I was most surprised by these readings to see how the 60-minute hour evovled through different civilizations and revisions over time. I never asked myself why we measure time like this. I was fascinated by the Babylonian base-60 positional number system and how something created thousands of years ago still influences our daily lives.
The one difference I could see is the first article explains the mathematical convenience of 60, but the second article questions whether that was really why the system developed. This made me realize that explanations that make sense to us today may not be the explanation of what really happened.
Instead of seeing a year as 12 equal months, I perceive it as a circle of seasons. I associated the seasons with festivals, family get-togethers, and the weather when I was growing up in Punjab. I began to associate the seasons with longer summer days and shorter winter days after relocating to Canada. Every year feels different to me because of my experiences, even though the calendar is the same every year.
I also find myself thinking about how I organize my day with time. When I’m working or studying and I’m thinking there aren’t enough hours in the day at times. On days when I have less to do, the same 24 hours can seem so much longer. After I learned that the ancient Egyptians measured hours by daylight I began to question whether our rigid way of measuring hours always aligned with the way we actually live and perceive time.
These readings made me question something I had always taken for granted: we measure time in fixed units, but our experience of time is not always fixed.
No comments:
Post a Comment