A SCIENCE MANIFESTO:
Why Is There No
University Department for
The Study of Time?
By Rick Doble
THE PURPOSE OF THIS MANIFESTO
WHY IS THE STUDY OF TIME IMPORTANT?
"Is 'time' the most commonly used noun in the English language?"...an Oxford dictionary...announc[ed] that the word is the most often used noun in the English language."Study: 'Time' Is Most Often Used Noun - CBS News. Jun 22, 2006.
WHAT HAS PREVENTED
THE STUDY OF TIME?
"A deep-sea fish has probably no means of apprehending the existence of water; it is too uniformly immersed in it..."Lodge, Sir Oliver. Ether and Reality: A Series of Discourses on the Many Functions of the Ether of Space, (1925), 28.
EXAMPLES OF HIDDEN TIME
I searched the Internet for articles about what is unique about human beings, i.e., what separates us from animals. It is clear that our ability to conceive and work with linear time is one of our unique characteristics. We are the only animal that has a sophisticated concept of linear time and as a result, we can design and build and cooperate. However, I read numerous articles from prestigious universities about what is uniquely human, and not one mentioned our concept of time. Here is an example.
The following statement from Harvard University involves time and does not make sense without an understanding of time, but time itself is never mentioned. Time is embedded but not obvious.
"The unique brain mechanisms underlying human language also enhance human cognitive ability, allowing us to derive abstract concepts and to plan complex activities."
Uniquely Human - Harvard University Press. Jacket description of the book. Lieberman, Philip. Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior. Harvard University Press. 1993.
Planning requires an understanding of time. And planning complex activities requires an advanced and sophisticated understanding of time.
Here is another example from Oxford University.
"We tend to think that being able to plan into the future, be flexible in our approach and learn from others are things that are particularly impressive about humans," says senior researcher Professor Matthew Rushworth of Oxford University's Department of Experimental Psychology.
---------------------------
"Brain area unique to humans linked to cognitive powers." Published: 28 Jan 2014.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-28-brain-area-unique-humans-linked-cognitive-powers
While this article mentions planning into the future, it does not deal with how time, itself, is understood. Yet planning and many other activities are based on an understanding of time which is fundamental.
It is important to say from the outset that time is an objective fact of life.
But the way we conceive of time and coordinate time is very human. Time is not only an objective reality but also a human concept. How we understand time today and how we may have understood it in the past are probably quite different. I believe that the ways it was understood by hunter-gatherers in the 3 Paleolithic eras and people in the Neolithic era, in the Ancient, Classical, and Medieval eras were all very different.
I think a culture shapes and indoctrinates a shared concept of time. For example, a contemporary hunter-gatherer tribe, the Piraha tribe in the Amazon, thinks of time in immediate terms. Dr. Daniel Everett, the acknowledged expert on this culture, calls it the Immediacy of Experience Principle. Their window of time conception is about two days in the past and two days in the future. Beyond those points, they don't imagine, plan, or conceptualize. But don't think of them as being primitive. They have a complex language that identifies time and reality, such as who saw something and when did they see it. There are over 65,000 possible ways to express such things in this language.
This is just one example of how a culture can shape an understanding of time. There are others. For example, some cultures today see the past as ahead of us instead of behind us.
Now, you might disagree that cultures can shape our understanding of time. But this is a perfect example of why there needs to be a Department of Time-Studies. This hypothesis needs to be explored and researched and this should be done by knowledgeable academic professionals.
"Man must have been conscious of memories and purposes long before he made any explicit distinction between past, present, and future."Whitrow, Gerald. Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press. 1988, pages 21-22.
"For words are to thought what tools are to work;the product depends largely on the growth of the tools."Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization: Vol. 1, p. 71, 1935."Time reference is a universal property of language..."Lecarme, Jacqueline, Ph.D. Linguistics. "Nominal Tense and Tense Theory." Academia.edu, 1998. https://www.academia.edu/2486019/Nominal_Tense_and_Tense_Theory
As I quoted earlier:"The unique brain mechanisms underlying human language also enhance human cognitive ability, allowing us to derive abstract concepts and to plan complex activities."Uniquely Human - Harvard University Press . Jacket description of the book.Lieberman, Philip. Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior. Harvard University Press. 1993.
"Unfortunately, we are not very well informed in the psychology of primitive man, but there are children all around us, and it is in studying children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth."Piaget, Jean. "Genetic Epistemology." Columbia Forum, (1969), 12, 4.
-- Animal existence and the Lower & Middle Paleolithic:
Since we began as animals who lived in the present, how did we acquire a linear sense of time? How is the human brain different? How did our memory develop? How did planning develop? How long did this take?
Scientists have reenacted tool-making at their different stages and then measured brain activity. These experiments have given these researchers a general idea of early hominin cognitive abilities and how they developed over millions of years.
-- The Upper Paleolithic
By the Upper Paleolithic, when the human brain was fully developed and as advanced as our brains today, a conscious understanding of linear time may have evolved that was almost immediate. This was possibly a window of time that was only a day or two. This later may have developed into a sense of time that we have evidence for. The contemporary nomadic hunter-gatherer Piraha tribe in the Amazon has an immediate sense of time with a window of about five days: the present and two days before and two days in the future. Their way of thinking suggests that Upper Paleolithic nomadic hunter-gatherers may have functioned this way as well.
-- The Neolithic:
The change from a momentary sense of time, that probably occurred during the Paleolithic era, to a linear year-long sense of time in the Neolithic era, was as revolutionary as the change to a sedentary agricultural lifestyle that occurred in the Neolithic. What can we understand from the Neolithic evidence that has been left? There are, for example, many structures that were built to determine the time of the winter solstice such as Newgrange in Ireland and more than a hundred 'circular enclosures' in Germany and Central Europe. It appears that knowing a precise point in time during the year's cycle was important.
In the Neolithic era when yearly planting was essential, long-term linear time probably developed, i.e., it was time based on the seasons but probably within a cosmic view that was cyclical, since the seasons repeated every year.
-- Ancient and Classical Civilizations:
To govern a large civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt, there had to be a way to gauge time, to track time, to standardize time, to schedule and coordinate time, to plan, and to keep a record of time. How did this start, develop, and work after thousands of years? Researchers can study many records that are available for this time period.
-- Medieval Clocks and the Industrial Age:
While not often appreciated, many large complex clocks were built in the Middle Ages using the gearing geometry of Ptolemy who had created the most accurate Geocentric (earth-centered) astronomy. While his astronomy was superseded by Heliocentric (sun-centered) Copernican astronomy, his gearing worked extremely well and was used to build these clocks. These clocks became the basis for industrial machinery and so led directly to the Industrial Revolution.
"The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age."
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934, Ch. 1, sct. 2.
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