively, new physical laws take effect regarding time travel that thwarts attempts to change the
past (contradicting the assumption mentioned in 1.1 above that the laws that apply to time travelers are
the same ones that apply to everyone else). These new physical laws can be as unsubtle as to reject time
travelers who travel to the past to change it by pulling them back to the point from when they came as
Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time or where the traveler is rendered an noncorporeal
phantom unable to physically interact with the past such as in some Pre-Crisis Superman stories and
Michael Garrett's "Brief Encounter" in Twilight Zone Magazine May 1981.
2. History is flexible and is subject to change (Plastic Time)
2.1 Changes to history are easy and can impact the traveler, the world, or both
Examples include Doctor Who and the Back to the Future trilogy. In some cases, any resulting
paradoxes can be devastating, threatening the very existence of the universe. In other cases the
traveler simply cannot return home. The extreme version of this (Chaotic Time) is that history is
Time travel 140

very sensitive to changes with even small changes having large impacts such as in Ray Bradbury's
"A Sound of Thunder".
2.2 History is change resistant in direct relationship to the importance of the event ie. small trivial
events can be readily changed but large ones take great effort.
In the Twilight Zone episode "Back There" a traveler tries to prevent the assassination of President
Lincoln and fails, but his actions have made subtle changes to the status quo in his own time (e.g.
a man who had been the butler of his gentleman's club is now a rich tycoon, and a man whose
family had long been members of the club is now the butler).
In the 2002 remake of The Time Machine, it is explained via a vision why Hartdegen could not
save his sweetheart Emma — doing so would have resulted in his never developing the time
machine he used to try and save her.
In The Saga of Darren Shan, major events in the past cannot be changed, but minor events can be
affected. Under this model, if a time traveler were to go back in time and kill Hitler, another Nazi
would simply take his place and commit his same actions, leaving the broader course of history
unchanged.
3. Alternate timelines. In this version of time travel, there are
multiple coexisting alternate histories, so that when the traveler
goes back in time, she ends up in a new timeline where historical
events can differ from the timeline she came from, but her
original timeline does not cease to exist (this means the
grandfather paradox can be avoided since even if the time
traveler's grandfather is killed at a young age in the new
timeline, he still survived to have children in the original
timeline, so there is still a causal explanation for the traveler's
existence). Time travel may actually create a new timeline that
diverges from the original timeline at the moment the time
traveler appears in the past, or the traveler may arrive in an
already existing parallel universe (though unless the parallel
Time travel under the parallel universe
universe's history was identical to the time traveler's history up
hypothesis. Notice the break of symmetry, and
until the point where the time traveler appeared, it is the possibility for one traveler to prevent his own
questionable whether the latter version qualifies as 'time travel'). double from using the time machine.

James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation fully explains

parallel universe time travel in chapter 20 where it has Einstein explaining that all the outcomes already
exist and all time travel does is change which already existing branch you will experience.
Though Star Trek has a long tradition of using the 2.1 mechanic, as seen in "City on the Edge of
Forever", "Tomorrow is Yesterday", "Time and Again", "Future's End", "Before and After", "Endgame"
and as late as Enterprise's Temporal Cold War, "Parallels" had an example of what Data called
"quantum realities." His exact words on the matter were "But there is a theory in quantum physics that
all possibilities that can happen do happen in alternate quantum realities," suggesting the writers were
thinking of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Michael Crichton's novel Timeline takes the approach that all time travel really is travel to an already
existing parallel universe where time passes at a slower rate than our own but actions in any of these
parallel universes may have already occurred in our past. It is unclear from the novel if any sizable
change in events of these parallel universe can be made.
Time travel 141

In the Homeline setting of GURPS Infinite Worlds there are echos — parallel universes at an early part
of Homeline's history but changes to their history do not affect Homeline's history. However tampering
with their history can cause them to shift quanta making access harder if not impossible.

Immutable timelines
Time travel in a type 1 universe does not allow paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox to occur, where one
deduces both a conclusion and its opposite (in the case of the grandfather paradox, one can start with the premise of
the time traveler killing his grandfather, and reach the conclusion that the time traveler will not be able to kill his
grandfather since he was never born) though it can allow other paradoxes to occur.
In 1.1, the Novikov self-consistency principle asserts that the existence of a method of time travel constrains events
to remain self-consistent. This will cause any attempt to violate such consistency to fail, even if seemingly extremely
improbable events are required.
Example: You have a device that can send a single bit of information back to itself at a precise moment in
time. You receive a bit at 10:00:00 p.m., then no bits for thirty seconds after that. If you send a bit back to
10:00:00 p.m., everything works fine. However, if you try to send a bit to 10:00:15 p.m. (a time at which no
bit was received), your transmitter will mysteriously fail. Or your dog will distract you for fifteen seconds. Or
your transmitter will appear to work, but as it turns out your receiver failed at exactly 10:00:15 p.m., etc.
Examples of this kind of universe are found in Timemaster, a novel by Dr. Robert Forward, the Twilight Zone
episode "No Time Like the Past", and the 1980 Jeannot Szwarc film Somewhere In Time (based on Richard
Matheson's novel Bid Time Return).
In 1.2, time travel is constrained to prevent paradox. How this occurs is dependent on whether interaction with the
past is possible.
If interaction with the past is possible and one attempts to make a paradox, one undergoes involuntary or
uncontrolled time travel. In the time-travel stories of Connie Willis, time travelers encounter "slippage" which
prevents them from either reaching the intended time or translates them a sufficient distance from their destination at
the intended time, as to prevent any paradox from occurring.
Example: A man who travels into the past with intentions to kill Hitler finds himself on a Montana farm in late
April 1945.
If interaction with the past is not possible then the traveler simply becomes an invisible insubstantial phantom unable
to interact with the past as in the case of James Harrigan in Michael Garrett's "Brief Encounter".
While a Type 1 universe will prevent a grandfather paradox it doesn't prevent paradoxes in other aspects of physics
such as the predestination paradox and the ontological paradox (GURPS Infinite Worlds calls this "Free Lunch
Paradox").
The predestination paradox is where the traveler's actions create some type of causal loop, in which some event A in
the future helps cause event B in the past via time travel, and the event B in turn is one of the causes of A. For
instance, a time traveler might go back to investigate a specific historical event like the Great Fire of London, and
their actions in the past could then inadvertently end up being the original cause of that very event. Examples of this
kind of causal loop are found in Timemaster, a novel by Dr. Robert Forward, the Twilight Zone episode "No Time
Like the Past", the 1980 Jeannot Szwarc film Somewhere In Time (based on Richard Matheson's novel Bid Time
Return), the Michael Moorcock novel Behold the Man, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It is also
featured in 1972's Doctor Who, in the three part The Day of the Daleks, where three freedom fighters from the future
attempt to kill a British diplomat they believe responsible for World War Three, and the subsequent easy conquest of
Earth by the Daleks. In the future they were taught an explosion at the diplomat's (Sir Reginald Styles) mansion with
foreign delegates inside caused the nations of the world to attack each other. The Doctor (Jon Pertwee), figures out
that they caused the explosion all along by way of a temporal paradox. This is also seen in the 2006 crime thriller
Déjà Vu.
Time travel 142

The Novikov self-consistency principle can also result in an

ontological paradox (also known as the knowledge or information
paradox)[71] where the very existence of some object or information is
a time loop. GURPS Infinite Worlds gives the example (from The Eyre
Affair) of a time traveler going to Shakespeare's time with a book of all
his works. Shakespeare pressed for time simply copies the information
in the book from the future. The "free lunch" is that no one really
A version of the ontological paradox. The
writes the plays!
appearance of the traveler is the result of his
The philosopher Kelley L. Ross argues in "Time Travel Paradoxes [72]" disappearance a few seconds later. In this
scenario, the traveler is traveling along a closed
that in an ontological paradox scenario involving a physical object,
timelike curve.
there can be a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Ross
uses Somewhere in Time as an example where Jane Seymour's
character gives Christopher Reeve's character a watch she has owned for many years, and when he travels back in
time he gives the same watch to Jane Seymour's character 60 years in the past. As Ross states

"The watch is an impossible object. It violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Law of
Entropy. If time travel makes that watch possible, then time travel itself is impossible. The watch,
indeed, must be absolutely identical to itself in the 19th and 20th centuries, since Reeve carries it with
him from the future instantaneously into the past and bestows it on Seymour. The watch, however,
cannot be identical to itself, since all the years in which it is in the possession of Seymour and then
Reeve it will wear in the normal manner. It's [sic] entropy will increase. The watch carried back by
Reeve will be more worn that [sic] the watch that would have been acquired by Seymour."
On the other had, the second law of thermodynamics is understood by modern physicists to be a statistical law rather
than an absolute one, so spontaneous reversals of entropy or failure to increase in entropy are not impossible, just
improbable (see for example the fluctuation theorem). In addition, the second law of thermodynamics only states that
entropy should increase in systems which are isolated from interactions with the external world, so Igor Novikov
(creator of the Novikov self-consistency principle) has argued that in the case of macroscopic objects like the watch
whose worldlines form closed loops, the outside world can expend energy to repair wear/entropy that the object
acquires over the course of its history, so that it will be back in its original condition when it closes the loop.[73]

Mutable timelines
Time travel in a Type 2 universe is much more complex. The biggest problem is how to explain changes in the past.
One method of explanation is that once the past changes, so too do the memories of all observers. This would mean
that no observer would ever observe the changing of the past (because they will not remember changing the past).
This would make it hard to tell whether you are in a Type 1 universe or a Type 2 universe. You could, however, infer
such information by knowing if a) communication with the past were possible or b) it appeared that the time line had
never been changed as a result of an action someone remembers taking, although evidence exists that other people
are changing their time lines fairly often.
An example of this kind of universe is presented in Thrice Upon a Time, a novel by James P. Hogan. The Back to the
Future trilogy films also seem to feature a single mutable timeline (see the "Back to the Future FAQ [74]" for details
on how the writers imagined time travel worked in the movies' world). By contrast, the short story "Brooklyn
Project" by William Tenn provides a sketch of life in a Type 2 world where no one even notices as the timeline
changes repeatedly.
In type 2.1, attempts are being made at changing the timeline, however, all that is accomplished in the first tries is
that the method in which decisive events occur is changed; final conclusions in the bigger scheme cannot be brought
to a different outcome.
Time travel 143

As an example, the movie Déjà Vu depicts a paper note sent to the past with vital information to prevent a terrorist
attack. However, the vital information results in the killing of an ATF agent, but does not prevent the terrorist attack;
the very same agent died in the previous version of the timeline as well, albeit under different circumstances. Finally,
the timeline is changed by sending a human into the past, arguably a "stronger" measure than simply sending back a
paper note, which results in preventing both a murder and the terrorist attack. As in the Back to the Future movie
trilogy, there seems to be a ripple effect too as changes from the past "propagate" into the present, and people in the
present have altered memory of events that occurred after the changes made to the timeline.
The science fiction writer Larry Niven suggests in his essay "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel" that in a type
2.1 universe, the most efficient way for the universe to "correct" a change is for time travel to never be discovered,
and that in a type 2.2 universe, the very large (or infinite) number of time travelers from the endless future will cause
the timeline to change wildly until it reaches a history in which time travel is never discovered. However, many other
"stable" situations might also exist in which time travel occurs but no paradoxes are created; if the
changeable-timeline universe finds itself in such a state no further changes will occur, and to the inhabitants of the
universe it will appear identical to the type 1.1 scenario. This is sometimes referred to as the "Time Dilution Effect".
Few if any physicists or philosophers have taken seriously the possibility of "changing" the past except in the case of
multiple universes, and in fact many have argued that this idea is logically incoherent,[65] so the mutable timeline
idea is rarely considered outside of science fiction.
Also, deciding whether a given universe is of Type 2.1 or 2.2 can not be done objectively, as the categorization of
timeline-invasive measures as "strong" or "weak" is arbitrary, and up to interpretation: An observer can disagree
about a measure being "weak", and might, in the lack of context, argue instead that simply a mishap occurred which
then led to no effective change.
An example would be the paper note sent back to the past in the film Déjà Vu, as described above. Was it a "too
weak" change, or was it just a local-time alteration which had no extended effect on the larger timeline? As the
universe in Déjà Vu seems not entirely immune to paradoxes (some arguably minute paradoxes do occur), both
versions seem to be equally possible.

Alternate histories
In Type 3, any event that appears to have caused a paradox has instead created a new time line. The old time line
remains unchanged, with the time traveler or information sent simply having vanished, never to return. A difficulty
with this explanation, however, is that conservation of mass-energy would be violated for the origin timeline and the
destination timeline. A possible solution to this is to have the mechanics of time travel require that mass-energy be
exchanged in precise balance between past and future at the moment of travel, or to simply expand the scope of the
conservation law to encompass all timelines. Some examples of this kind of time travel can be found in David
Gerrold's book The Man Who Folded Himself and The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter, plus several episodes of the
TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Gradual and instantaneous

In literature, there are two methods of time travel:
1. The most commonly used method of time travel in science fiction is the instantaneous movement from one point
in time to another, like using the controls on a CD player to skip to a previous or next song, though in most cases,
there is a machine of some sort, and some energy expended in order to make this happen (like the time-traveling De
Lorean in Back to the Future or the phone booth that traveled through the "circuits of history" in Bill and Ted's
Excellent Adventure). In some cases, there is not even the beginning of a scientific explanation for this kind of time
travel; it's popular probably because it is more spectacular and makes time travel easier. The "Universal Remote"
used by Adam Sandler in the movie Click works in the same manner, although only in one direction, the future.
While his character Michael Newman can travel back to a previous point it is merely a playback with which he
Time travel 144

cannot interact.
2. In The Time Machine, H.G. Wells explains that we are moving
through time with a constant speed. Time travel then is, in Wells'
words, "stopping or accelerating one's drift along the time-dimension,
or even turning about and traveling the other way." To expand on the
audio playback analogy used above, this would be like rewinding or
fast forwarding an analogue audio cassette and playing the tape at a
chosen point. Perhaps the oldest example of this method of time travel
A gradual time travel, as in the movie Primer.
is in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871): the White
When the time machine is red, everything inside
Queen is living backwards, hence her memory is working both ways. is going through time at normal rate, but
Her kind of time travel is uncontrolled: she moves through time with a backwards. During entry/exit it seems there
constant speed of -1 and she cannot change it. T.H. White, in the first would have to be fusion/separation between the
forward and reversed versions of the traveler.
part of his Arthurian novel The Once and Future King, The Sword in
the Stone (1938) used the same idea: the wizard Merlyn lives backward
in time, because he was born "at the wrong end of time" and has to live backwards from the front. "Some people call
it having second sight", he says. This method of gradual time travel is not as popular in modern science fiction,
though a form of it does occur in the film Primer.

Time travel, or space-time travel?

An objection that is sometimes raised against the concept of time machines in science fiction is that they ignore the
motion of the Earth between the date the time machine departs and the date it returns. The idea that a traveler can go
into a machine that sends him or her to 1865 and step out into the exact same spot on Earth might be said to ignore
the issue that Earth is moving through space around the Sun, which is moving in the galaxy, and so on, so that
advocates of this argument imagine that "realistically" the time machine should actually reappear in space far away
from the Earth's position at that date. However, the theory of relativity rejects the idea of absolute time and space; in
relativity there can be no universal truth about the spatial distance between events which occurred at different
times[75] (such as an event on Earth today and an event on Earth in 1865), and thus no objective truth about which
point in space at one time is at the "same position" that the Earth was at another time. In the theory of special
relativity, which deals with situations where gravity is negligible, the laws of physics work the same way in every
inertial frame of reference and therefore no frame's perspective is physically better than any other frame's, and
different frames disagree about whether two events at different times happened at the "same position" or "different
positions". In the theory of general relativity, which incorporates the effects of gravity, all coordinate systems are on
equal footing because of a feature known as "diffeomorphism invariance".[76]
Nevertheless, the idea that the Earth moves away from the time traveler when he takes a trip through time has been
used in a few science fiction stories, such as the 2000 AD comic Strontium Dog, in which Johnny Alpha uses "Time
Bombs" to propel an enemy several seconds into the future, during which time the movement of the Earth causes the
unfortunate victim to re-appear in space. Other science fiction stories try to anticipate this objection and offer a
rationale for the fact that the traveler remains on Earth, such as the 1957 Robert Heinlein novel The Door into
Summer where Heinlein essentially handwaved the issue with a single sentence: "You stay on the world line you
were on." In his 1980 novel The Number of the Beast a "continua device" allows the protagonists to dial in the six
(not four!) co-ordinates of space and time and it instantly moves them there—without explaining how such a device
might work.
In Clifford Simak's 1950s short story "Mastodonia" (later broadcast on the X Minus One radio anthology show, and
then significantly re-written into a longer novel of the same name) the protagonists are aware of the possibility of
changes in ground level while traveling back in time to the same geographical coordinates and mount their time
machine in a helicopter so as to not materialize underground. When the helicopter is damaged beyond repair while in
Time travel 145

the past, they then build a mound of rocks from which to launch their return to the present.
The television series Seven Days also dealt with this problem; when the chrononaut would be 'rewinding', he would
also be propelling himself backwards around the Earth's orbit, with the intention of landing at some chosen spatial
location, though seldom hitting the mark precisely. In Piers Anthony's Bearing an Hourglass, the potent Hourglass
of the Incarnation of Time naturally moves the Incarnation in space according to the numerous movements of the
globe through the solar system, the solar system through the galaxy, etc.; but by carefully negating some of the
movements he can also travel in space within the limits of the planet. The television series Doctor Who cleverly
avoided this issue by establishing early on in the series that the Doctor's TARDIS is able to move about in space in
addition to traveling in time.

See also
• Travel time

Speculations Claims of time travel Fiction, humor

• Grandfather paradox • Philadelphia Experiment • Andrew Carlssin
• Ontological paradox • Chronovisor • Time travel in fiction
• Predestination paradox • Billy Meier • Thiotimoline
• Temporal paradox • Darren Daulton • Time loop
• Tipler Cylinder • John Titor • Chronodynamics
• Ring singularity • Moberly-Jourdain incident
• Ronald Mallett • Montauk Project
• Retrocausality • Time slip

References

Bibliography
• Davies, Paul (1996). About Time. Pocket Books. ISBN 0-684-81822-1.
• Davies, Paul (2002). How to Build a Time Machine. Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN 0-14-100534-3.
• Gale, Richard M (1968). The Philosophy of Time. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-00042-0.
• Gott, J. Richard (2002). Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time.
Boston: Mariner Books. ISBN 0-618-25735-7.
• Gribbin, John (1985). In Search of Schrödinger's Cat. Corgi Adult. ISBN 0-552-12555-5.
• Miller, Kristie (2005). "Time travel and the open future". Disputatio 1 (19): 223–232.
• Nahin, Paul J. (2001). Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction.
Springer-Verlag New York Inc.. ISBN 0-387-98571-9.
• Nahin, Paul J. (1997). Time Travel: A writer's guide to the real science of plausible time travel. Writer's Digest
Books. Cincinnati, Ohio. ISBN 0-89879-748-9
• Nikolic, H. Causal paradoxes: a conflict between relativity and the arrow of time. arXiv:gr-qc/0403121
• Pagels, Heinz (1985). Perfect Symmetry, the Search for the Beginning of Time. Simon & Schuster.
ISBN 0-671-46548-1.
• Pickover, Clifford (1999). Time: A Traveler's Guide. Oxford University Press Inc, USA. ISBN 0-19-513096-0.
• Randles, Jenny (2005). Breaking the Time Barrier. Simon & Schuster Ltd. ISBN 0-7434-9259-5.
• Shore, Graham M. "Constructing Time Machines". Int. J. Mod. Phys. A, Theoretical. arXiv:gr-qc/0210048
• Toomey, David (2007). The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics. W.W. Norton &
Company. ISBN 978-0-393-06013-3.
Time travel in fiction 149

Time travel in fiction

Time travel is a common theme in science fiction and is depicted in a variety of media. It simply means either going
forward in time or backward, like seeing the future, or the past.

Literature
Time travel can form the central theme of a book, or it can be simply a plot device. Time travel in fiction can ignore
the possible effects of the time-traveler's actions, as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, or it can use
one resolution or another of the Grandfather paradox.

Early stories featuring time travel without time machines

Although The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was instrumental in causing the idea of time travel to enter the public
imagination, non-technological forms of time travel had appeared in a number of earlier stories, and some even
earlier stories featured elements suggestive of time travel, but remain somewhat ambiguous.
• In ancient Hindu mythology, the Mahabharatha mentions the story of the King Revaita, who travels to a different
world to meet the creator Brahma and is shocked to learn that many ages have passed when he returns to Earth.[1]
[2]

• "Urashima Tarō", an early Japanese tale, involves traveling forwards in time to a distant future,[3] and was first
described in the Nihongi (720).[4] It was about a young fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea
palace and stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself three hundred years in
the future, where he is long forgotten, his house in ruins, and his family long dead.[3]
• Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) by Samuel Madden is mainly a series of letters from English
ambassadors in various countries to the British "Lord High Treasurer", along with a few replies from the British
foreign office, all purportedly written in 1997 and 1998 and describing the conditions of that era. However, the
framing story is that these letters were actual documents given to the narrator by his guardian angel one night in
1728; for this reason, Paul Alkon suggests in his book Origins of Futuristic Fiction that "the first time-traveler in
English literature is a guardian angel who returns with state documents from 1998 to the year 1728", although the
book does not explicitly show how the angel obtained these documents. Alkon later qualifies this by writing "It
would be stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being the first to show a traveler arriving from the
future", but also says that Madden "deserves recognition as the first to toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the
form of an artifact sent backwards from the future to be discovered in the present."
• in Walter Map's 12th century De nugis curialium (Courtiers' Trifles), Map tells of the Briton King Herla, who is
transported with his hunting party over two centuries into the future by the enchantment of a mysterious
harlequin.
• In the play Anno 7603, written by the Dano-Norwegian poet Johan Herman Wessel in 1781, the two main
characters are moved to the future (AD 7603) by a good fairy.
• "Rip Van Winkle", Washington Irving's 1819 story, is about a man named Rip Van Winkle who takes a nap at a
mountain and wakes up twenty years in the future, where he has been forgotten, his wife deceased, and his
daughter grown up.[3]
• In the science fiction anthology Far Boundaries (1951), the editor August Derleth identifies the short story
"Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism", written for the Dublin Literary Magazine by an anonymous author in
1838, as a very early time travel story. In this story, the narrator is waiting under a tree to be picked up by a coach
which will take him out of Newcastle, when he suddenly finds himself transported back over a thousand years,
where he encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery, and gives him somewhat ironic explanations of the
developments of the coming centuries. It is never entirely clear whether these events actually occurred or were
merely a dream.
Time travel in fiction 150

• The book Paris avant les hommes (Paris before Men) by the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boiterd,
published posthumously in 1861, in which the main character is transported to various prehistoric settings by the
magic of a "lame demon", and is able to actively interact with prehistoric life.
• The short story "The Clock That Went Backward [15]", written by editor Edward Page Mitchell appeared in the
New York Sun in 1881, another early example of time travel in fiction.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain.
• News from Nowhere (1890) by William Morris, which features a protagonist who wakes up in a socialist utopian
future.
• Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1891) by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (written under the pseudonym F. Anstey) was the
first story to play with the paradoxes that time travel could cause.
• Golf in the Year 2000 (1892) by J. McCullough tells the story of an Englishman who fell asleep in 1892 and
awakens in the year 2000. The focus of the book is how the game of golf would have changed by then, but many
social and technological themes are also discussed along the way, including a device similar to television and
women's equality.

Time traveling themes and ideological function

A number of themes tend to recur in science fiction time-travel stories, often with enough variation to make them
interesting.
• Taking technology to the past In these stories a visitor to the past changes history using knowledge from their
own time, either for evil or good, or sometimes accidentally. Examples of this genre include the classic Lest
Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp.
• The Guardians of Time In this genre a group of people are charged with ensuring that time turns out 'properly'
(or protecting it from changes by other travellers). This includes Hugo winner The Big Time and the other
Change War stories by Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchett's humorous Thief of Time, Simon Hawke's TimeWars series
and The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov. Another good example of this concept is the popular sci-fi series
Doctor Who, whose main character is a "Time Lord" and whose people are essentially scholars and historians
who usually only observe histories; "the Doctor," as he calls himself, intervenes to fight the evil he encounters if
he is called on to do so.
• Unintentional change or fulfillment. In these stories a time traveller intends to observe past events, but
discovers that he or she has unintentionally altered the future. A Sound of Thunder is an example of this kind.
The time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing
effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that
concern people in the present. If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in
the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and
Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world
turns out.
—Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)[5]
Time travel in fiction 151

Time travel as a defining characteristic of science fiction

Science fiction is, in essence, a time travel genre. Events either open in the altered past, the transformed
present, or the possible future, transporting the reader or viewer to another age, place, dimension or world.
—Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)[5]
When science fiction time travels one truly knows that one is in science fiction because time travel provides
[…] the futuristic narrative dynamic needed for the genre.
—Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)[5]

Time travel in science fiction versus fantasy

Stories that involve time travel devices and technologies that take people backwards and forwards in time and space
are considered part of the science fiction genre, whereas stories that involve time travel through supernatural,
magical, or unexplained means are considered part of the fantasy genre.
The genre of science fiction is often characterized by incorporating technology either as “a driving force of the story,
or merely the setting for drama.”[6] Therefore, it is this key component—technology—that can be used to distinguish
between time travel of the science fiction and fantasy realms.
Isaac Asimov, when asked to explain the difference between science fiction and fantasy, once explained that science
fiction, given its grounding in science, is possible; fantasy, which has no grounding in reality, is not.[6]
Any story involving time travel may be considered to include an element of science fiction. However, novels and
short stories from the science fiction genre usually feature time travel via technology (a 'time machine') rather than
time travel by supernatural means, and often play with the possibility of time paradoxes such as the grandfather
paradox.[7]

See also
• List of time travel science fiction • Ontological paradox
• List of time travel science fiction literature • Grandfather paradox
• List of time travel science fiction films • Predestination paradox
• List of time travel science fiction television • Time viewer
• List of games containing time travel
• List of fictional characters who can manipulate time

External links
• timelinks - the big list of time travel video, time travel movies, & time travel TV [8] - over 700 movies and
television programs featuring time travel
• SciFan: Time Travel - Time Control - Time Warp [9] - list of over 2400 books featuring time travel
• Aparta Krystian. Conventional Models of Time and Their Extensions in Science Fiction [90] A master's thesis
exploring conceptual blending in time travel.
• Andy's Anachronisms [10] - Exploring the themes of Time Travel and Alternate Universes in Literature and
Entertainment
• Ultimate Time Travel [11] - Reviewing books, movies and computer games that deal with concept of Time Travel
• Time Travel Movies [12] - Reviews and clips of the some more influential movies involving time travel.
Time travel in fiction 152

References
[1] http:/ / www. mythfolklore. net/ india/ encyclopedia/ revati. htm
[2] http:/ / mayapur. com/ node/ 1160/
[3] Yorke, Christopher (February 2006), "Malchronia: Cryonics and Bionics as Primitive Weapons in the War on Time" (http:/ / jetpress. org/
volume15/ yorke-rowe. html), Journal of Evolution and Technology 15 (1): 73–85, , retrieved 2009-08-29
[4] Rosenberg, Donna (1997), Folklore, myths, and legends: a world perspective, McGraw-Hill, p. 421, ISBN 084425780X
[5] Redmond, Sean (editor). Liquid Metal: the Science Fiction Film Reader. London: Wallflower Press, 2004.
[6] Goldschlager, Amy; Eos, Avon. " Science Fiction & Fantasy: A Genre With Many Faces (http:/ / www. sfsite. com/ columns/ amy26. htm)".
SF Site, 1997.
[7] Odgers, Sally O. " SF? Fantasy? What's the difference? (http:/ / www. twilighttimes. com/ Odgers4a. html)". Twilight Times, 1999.
[8] http:/ / www. aetherco. com/ timelinks/ timevideo-thebiglist. html
[9] http:/ / www. scifan. com/ themes/ themes. asp?TH_themeid=4& Items=
[10] http:/ / www. timetravelreviews. com
[11] http:/ / www. UltimateTimeTravel. com
[12] http:/ / www. toptenz. net/ top-ten-time-travel-movies. php

Grandfather paradox
The grandfather paradox is a proposed paradox of time travel first described (in this exact form) by the science
fiction writer René Barjavel in his 1943 book Le Voyageur Imprudent (The Imprudent Traveller).[1] Nevertheless,
similar (and even more mind-boggling) paradoxes had already been described, for instance by Robert A. Heinlein in
"By His Bootstraps". The paradox is this: suppose a man travelled back in time and killed his biological grandfather
before the latter met the traveller's grandmother. As a result, one of the traveller's parents (and by extension the
traveller himself) would never have been conceived. This would imply that he could not have travelled back in time
after all, which means the grandfather would still be alive, and the traveller would have been conceived allowing him
to travel back in time and kill his grandfather. Thus each possibility seems to imply its own negation, a type of
logical paradox.
Despite the name, the grandfather paradox does not exclusively regard the impossibility of one's own birth. Rather, it
regards any action that makes impossible the ability to travel back in time in the first place. The paradox's namesake
example is merely the most commonly thought of when one considers the whole range of possible actions. Another
example would be using scientific knowledge to invent a time machine, then going back in time and (whether
through murder or otherwise) impeding a scientists' work that would eventually lead to the very information that you
used to invent the time machine.
An equivalent paradox is known (in philosophy) as autoinfanticide, going back in time and killing oneself as a
baby.[2]
The grandfather paradox has been used to argue that backwards time travel must be impossible. However, a number
of possible ways of avoiding the paradox have been proposed, such as the idea that the timeline is fixed and
unchangeable, the idea that the time traveller will end up in a parallel timeline, while the timeline in which the
traveller was born remains independent or the possibility of the time traveller saving his grandfather's life instead of
killing him so that he could later be born and travel back in time so that he could save his grandfather's life, exactly
the opposite of the original paradox.
Another paradox similar to that was developed by Stephen Hawking in his TV Documents series, Into The Universe
With Stephen Hawking. According to the paradox, a young scientist travels into the past one minute with a time
machine he just built. With him he took a gun and killed his past self that was loading the gun, instantly killing him.
The question is though, who fired the shot? The loop stays open with the person being dead who fired the shot.
According to the theory however, there is always a cause before an effect saying that the future man is a copy of the
past man, meaning he killed a different person.
Grandfather paradox 153

Scientific theories

Novikov self-consistency principle

See the Novikov self-consistency principle and Kip S. Thorne for one view on how backwards time travel could be
possible without a danger of paradoxes. According to this hypothesis, the only possible timelines are those which are
entirely self-consistent, so that anything a time traveller does in the past must have been part of history all along, and
the time traveller can never do anything to prevent the trip back in time from being made since this would represent
an inconsistency. In laymen's terms, this is often called determinism. It conflicts with the notion of free-will.
Succinctly, this explanation states that if time travel is possible, then actions are determined by history.

Parallel universes/alternate timelines

There could be "an ensemble of parallel universes" such that when the traveller kills the grandfather, the act took
place in (or resulted in the creation of) a parallel universe in which the traveller's counterpart will never be conceived
as a result. However, his prior existence in the original universe is unaltered. Succinctly, this explanation states that:
if time travel is possible, then multiple versions of future exist in parallel universes.
Examples of parallel universes postulated in physics are:
• In quantum mechanics, the many-worlds interpretation suggests that every seemingly random quantum event with
a non-zero probability actually occurs in all possible ways in different "worlds", so that history is constantly
branching into different alternatives. The physicist David Deutsch has argued that if backwards time travel is
possible, it should result in the traveller ending up in a different branch of history than the one he departed
from.[3] See also quantum suicide and immortality.
• M-theory is put forward as a hypothetical master theory that unifies the six superstring theories, although at
present it is largely incomplete. One possible consequence of ideas drawn from M-theory is that multiple
universes in the form of 3-dimensional membranes known as branes could exist side-by-side in a fourth large
spatial dimension (which is distinct from the concept of time as a fourth dimension) - see Brane cosmology.
However, there is currently no argument from physics that there would be one brane for each physically possible
version of history as in the many-worlds interpretation, nor is there any argument that time travel would take one
to a different brane.

Theories in science fiction

Parallel universes resolution

The idea of preventing paradoxes by supposing that the time traveller is taken to a parallel universe while his original
history remains intact, which is discussed above in the context of science, is also common in science fiction - see
Time travel as a means of creating historical divergences.

Restricted action resolution

Another resolution, of which the Novikov self-consistency principle can be taken as an example, holds that if one
were to travel back in time, the laws of nature (or other intervening cause) would simply forbid the traveller from
doing anything that could later result in their time travel not occurring. For example, a shot fired at the traveller's
grandfather will miss, or the gun will jam, or misfire, or the grandfather will be injured but not killed, or the person
killed will turn out to be not the real grandfather, or some other event will occur to prevent the attempt from
succeeding. No action the traveller takes to affect change will ever succeed, as there will always be some form of
"bad luck" or coincidence preventing the outcome. In effect, the traveller will be unable to change history from the
state they found it. Very commonly in fiction, the time traveller does not merely fail to prevent the actions he seeks
Grandfather paradox 154

to prevent; he in fact precipitates them (see predestination paradox), usually by accident.

This theory might lead to concerns about the existence of free will (in this model, free will may be an illusion, or at
least not unlimited). This theory also assumes that causality must be constant: i.e. that nothing can occur in the
absence of cause, whereas some theories hold that an event may remain constant even if its initial cause was
subsequently eliminated.
Closely related but distinct is the notion of the time line as self-healing. The time-traveller's actions are like throwing
a stone in a large lake; the ripples spread, but are soon swamped by the effect of the existing waves. For instance, a
time traveller could assassinate a politician who led his country into a disastrous war, but the politician's followers
would then use his murder as a pretext for the war, and the emotional effect of that would cancel out the loss of the
politician's charisma. Or the traveller could prevent a car crash from killing a loved one, only to have the loved one
killed by a mugger, or fall down the stairs, choke on a meal, killed by a stray bullet, etc. In the 2002 film The Time
Machine, this scenario is shown where the main character builds a time machine to save his girlfriend who got killed
by a robber, yet she still dies, only from a car crash instead. In some stories it is only the event that precipitated the
time traveller's decision to travel back in time that cannot be substantially changed, in others all attempted changes
will be "healed" in this way, and in still others the universe can heal most changes but not sufficiently drastic ones.
This is also the explanation advanced by the Doctor Who role-playing game, which supposes that Time is like a
stream; you can dam it, divert it, or block it, but the overall direction it is headed will resume after a period of
conflict.
It also may not be clear whether the time traveller altered the past or precipitated the future he remembers, such as a
time traveller who goes back in time to persuade an artist—whose single surviving work is famous—to hide the rest
of the works to protect them. If, on returning to his time, he finds that these works are now well-known, he knows he
has changed the past. On the other hand, he may return to a future exactly as he remembers, except that a week after
his return, the works are found. Were they actually destroyed, as he believed when he travelled in time, and has he
preserved them? Or was their disappearance occasioned by the artist's hiding them at his urging, and the skill with
which they were hidden, and so the long time to find them, stemmed from his urgency?

Destruction resolution
Some science fiction stories suggest that causing any paradox will cause the destruction of the universe, or at least
the parts of space and time affected by the paradox. The plots of such stories tend to revolve around preventing
paradoxes, such as the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A less destructive alternative of this theory
suggests the death of the time traveller whether the history is altered or not; an example would be in the first part of
the Back to the Future trilogy, where the lead character's alteration of history results in a risk of his own
disappearance, and he has to fix the alteration to conserve his own existence. In this theory, killing one's grandfather
would result in the disappearance of oneself, history would erase all traces of the person's existence, and the death of
the grandfather would be caused by another means (say, another existing person firing the gun); thus, the paradox
would never occur from a historical viewpoint.

Temporal Modification Negation Theory

This theory is partially similar to other theories on time travel. While stating that if time travel is possible it would be
impossible to violate the grandfather paradox, it goes further to state that any action taken that itself negates the time
travel event cannot occur. The consequences of such an event would in some way negate that event, be it by either
voiding the memory of what one is doing before doing it, by preventing the action in some way, or even by
destroying the universe among other possible consequences. It states therefore that to successfully change the past
one must do so incidentally.
For example, if one tried to stop the murder of one's parents, he would fail. On the other hand, if one traveled back
and did something to some random person that as a result prevented the death of someone else's parents, then such an
Grandfather paradox 155

event would be successful, because the reason for the journey and therefore the journey itself remains unchanged
preventing a paradox.
In addition, if this event had some colossal change in the history of mankind, and such an event would not void the
ability or purpose of the journey back, it would occur, and would hold. In such a case, the memory of the event
would immediately be modified in the mind of the time traveller.
An example of this would be for someone to travel back to observe life in Austria in 1887 and shooting five people,
one of which was one of Hitler's parents. Hitler would therefore never have existed, but since this would not prevent
the invention of the means for time travel, or the purpose of the trip, then such a change would hold. But for it to
hold, every element that influenced the trip must remain unchanged. This would void someone convincing another
party to travel back to kill the people without knowing who they are and making the time line stick, because by being
successful, they would void the first party's influence and therefore the second party's actions.
A humorous treatment of this issue occurs in an episode of Futurama, in which Fry travels back in time and
inadvertently causes his grandfather's death before he marries his grandmother. His distraught grandmother then
seduces him, and upon returning to his own time Fry learns that he is his own grandfather.

Other considerations
Consideration of the grandfather paradox has led some to the idea that time travel is by its very nature paradoxical
and therefore logically impossible, on the same order as round squares. For example, the philosopher Bradley
Dowden made this sort of argument in the textbook Logical Reasoning, where he wrote:

“
Nobody has ever built a time machine that could take a person back to an earlier time. Nobody should be seriously trying to build one, either,
because a good argument exists for why the machine can never be built. The argument goes like this: suppose you did have a time machine
right now, and you could step into it and travel back to some earlier time. Your actions in that time might then prevent your grandparents
from ever having met one another. This would make you not born, and thus not step into the time machine. So, the claim that there could be a
time machine is self-contradictory. ”
However, some philosophers and scientists believe that time travel into the past need not be logically impossible
provided that there is no possibility of changing the past, as suggested, for example, by the Novikov self-consistency
principle. Bradley Dowden himself revised the view above after being convinced of this in an exchange with the
philosopher Norman Swartz.[4]
Consideration of the possibility of backwards time travel in a hypothetical universe described by a Gödel metric led
famed logician Kurt Gödel to assert that time might itself be a sort of illusion.[5] [6] He seems to have been
suggesting something along the lines of the block time view in which time does not really "flow" but is just another
dimension like space, with all events at all times being fixed within this 4-dimensional "block".
Another theory suggests that the time machine requires a receiving end machine and thus it is impossible to travel
before the time of the first invention of a time machine.[7]
 157

Perception of time

Mental chronometry
Mental chronometry is the use of response time in perceptual-motor tasks to infer the content, duration, and
temporal sequencing of cognitive operations. Mental chronometry is one of the core paradigms of experimental and
cognitive psychology, and has found application in various disciplines including cognitive
psychophysiology/cognitive neuroscience and behavioral neuroscience to elucidate mechanisms underlying
cognitive processing.

History: Donders' experiment

Psychologists have developed and refined mental chronometry for over the past 100 years. Seminal early studies in
reaction time were conducted by Franciscus Donders (1869).
Donders devised a subtraction method
to analyze cognitive activity into
separate stages, each of which requires
some fairly constant time to complete.
The method involved three tasks:
1. A simple reaction time task. For
example, you are seated in front of a
panel that contains a light bulb and Donders (1868’s): method of subtraction. Picture from the ‘Historical Introduction to
a response button. When the light Cognitive Psychology’ webpage.
comes on, you must press the
button.
2. A discrimination reaction time task. For example, you are seated in front of a panel with two light bulbs and one
response button. When a prespecified target light (e.g., the one on the left) is illuminated, you must press the
button, but not if the one on the right is illuminated.
3. A choice reaction time task. For example, you are seated in front of two light bulbs, each with their own button.
You must press the button corresponding to the illuminated light.
Donders then predicted the kinds of processes that might be involved in each task:
1. A simple reaction time task would require perception and motor stages (the time to perceive the light and then
execute the response).
2. A discrimination reaction time task requires the above + a perceptual discrimination stage.
3. A choice reaction time task requires all of the above + a response selection stage.
As expected, simple tasks take the shortest amount of time, followed by discrimination tasks, with choice tasks
taking the longest amount of time. Donders calculated the time required for each stage by using a subtraction
technique:
1. Perception and motor time = time required for simple task
2. 'Perceptual discrimination time = time for discrimination task - simple task
3. Response selection time = time for choice task - discrimination task.
This method provides a way to investigate the cognitive processes underlying simple perceptual-motor tasks, and
formed the basis of subsequent developments, as discussed in the next section.
Mental chronometry 158

Development of mental chronometry in cognitive psychology

Posner’s letter matching studies

Posner (1978) used a series of letter-matching studies to measure the mental processing time of several tasks
associated with recognition of a pair of letters. The simplest task was the physical match task, in which subjects were
shown a pair of letters and had to identify whether the two letters were physically identical or not. The next task was
the name match task where subjects had to identify whether two letters had the same name. The task involving the
most cognitive processes was the rule match task in which subjects had to determine whether the two letters
presented both were vowels or not vowels. The physical match task was the most simple because mentally subjects
had to encode the letters, compare them to each other, and make a decision. When doing the name match task
subjects were forced to add a cognitive step before making a decision. They had to search memory for the names of
the letters, and then compare those before deciding. In the rule based task they had to also categorize the letters as
either vowels or consonants before making their choice. The time taken to perform the rule match task was longer
than the name match task which was longer than the physical match task. Using the subtraction method
experimenters were able to determine the approximate amount of time that it took for subjects to perform each of the
cognitive processes associated with each of these tasks.

Sternberg’s memory-scanning task

Sternberg (1966) devised an experiment wherein subjects were told to remember a set of unique digits in short-term
memory. Subjects were then given a probe stimulus in the form of a digit from 0-9. The subject then answered as
quickly as possible whether the probe was in the previous set of digits or not. The size of the initial set of digits was
the independent variable and the reaction time of the subject was the dependent variable. The idea is that as the size
of the set of digits increases the number of processes that need to be completed before a decision can be made
increases as well. So if the subject has 4 items in short-term memory (STM), then after encoding the information
obtained from the probe stimulus the subject will need to compare the probe to each of the 4 items in memory and
then make a decision. If there were only 2 items in the initial set of digits then the number of processes would be
reduced by 2. The data from this study found that for each additional item added to the set of digits that the subject
had in STM about 38 milliseconds were added to the response time of the subject. This finding supported the idea
that a subject did a serial exhaustive search through memory rather than a serial self-terminating search. Sternberg
(1969) developed a much-improved method for dividing reaction time into successive or serial stages, called the
additive factor method.

Shepard and Metzler’s mental rotation task

Shepard and Metzler (1971) presented a pair of three-dimensional shapes that were identical or mirror-image
versions of one another. Reaction time to determine whether they were identical or not was a linear function of the
angular difference between their orientation, whether in the picture plane or in depth. They concluded that the
observers performed a constant-rate mental rotation to align the two objects so they could be compared. Cooper and
Shepard (1973) presented a letter or digit that was either normal or mirror-reversed, and presented either upright or at
angles of rotation in units of 60 degrees. The subject had to identify which type of stimulus it was: normal or
mirror-reversed. Response time increased roughly linearly as the orientation of the letter deviated from upright (0
degrees) to inverted (180 degrees), and then decreases again until it reaches 360 degrees. The authors concluded that
the subjects mentally rotate the image the shortest distance to upright, and then judge whether it is normal or
mirror-reversed.
Mental chronometry 159

Sentence-picture verification
Mental chronometry has been a useful tool in identifying some of the processes associated with understanding a
sentence. This type of research typically revolves around the differences in processing 4 types of sentences: true
affirmative (TA), false affirmative (FA), false negative (FN), and true negative (TN). A picture can be presented
with an associated sentence that falls into one of these 4 categories. The subject then decides if the sentence matches
the picture or does not. The type of sentence determines how many processes need to be performed before a decision
can be made. According to the data from Clark and Chase (1972) and Just and Carpenter (1971), the TA sentences
are the simplest and take the least time, than FA, FN, and TN sentences.

Mental chronometry and models of memory

Hierarchical network models of memory were largely discarded due to some findings related to mental chronometry.
The TLC model proposed by Collins and Quillian (1969) had a hierarchical structure indicating that recall speed in
memory should be based on the number of levels in memory traversed in order to find the necessary information.
But the experimental results did not agree with this model. For example, a subject will reliably answer that a robin is
a bird more quickly than he will answer that an ostrich is a bird despite these questions accessing the same two levels
in memory. This led to the development of spreading activation models of memory (e.g., Collins & Loftus, 1975),
wherein links in memory are not organized hierarchically but by importance instead.

Mental chronometry and cognitive development

Main article: Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development
In the recent years there has been extensive research using mental chronometry methods for the study of cognitive
development. Specifically, various measures of speed of processing were used to examine changes in the speed of
information processing as a function of age. Kail (1991) showed that speed of processing increases exponentially
from early childhood to early adulthood. There is then a long period of stability until speed of processing to start
declining from middle age to senelity (Salthouse, 2000). In fact, cognitive slowing is considered a good index of
broader changes in the functioning of the brain and intelligence. Demetriou and colleagues, using various methods of
measuring speed of processing, showed that it is closely associated with changes in working memory and thought
(Demetriou, Mouyi, & Spanoudis, 2009). These relations are extensively discussed in the neo-Piagetian theories of
cognitive development.
Mental chronometry 160

Application of mental chronometry in biological psychology/cognitive

neuroscience
With the advent of functional neuroimaging
techniques, notably PET and fMRI,
psychologists started to modify their mental
chronometry paradigms for functional
imaging (Posner, 2005). Although
psycho(physio)logists have been using
electroencephalographic measurements for
decades before the conception of PET and
fMRI, the images obtained with PET have
attracted great interest from other branches
of neuroscience, increasingly popularizing
mental chronometry among a more
elaborate breed of scientists in recent years.
The way that mental chronometry is utilized
is by performing tasks based on reaction
time which measures through neuroimaging
the parts of the brain which are involved in
the cognitive processes.

Much research is being done now using

mental chronometry and connecting it with Regions of the Brain Involved in a Number Comparison Task Derived from EEG
cognitive studies however, there was and fMRI Studies. The regions represented correspond to those showing effects of
extensive research being conducted in the notation used for the numbers (pink and hatched), distance from the test number
(orange), choice of hand (red), and errors (purple). Picture from the article: ‘Timing
past.
the Brain: Mental Chronometry as a Tool in Neuroscience’.
In the 1950’s, the use of a micro electrode
recording of single neurons in anaesthetized monkeys allowed research to look at physiological process in the brain
and supported this idea that people encode information serially.
In the 1960s, these methods were used extensively in humans: researchers recorded the electrical potentials in human
brain using scalp electrodes while a reaction tasks was being conducted using digital computers. What they found
was that there was a connection between the observed electrical potentials with motor and sensory stages for
information processing. For example, researchers found in the recorded scalp potentials that the frontal cortex was
being activated in association with motor activity. These finding can be connected to Donders’ idea of the subtractive
method of the sensory and motor stages involved in reaction tasks.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, development of signal processing tool for EEG translated into a revival of research
using this technique to assess the timing and the speed of mental processes. For exemple, high-profile research
showed how reaction time on a given trial correlated with the latency of the P300 wave[1] or how the timecourse of
the EEG reflected the sequence of cognitive processes involved in perceptual processing[2] .
Then, with the invention of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), techniques were used to measure activity
through electrical event-related potentials in a study when subjects were asked to identify if a digit that was
presented was above or below five. According to Sternberg’s additive theory, each of the stages involved in
performing this task includes: encoding, comparing against the stored representation for five, selecting a response,
and then checking for error in the response. This fMRI image presents the specific locations where these stages are
occurring in the brain while performing this simple mental chronometry task.
Mental chronometry 161

In the 1980s, neuroimaging experiments allowed researchers to detect the activity in localized brain areas by
injecting radionuclides and using positron emission tomography (PET) to detect them. Also, fMRI was used which
have detected the precise brain areas that are active during mental chronometry tasks. Many studies have shown that
there is a small number of brain areas which are widely spread out which are involved in performing these cognitive
tasks.

References
[1] http:/ / www. sciencemag. org/ cgi/ content/ abstract/ 197/ 4305/ 792
[2] http:/ / www. sciencemag. org/ cgi/ content/ abstract/ 215/ 4538/ 1413

• Clark, H. H., & Chase, W. G. (1972). On the process of comparing sentences against pictures. Cognitive
Psychology, 3, 472-517.
• Collins, A. M. & Loftus, E. F. (1975). A spreading activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological
Review, 82, 407-428.
• Collins, A. M. & Quillian, M. R. (1969). Retrieval time from semantic memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior, 8, 240-247.
• Cooper, L. A., & Shepard, R. N. (1973). Chronometric studies of the rotation of mental images. New York:
Academic Press.
• Demetriou, A., Mouyi, A., & Spanoudis, G. (2008). Modeling the structure and development of g. Intelligence, 5,
437-454.
• Donders, F.C. (1869). On the speed of mental processes. In W. G. Koster (Ed.), Attention and Performance II.
Acta Psychologica, 30, 412-431. (Original work published in 1868.)
• Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1971). Comprehension of negation with quantification. Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior, 10, 244-253.
• Kail, R. (1991). Developmental functions for speed of processing during childhood and adolescence.
Psychological Bulletin, 109, 490-501.
• Posner, M. I. (1978). Chronometric explorations of mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1978.
• Posner, M. I., & Mitchell, R. F. (1967). Chronometric analysis of classification. Psychological Review, 74,
392-409.
• Posner MI (2005) Timing the Brain: Mental Chronometry as a Tool in Neuroscience. PLoS Biol 3(2): e51
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030051
• Salthouse, T. A. (2000). Aging and measures of processing speed. Biological Psychology, 54, 35-54.
• Shepard, R.N. & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science, 171, 701 - 703.
• Sternberg, S. (1966). High speed scanning in human memory. Science, 153, 652-654.
• Sternberg, S. (1969). The discovery of processing stages: Extensions of Donders' method. Acta Psychologica, 30,
276-315.
• Sternberg, S. (1975). Memory scanning: New findings and current controversies. Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology, 27, 1-32.
Mental chronometry 162

Further reading
• Luce, R.D. (1986). 'Response Times: Their Role in Inferring Elementary Mental Organization. New York: Oxford
University Press.
• Meyer, D.E., Osman, A.M., Irwin, D.E., & Yantis, S. (1988). Modern mental chronometry. Biological
Psychology, 26, 3-67.
• Townsend, J.T. & Ashby, F.G. (1984). Stochastic Modeling of Elementary Psychological Processes. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Weiss V, Weiss H (2003). The golden mean as clock cycle of brain waves. Chaos, Solitons and Fractals 18:
643-652. Full text (http://www.v-weiss.de/chaos.html)

External links
• Historical Introduction to Cognitive Psychology (http://www.mtsu.edu/~sschmidt/Cognitive/intro/intro.
html)
• Timing the Brain: Mental Chronometry as a Tool in Neuroscience (http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/
?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030051)
• Sample Chronometric Test on the web (http://cognitivelabs.com/mydna_speedtestno.htm)

Sense of time
The sense of time can refer either to the perception of relatively short periods of time, or the perception of times
which are a significant fraction of a person's lifetime.
When asked to place the time of a past event, people have a systematic tendency to recall that recent events occurred
farther back in time (backward telescoping) and distant events occurred more recently (forward telescoping) than is
actually the case.[1]
Experiments have shown rats successfully estimating intervals of
time.[2] [3]

Theory
William Friedman contrasted two theories for a sense of time:[4]
• The strength model of time memory. Posits such a thing as a
memory trace that persists over time, where one could judge the age
of a memory (and therefore how long ago the event remembered
A contemporary quartz watch
occurred) from the strength of the trace. The longer ago the event,
the weaker the trace.
Unfortunately, the trace model comes into conflict with a very familiar feature of our experience: that some
memories of recent events may fade more quickly than memories of more distant events.
• The inference model suggests the time of an event is not simply read off from some aspect of the memory of it,
but is inferred from information about relations between the event in question and other events whose date or time
is known.
Sense of time 163

Short-term
Although the sense of time is not associated with a specific sensory system, the work of psychologists and
neuroscientists indicates that human brains do have a system governing the perception of time.[5] This is a highly
distributed system including the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia as its components. One particular
component, the suprachiasmatic nuclei, is responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters
appear to be capable of shorter-range (ultradian) timekeeping. The sense of time is impaired in some people with
neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease and attention deficit disorder.
Human perception of duration is subjective and variable. For example, time may appear to slow or drag as one
eagerly anticipates the arrival of a specific event. A school day may seem endless for a student who is waiting for the
bell indicating that school is finished for the day. The traditional proverb describing this effect is "a watched pot
never boils".[6] [7]
Psychoactive drugs can also impair the perception of time. Stimulants can lead both humans and rats to overestimate
time intervals[8] [9] while depressants can have the opposite effect.[10] The level of activity in the brain of
neurotransmitters such as dopamine and adrenaline may be the reason for this. Errors in estimated time intervals
might be caused by varying levels of neurotransmitters in the brain.[11]
People who have been hypnotized underestimate the duration of their trance.[12]
In an experiment comparing a group of subjects aged between 19 and 24 and a group between 60 and 80 asked to
estimate when they thought 3 minutes had passed, it was found that the younger group's estimate was on average 3
minutes and 3 seconds, while the older group averaged 3 minutes and 40 seconds;[13] time seemed to pass more
quickly for the older group.

Specious present
The specious present is the time duration wherein a state of consciousness is experienced as being in the present. The
term specious present was first introduced by the psychologist E. R. Clay, and developed by William James.[14] A
version of the concept was used by Edmund Husserl in his works and discussed further by Francisco Varela based on
the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.[15] The experienced present is an interval; it's not a
momentary instant except 'speciously'.

Long-term
It is a known phenomenon that long periods of time appear to pass faster as people grow older. The time from a
child's eighth birthday to the ninth seems an eternity; the time from the sixty-eighth to the sixty-ninth seems to pass
in a flash.[16]

Alterations
A form of temporal illusion verifiable by experiment is the kappa effect,[17] whereby time intervals between visual
events are perceived as relatively longer or shorter depending on the relative spatial positions of the events. In other
words: the perception of temporal intervals appears to be directly affected, in these cases, by the perception of spatial
intervals.
Sense of time 164

Special relativity
This common experience was used to familiarize the general public to the ideas presented by Einstein's theory of
relativity in a 1930 cartoon by Sidney "George" Strube:[18] [19]
Man: Well, it's like this,—supposing I were to sit next to a pretty girl for half an hour it would seem like half a
minute,—
Einstein: Braffo! You haf zee ideah! [sic]
Man: But if I were to sit on a hot stove for two seconds then it would seem like two hours.

Psychoactive substances
Altered states of consciousness are sometimes characterized by a different estimation of time. Some psychoactive
substances – such as entheogens – may also dramatically alter a person's temporal judgement. When viewed under
the influence of such substances as LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, and peyote, a clock may appear to be a strange
reference point and a useless tool for measuring the passage of events as it does not correlate with the user's
experience. At higher doses, time may appear to slow down, stop, speed up, go backwards and even seem out of
sequence. In 1955, British MP Christopher Mayhew took mescaline hydrochloride in an experiment under the
guidance of his friend, Dr Humphry Osmond. On the BBC documentary The Beyond Within, he described that half a
dozen times during the experiment, he had "a period of time that didn't end for me".[20]

See also
• Time#Judgement of time
• Arrow of time
• Temporal illusion
• Time perception

External links
• Time perception research at the University of Manchester [21]
• "A Cognitive Model of Retrospective Duration Estimations", Hee-Kyung Ahn, et al., March 7, 2006. [22]
• "Time, Force, Motion, and the Semantics of Natural Languages", Wolfgang Wildgen, Antwerp Papers in
Linguistics, 2003/2004. [23]
• Can Time Slow Down? [24]
• "Interactions emerge between biological clocks", The Pharmaceutical Journal, Vol 275 No 7376 p644, 19
November 2005 [25] Registration required.
• "Time and the Brain: How Subjective Time Relates to Neural Time [26]" (November 9, 2005). Eagleman, David
M.; Peter U. Tse, Dean Buonomano, Peter Janssen, Anna Christina Nobre, Alex O. Holcombe. (Review, full text).
The Journal of Neuroscience 25 (45):10369-10371.
• "Evidence for a Short-Period Internal Clock in Humans", Tom G. Slanger, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol.
2, N. 2, pp. 203-216, 1998 [27]
• The images of time: an essay on temporal representation.[28] By Robin Le Poidevin
 166

Use of time

Time management
Time management refers to a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing
specific tasks, projects and goals. This set encompasses a wide scope of activities, and these include planning,
allocating, setting goals, delegation, analysis of time spent, monitoring, organizing, scheduling, and prioritizing.
Initially time management referred to just business or work activities, but eventually the term broadened to include
personal activities as well. A time management system is a designed combination of processes, tools and techniques.
Some authors (such as Stephen R. Covey) offered a categorization scheme for the hundreds of time management
approaches that they reviewed
• First generation: reminders based on clocks and watches, but with computer implementation possible; can be used
to alert a person when a task is to be done.
• Second generation: planning and preparation based on calendar and appointment books; includes setting goals.
• Third generation: planning, prioritizing, controlling (using a personal organizer, other paper-based objects, or
computer or PDA-based systems) activities on a daily basis. This approach implies spending some time in
clarifying values and priorities.
• Fourth generation: being efficient and proactive using any of the above tools; places goals and roles as the
controlling element of the system and favors importance over urgency.
Some of the recent general arguments related to "time" and "management" point out that the term "time
management" is misleading and that the concept should actually imply that it is "the management of our own
activities, to make sure that they are accomplished within the available or allocated time, which is an unmanageable
continuous resource".
Time management literature paraphrased:
• "Get Organized" - paperwork and task triage
• "Protect Your Time" - insulate, isolate, delegate
• "Set gravitational goals" - that attract actions automatically
• "Achieve through Goal management Goal Focus" - motivational emphasis
• "Work in Priority Order" - set goals and prioritize
• "Use Magical Tools to Get More Out of Your Time" - depends on when written
• "Master the Skills of Time Management"
• "Go with the Flow" - natural rhythms, Eastern philosophy
• "Recover from Bad Time Habits" - recovery from underlying psychological problems, e.g. procrastination
Time management 167

Time management and related concepts

Time management has been considered as subsets of different concepts such as:
• Project management. Time Management, can be considered as a project management subset, and is more
commonly known as project planning and project scheduling. Time Management is also been identified as one of
the core functions identified in project management [1] .
• Attention management: Attention management relates to the management of cognitive resources, and in particular
the time that humans allocate their mind (and organizations the minds of their employees) to conduct some
activities.
• Personal knowledge management: see below (Personal time management).

Personal Time Management

Time management strategies are often associated with the recommendation to set goals. These goals are recorded
and may be broken down into a project, an action plan, or a simple task list. For individual tasks or for goals, an
importance rating may be established, deadlines may be set, and priorities assigned. This process results in a plan
with a task list or a schedule or calendar of activities. Authors may recommend a daily, weekly, monthly or other
planning periods, usually fixed, but sometimes variable. Different planning periods may be associated with different
scope of planning or review. Authors may or may not emphasize reviews of performance against plan. Routine and
recurring tasks may or may not be integrated into the time management plan and, if integrated, the integration can be
accomplished in various ways.

Task list
A task list (also to-do list) is a list of tasks to be completed, such as chores or steps toward completing a project. It is
an inventory tool which serves as an alternative or supplement to memory.
Task lists are used in self-management, grocery lists, business management, project management, and software
development. It may involve more than one list.
When you accomplish one of the items on a task list, you check it off or cross it off. The traditional method is to
write these on a piece of paper with a pen or pencil, usually on a note pad or clip-board. Numerous digital
equivalents are now available, including PIM (Personal information management) applications and most PDAs.
There are also several web-based task list applications, many of which are free.

Task list organization

Task lists are often tiered. The simplest tiered system includes a general to-do list (or task-holding file) to record all
the tasks the person needs to accomplish, and a daily to-do list which is created each day by transferring tasks from
the general to-do list.
Task lists are often prioritized:
• An early advocate of "ABC" prioritization was Alan Lakein (See Books below.). In his system "A" items were the
most important ("A-1" the most important within that group), "B" next most important, "C" least important.
• A particular method of applying the ABC method[2] assigns "A" to tasks to be done within a day, "B" a week, and
"C" a month.
• To prioritize a daily task list, one either records the tasks in the order of highest priority, or assigns them a number
after they are listed ("1" for highest priority, "2" for second highest priority, etc.) which indicates in which order
to execute the tasks. The latter method is generally faster, allowing the tasks to be recorded more quickly.
Alternatives to prioritizing:
Time management 168

A completely different approach which argues against prioritising altogether was put forward by British author Mark
Forster in his book "Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management". This is based on the idea of operating
"closed" to-do lists, instead of the traditional "open" to-do list. He argues that the traditional never-ending to-do lists
virtually guarantees that some of your work will be left undone. This approach advocates getting all your work done,
every day, and if you are unable to achieve it helps you diagnose where you are going wrong and what needs to
change. Recently, Forster developed the "Autofocus Time Management System", which further systematizes
working a to-do list as a series of closed sublists and emphasizes intuitive choices.

Software applications
Modern task list applications may have built-in task hierarchy (tasks are composed of subtasks which again may
contain subtasks),[3] may support multiple methods of filtering and ordering the list of tasks, and may allow one to
associate arbitrarily long notes for each task.
In contrast to the concept of allowing the person to use multiple filtering methods, at least one new software product
additionally contains a mode where the software will attempt to dynamically determine the best tasks for any given
moment.[4]
Many of the software products for time management support multiple users. It allows the person to give tasks to
other users and use the software for communication[5]
Task list applications may be thought of as lightweight personal information manager or project management
software.

Resistors
• Fear of change: Change can be daunting and one may be afraid to change what's proven to work in the past.
• Uncertainty: Even with the change being inevitable, one may be hesitant as being not sure where to start.
Uncertainty about when or how to begin making a change can be significant.
• Time pressure: To save time, one has to invest time, and this time investment may be a cause of concern. Fearing
that changing may involve more work at the start—and thus, in the very short term, make things worse—is a
common resistor.

Attention Deficit Disorder

Excessive and chronic inability to manage time effectively may be a result of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
Diagnostic criteria include: A sense of underachievement, difficulty getting organized, trouble getting started, many
projects going simultaneously and trouble with follow-through.[6]
• Prefrontal cortex: The prefrontal cortex is the most evolved part of the brain. It controls the functions of attention
span, impulse control, organization, learning from experience and self-monitoring, among others. Some authors
argue that changing the way the prefrontal cortex works is possible and offers a solution.[7]
Time management 169

Drivers
• Increased effectiveness: One may feel the need to make more time so as to be more effective in performing the
job and carrying out responsibilities.
• Performance improvement: Time management is an issue that often arises during performance appraisals or
review meetings.
• Personal development: One may view changing the approach to time management as a personal development
issue and reap the benefit of handling time differently at work and at home.
• Increased responsibilities: A change in time-management approach may become necessary as a result of a
promotion or additional responsibilities. Since there is more work to do, and still the same amount of time to do it
in, the approach must change.

Caveats

Dwelling on the lists

• According to Sandberg,[8] task lists "aren't the key to productivity [that] they're cracked up to be". He reports an
estimated "30% of listers spend more time managing their lists than [they do] completing what's on them".
• This could be caused by procrastination by prolonging the planning activity. This is akin to analysis paralysis. As
with any activity, there's a point of diminishing returns.

Rigid adherence
• Hendrickson asserts[9] that rigid adherence to task lists can create a "tyranny of the to-do list" that forces one to
"waste time on unimportant activities".
• Again, the point of diminishing returns applies here too, but toward the size of the task. Some level of detail must
be taken for granted for a task system to work. Rather than put "clean the kitchen", "clean the bedroom", and
"clean the bathroom", it is more efficient to put "housekeeping" and save time spent writing and reduce the
system's administrative load (each task entered into the system generates a cost in time and effort to manage it,
aside from the execution of the task). The risk of consolidating tasks, however, is that "housekeeping" in this
example may prove overwhelming or nebulously defined, which will either increase the risk of procrastination, or
a mismanaged project.
• Listing routine tasks wastes time. If you are in the habit of brushing your teeth every day, then there is no reason
to put it down on the task list. The same goes for getting out of bed, fixing meals, etc. If you need to track routine
tasks, then a standard list or chart may be useful, to avoid the procedure of manually listing these items over and
over.
• To remain flexible, a task system must allow for disaster. A disaster occurs constantly whether it is personal or
business-related. A company must have a cushion of time ready for a disaster. Even if it is a small disaster, if no
one made time for this situation, it can blow up bigger, causing the company to bankruptcy just because of poor
time management.[10]
• To avoid getting stuck in a wasteful pattern, the task system should also include regular (monthly, semi-annual,
and annual) planning and system-evaluation sessions, to weed out inefficiencies and ensure the user is headed in
the direction he or she truly desires.[11]
• If some time is not regularly spent on achieving long-range goals, the individual may get stuck in a perpetual
holding pattern on short-term plans, like staying at a particular job much longer than originally planned.
Time management 170

Techniques for setting priorities

ABC analysis
A technique that has been used in business management for a long time is the categorization of large data into
groups. These groups are often marked A, B, and C—hence the name. Activities are ranked upon these general
criteria:
• A – Tasks that are perceived as being urgent and important.
• B – Tasks that are important but not urgent.
• C – Tasks that are neither urgent nor important.
Each group is then rank-ordered in priority. To further refine priority, some individuals choose to then force-rank all
"B" items as either "A" or "C". ABC analysis can incorporate more than three groups. ABC analysis is frequently
combined with Pareto analysis.

Pareto analysis
This is the idea that 80% of tasks can be completed in 20% of the disposable time. The remaining 20% of tasks will
take up 80% of the time. This principle is used to sort tasks into two parts. According to this form of Pareto analysis
it is recommended that tasks that fall into the first category be assigned a higher priority.
The 80-20-rule can also be applied to increase productivity: it is assumed that 80% of the productivity can be
achieved by doing 20% of the tasks. If productivity is the aim of time management, then these tasks should be
prioritized higher.
It depends on the method adopted to complete the task. There is always a simpler and easy way to complete the task.
If one uses a complex way, it will be time consuming. So, one should always try to find out the alternate ways to
complete each task.

Fit
Essentially, fit is the congruence of the requirements of a task (location, financial investment, time, etc.) with the
available resources at the time. Often people are constrained by externally controlled schedules, locations, etc., and
"fit" allows us to maximize our productivity given those constraints. For example, if one encounters a gap of 15
minutes in their schedule, it is typically more efficient to complete a task that would require 15 minutes, than to
complete a task that can be done in 5 minutes, or to start a task that would take 4 weeks. This concept also applies to
time of the day: free time at 7am is probably less usefully applied to the goal of learning the drums, and more
productively a time to read a book. Lastly, fit can be applied to location: free time at home would be used differently
from free time at work, in town, etc.

POSEC method
POSEC is an acronym for Prioritize by Organizing, Streamlining, Economizing and Contributing.
The method dictates a template which emphasizes an average individual's immediate sense of emotional and
monetary security. It suggests that by attending to one's personal responsibilities first, an individual is better
positioned to shoulder collective responsibilities.
Inherent in the acronym is a hierarchy of self-realization which mirrors Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of needs".
1. Prioritize - Your time and define your life by goals.
2. Organizing - Things you have to accomplish regularly to be successful. (Family and Finances)
3. Streamlining - Things you may not like to do, but must do. (Work and Chores)
4. Economizing - Things you should do or may even like to do, but they're not pressingly urgent. (Pastimes and
Socializing)
5. Contributing - By paying attention to the few remaining things that make a difference. (Social Obligations)
Time management 171

The Eisenhower Method

All tasks are evaluated using the criteria important/unimportant and urgent/not urgent and put in according
quadrants. Tasks in unimportant/not urgent are dropped, tasks in important/urgent are done immediately and
personally, tasks in unimportant/urgent are delegated and tasks in important/not urgent get an end date and are done
personally. This method is said to have been used by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and is outlined in a quote
attributed to him: What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.

See also
• Action item
• African time
• Attention management
• Chronemics
• Opportunity cost
• Polychronicity
• Procrastination
• Punctuality
• Prospective memory
Tools:
• Hipster PDA
• Personal digital assistant
• Personal organizer
• Time boxing
• Time tracking software
Systems:
• Getting Things Done
• Stephen Covey's system offered in the book First Things First and implemented in the Franklin Planner time
management system
• Mark Forster author and developer of many books and time management systems
• The Ultra Simple Guide to Time Management
• Pomodoro Technique

Further reading
• Allen, David (2001). Getting things done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity. New York: Viking.
ISBN 9780670889068.
• Covey, Stephen (1994) First Things First. ISBN 0-684-80203-1
• Fiore, Neil A (2006). The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-
Free Play. New York: Penguin Group. ISBN 9781585425525.
• Forster, Mark (2006-07-20). Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management. Hodder & Stoughton
Religious. pp. 224. ISBN 0340909129.
• Hubbard, L. Ron (1972). The Management Series Volume 2, "Doing Work" chapter. Los Angeles: Bridge
Publications, Inc.. ISBN 0-88404-673-7.
• Lakein, Alan (1973). How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life.. New York: P.H. Wyden.
ISBN 0451134303.
• Morgenstern, Julie (2004). Time Management from the Inside Out: The Foolproof System for Taking Control of
Your Schedule--and Your Life (2nd ed.). New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books. pp. 285. ISBN 0805075909.
Time discipline 173

Time discipline
In sociology and anthropology, time discipline is the general name given to social and economic rules, conventions,
customs, and expectations governing the measurement of time, the social currency and awareness of time
measurements, and people's expectations concerning the observance of these customs by others.
The concept of "time discipline" as a field of special attention in sociology and anthropology was pioneered by E. P.
Thompson in Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, published in 1967. Coming from a Marxist
viewpoint, Thompson argued that observance of clock-time is a consequence of the European industrial revolution,
and that neither industrial capitalism nor the creation of the modern state would have been possible without the
imposition of synchronic forms of time and work discipline. The new clock time imposed by government and
capitalist interests replaced earlier, collective perceptions of time that Thompson believed flowed from the collective
wisdom of human societies. While, in fact, it appears likely that earlier views of time were imposed instead by
religious and other social authorities prior to the industrial revolution, Thompson's work identified time discipline as
an important concept for study within the social sciences.

Time discipline and the natural world

In societies based around agriculture, hunting, and other pursuits that involve human interaction with a natural world,
time discipline is a matter governed by astronomical and biological factors. Specific times of day or seasons of the
year are defined by reference to these factors, and measured, to the extent that they need measuring, by observation.
Different peoples' needs with respect to these things mean sharply differing cultural perceptions of time. For
example, it surprises many non-Muslims that the Islamic calendar is entirely lunar and makes no reference at all to
the seasons; the desert-dwelling Arabs who devised it were nomads rather than agriculturalists, and a calendar that
made no reference to the seasons was no inconvenience for most of them.

Time discipline in Western societies

In more urban societies, some of these natural phenomena were no longer at hand, and most were of much less
consequence to the inhabitants. Artificial means of dividing and measuring time were needed. Plautus complained of
the social effect of the invention of such divisions in his lines complaining of the sundial:
The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sun-dial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions. When I was a boy
My belly was my sun-dial; one more sure,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat.
But now-a-days, why, even when I have,
I can't fall-to, unless the sun give leave. The alarm clock is for many people a reminder of
the intrusion of socio-economic time discipline
The town's so full of these confounded dials,
into their sleep cycle.
The greatest part of its inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets.

Plautus's protagonist here complains about the social discipline and expectations that arose when these
measurements of time were introduced. The invention of artificial units of time measurement made the introduction
of time management possible, and time management was not universally appreciated by those whose time was
Time discipline 174

managed.

Religious influences on Western time discipline

In western Europe, the practice of Christian monasticism introduced new factors into the time discipline observed by
members of religious communities. The rule of Saint Benedict introduced canonical hours; these were religious
observances that were held on a daily basis, and based on factors again mostly unrelated to natural phenomena. It is
no surprise, then, that religious communities were likely the inventors, and certainly the major consumers, of early
clocks. The invention of the mechanical clock in western Europe, and its subsequent technical developments,
enabled a public time discipline even less related to natural phenomena. (Highly sophisticated clepsydras existed in
China, where they were used by astrologers connected with the imperial court; these water clocks were quite large,
and their use limited to those who were professionally interested in precise timekeeping.)

The invention of the clock

The English word clock comes from an Old French word for "bell"; for the striking feature of early clocks was a
greater concern than their dials. Shakespeare's Sonnet XII begins, "When I do count the clock that tells the time."
Even after the introduction of the clock face, clocks were costly, and found mostly in the homes of aristocrats. The
vast majority of urban dwellers had to rely on clock towers, and outside the sight of their dials or the sound of their
bells, clock time held no sway. Clock towers, at least, defined the time of day for those who could hear and see them.
As the saying goes, "a person with a clock always knows what time it is; a person with two clocks is never sure."

Improvements of the clock

The discipline imposed by these public clocks still remained lax by contemporary standards. A clock that only
strikes the hours can only record the nearest hour that has passed; most early clocks had only hour hands in any case.
Minute hands did not come into widespread use until the pendulum made a large leap in the accuracy of clocks; for
watches, a similar leap in accuracy was not made possible before the invention of the balance spring. Before these
improvements, the equation of time, the difference between apparent and mean solar time, was not even noticed.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, private ownership of clocks and watches became more common, as
their improved manufacture made them available for purchase by at least the bourgeoisie of the cities. Their
proliferation had many social and even religious consequences for those who could afford and use them.

Religious consequences of improved clocks

Religious texts of the period make many more references to the irreversible passage of time, and artistic themes
appeared at this time such as Vanitas, a reminder of death in the form of a still life, which always included a watch,
clock, or some other timepiece. The relentless ticking of a clock or watch, and the slow but certain movement of its
hands, functioned as a visible and audible memento mori. Clocks and sundials would be decorated with mottos such
as ultima forsan ("perhaps the last" [hour]) or vulnerant omnes, ultima necat ("they all wound, and the last kills").
Even today, clocks often carry the motto tempus fugit, "time flies." Mary, Queen of Scots was said to have owned a
large watch made in the shape of a silver skull.

Economic consequences of improved clocks

Economically, their impact was even greater; an awareness that time is money, a limited commodity not to be
wasted, also appears during this period. Because Protestantism was at this time chiefly a religion of literate city
dwellers, the so-called "Protestant work ethic" came to be associated with this newly fashion time discipline;
production of clocks and watches during this period shifted from Italy and Bavaria to Protestant areas such as
Geneva, the Netherlands, and England; the names of French clockmakers during this time disclose a large number of
Huguenot-fashion names from the Old Testament.
Time discipline 175

Standard, synchronous, public time

In the nineteenth century, the introduction of standard time and time zones divorced the "time of day" from local
mean solar time and any links to astronomy. Time signals, like the bells and dials of public clocks, once were
relatively local affairs; the ball that is dropped in Times Square on New Year's Eve in New York City once served as
a time signal whose original purpose was for navigators to check their marine chronometers. However, when the
railroads began running trains on complex schedules, keeping a schedule that could be followed over hundreds of
miles away required synchronization on a scale not attempted before. Telegraphy, and later, shortwave radio were
used to broadcast time signals from the most accurate clocks available. Radio and television broadcasting schedules
created a further impetus to regiment everyone's clock so that they all told the same time within a very small
tolerance; the broadcasting of time announcements over radio and television enabled all the households in their
audience to get in synch with the clocks at the network.
The mass production of clocks and watches further tightened time discipline in the Western world; before these
machines were made, and made to be more accurate, it would be idle to complain about someone's being fifteen, or
five, minutes late. For many employees, the time clock was the clock that told the time that mattered: it was the
clock that recorded their hours of work. By the time that time clocks became commonplace, public, synchronized
clock time was considered a fact of life. Uniform, synchronized, public clock time did not exist until the nineteenth
century.
When one speaks about the intellectual history of time, one essentially is stating that changes have occurred in the
way humans experience and measure time. Our conceived abstract notions of time have presumably developed in
accordance with our art, our science, and our |social infrastructure. (See also horology.)

Towards time-keeping
The units of time first developed by humans would likely have been days and months (moons). In some parts of the
world the cycle of seasons are apparent enough to lead to people speaking about years & seasons (e.g. 4 summers
ago, or 4 floods ago). With the invention of agriculture in the 3rd millennium BC, people relied heavily on the cycles
of the season for planting and harvesting crops. Most humans came to live in settled societies and the whole
community relied upon accurate predictions of the seasonal cycle. This led to the development of calendars. Over
time, some people came to recognize patterns of the stars with the seasons. Learning astronomy became an assigned
duty for certain people so they could coordinate the lunar and solar calendars by adding days or months to the year.
At about the same time, sundials were developed, likely marked first at noon, sunrise and sunset. In ancient Sumer
and Egypt, numbers were soon used to divide the day into 12 hours, as was the night. In Egypt there is not as much
seasonal variation in the length of the day, but those further from the equator would need to make many more
modifications in calibrating their sundials to deal with these differences. Ancient traditions did not begin the day at
midnight, but rather some at dawn, others at dusk (both being more obvious).
Since a sundial has only one "hand", a minute probably only meant "a short time". It took centuries for technology to
make measurements precise enough for minutes (and later seconds) to become fixed meaningful units—longer still
for milliseconds, nanoseconds, and further subdivisions.
When the water clock was invented, time could also be measured at night – though there was significant variation in
flow rate and less accuracy and precision. With water clocks, and also candle clocks, modifications were made to
have them make sounds on a regular basis. (The English word clock actually comes from French, Latin, and German
words that mean bell.)
With the invention of the hourglass (perhaps as early as the 11th Century) hours and units of time smaller than an
hour could be measured much more reliably than with water clocks and candle clocks.
The earliest reasonably accurate mechanical clocks are the 13th century tower clocks probably developed for (and
perhaps by) monks in Northern Italy. Using gears and gradually falling weights, these were adjusted to conform with
Time discipline 176

canonical hours—which varied with the length of the day. As these were used primarily to ring bells for prayer, the
clock dial likely only came later. When dials were eventually incorporated into clocks, they were analogous to the
dials on sundials, and, like a sundial, the clocks themselves had only one hand.
A possible explanation for the shift from having the first hour being the one after dawn, to having the hour after noon
being designated as 1 p.m. (post meridiem), is that these clocks would likely regularly be reset at local high noon
each day. This, of course, results in midnight becoming 12 o'clock.
Peter Henlein, a locksmith and burgher of Nuremberg, Germany, invented a spring-powered clock around 1510. It
had only one hand, had no glass cover, and was rather imprecise because it slowed down as the spring unwound. In
fact, Henlein went so far as to develop the first portable watch; it was six inches high. People usually carried it by
hand, or wore it around their necks or in large pockets. The first reported person to actually wear a watch on the
wrist was the French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). With a piece of string, he attached
his pocket watch to his wrist.
In 1577, the minute hand was added by a Swiss clock maker, Jost Burgi (who also is a contender for the invention of
logarithms), and was incorporated into a clock Burgi made for astronomer Tycho Brahe who had a need for more
accuracy as he charted the heavens.

Isochronous time
With invention of the pendulum clock in 1656 by Christiaan Huygens, came isochronous time, with a fixed pace of
3600 seconds per hour. By 1680, both a minute hand and then a second hand were added. Some of the first of these
had a separate dial for the minute hand (turning counter-clockwise), and a second hand that took 5 minutes per cycle.
[1] Even as late as 1773, towns were content to order clocks without minute hands.[2]
But the clocks were still aligned with the local noonday sun. Following the invention of the locomotive in 1830, time
had to be synchronized across vast distances in order to organize the train schedules. This eventually led to the
development of time zones, and, thus, global isochronous time. These time changes were not accepted everywhere
right away, because many people's lives were still tied closely to the length of the daytime. With the invention in
1879 of the light bulb, that changed too.
The isochronous clock changed lives. Appointments are rarely "within the hour", but at quarter hours (and being five
minutes late is often considered being tardy). People often eat, drink, sleep, and even go to the bathroom in
adherence to some time-dependent schedule.

See also
• Punctuality
• Timeline of time measurement technology
• Timeline of historic inventions
• 12-hour clock

References
• Landes, David: Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World: (Belknap/Harvard, 1983) ISBN
0-674-76800-0
• Aveni, Anthony: Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures: (Basic Books, 1989) ISBN 0-465-01951-X