Space and time are philosophical categories. Space is a form of coexistence of material objects and processes. It characterizes the structure and extent of material systems; time is a form and successive changes in the states of objects and processes, it characterizes the duration of their existence. Space and time have an objective character, are inextricably linked with each other, and are infinite. The universal properties of time are duration, non-repetition, and irreversibility; the general properties of space are extension, the unity of discontinuity and continuity. The idea of space is perceived by a person much more simply and clearly than the idea of time. This is due to the fact that space is viewed by us as if all at once in three-dimensional form, while time is felt only as a moment between the past and the future, a successive change of events.
Time, along with space, is the essence of our world, forms the arena of human activity, and is the main subject of their cognition. The awareness of the concept of time is associated with the awareness of the irrevocability of the past, the fleetingness of the present, and the unknowability of the future.
A person cannot move along the time scale - from the past to the future, and from the future to the past. He only lives in his time. The arrow of time is directed only from the past to the future. There is no time machine. A person cannot free himself from time or control it. He only learned to "stop the moment" with the help of books, gramophone, magnetic sound recordings, photography, cinema, and video recordings.
But he cannot live, act, develop without orientation in time, without synchronizing his behavior with changes in the environment, with the behavior of other people and other objects.
Nature, which created man, provided him and other living organisms with a special biological mechanism for an approximate intuitive assessment of time - a biological clock - the ability of an animal and a person to navigate in time. It is based on the strict periodicity of physical, chemical and physiological processes in cells - biological rhythms, cyclical fluctuations in the intensity and nature of biological processes and phenomena.
The concept of the flow of time was suggested to ancient man by the periodic change of day and night, the seasons. Current life events required measuring time.
Chronology (or calendar) is a system for calculating large periods of time. In many systems of chronology, the count was conducted from some historical or legendary event.
Each nation used its own methods of dating historical events. Some counted years from the supposed creation of the world: thus, the Jews dated it to 3761 BC, the Alexandrian chronology considered this date to be May 25, 5493 BC. The Romans began counting from the legendary foundation of Rome (753 BC). The Parthians counted years from the accession to the throne of the first king, the Egyptians - from the beginning of the reign of each subsequent dynasty. Each world religion based its own calendar.
The Christian Church timed the beginning of the chronology to the birth of Jesus Christ. This system of chronology (new era) is currently accepted in most countries. The peoples who profess Islam have their calendar from 622 CE (from the date of the migration of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, to Medina).
The calendar (from the Latin calendarium, literally - a debt book; in ancient Rome, debtors paid interest on the day of the calends) is based on the periodicity of the visible movements of celestial bodies. The most common is the solar calendar, which is based on the solar (tropical) year.
No one knows exactly why the year is divided into 12 months (this division does not correspond to either the lunar or solar calendar). It is believed that dividing an hour into 60 minutes is associated with the Babylonian number system, which was based not on 10, but 60.
The translation from one calendar to another presents certain difficulties due to the different year lengths in other systems. The year counting from January 1 was introduced in Rome by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. In 325, Byzantium adopted the Julian calendar. The calendar reform carried out by Pope Gregory XIII was recognized in most Catholic countries. It eliminated an error in the calculation of time: from the moment of the introduction of the Julian calendar until the end of the 16th century, a difference of 10 days "ran up" compared to the solar year. The modern one is called Gregorian (new style), introduced under Gregory XIII on October 4, 1582, and replaced the Julian (old style).
The month's division into seven-day weeks arose in the Ancient East in the 1st century BC and began to be used in Rome, from where it later spread throughout Europe.
In the seven-day week adopted by the Romans, only one day had a special name - "Saturday" (ancient Hebrew sabbath - rest, peace), the other days were called by ordinal numbers in the week: first, second, etc. The Romans named the days of the week after the seven luminaries that bore the names of gods. The names are as follows: Saturday - the day of Saturn, then - the day of the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. The Latin names, having changed, are partly preserved to this day in Western Europe's names of the days of the week.
The imperfection of the natural biological clock forced man to invent and create artificial devices that more effectively measure time during the day, days, weeks, months, and years—watches.
Watches are the most common measuring device today – their annual production in the world exceeds 300 million pieces, and time measurement is the most common measurement: several tens of billions of such measurements are made on the globe every day.
Time measurement is also the most accurate type of measurement today. The maximum accuracy of time measurement is now determined by a very small value—an error of about 1 10–11%, or 1 s in 300 thousand years. Even ordinary household watches with an error of 20 s per day (0.02%) are comparable in accuracy to standard measuring devices in other types of measurements, such as electrical measurements.
The most ancient methods of measuring time were known 2000 years BC, and their development continued until the first centuries of modern times. This includes many types of solar, water, fire, sand, and mechanical clocks, which played an important role in the history of chronometry – the art of measuring time.
Share
