From Deseret News archives:
Timekeeping has a long, interesting history
"You'll never hear them!" screamed the Duke. "I slew time in this castle many a cold and snowy year ago."
Hark stared at him emptily and seemed to be chewing something. "Time froze here. Someone left the windows open."
— James Thurber, "The 13 Clocks"
Ahh, Sunday is the end of daylight-saving time. Go to bed. Sleep in. Magically gain an hour of time.
But wait a minute, you say — that hour didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the repayment of a one-hour loan we granted the universe back in April, when we set our clocks one hour ahead. All right — so where has that hour been all this while?
Being as it is an amalgam of nature and artifice, time is a tricky thing. The only natural divisions of time we use are years (the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun), days (one rotation of the Earth) and lunar months (the time it takes the moon to wax and wane). Hours, minutes and seconds are all human constructs.
After their revolution, the French attempted a short-lived time-keeping system based on the more common decimal (base 10) system, but it never caught on.
"We could no more find our clock time in nature than we could find a wooden chair sprouting from the soil or a sweater growing from a sheep's back," said Jo Ellen Barnett, author of the book "Time's Pendulum."
Deseret News graphic
Cesium atomic clock diagram
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