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Okay, so I was just sitting here and thought to myself you cant hold time in your hand and you cant see it in the physical world, therefor it would seem that time would only be a concept that is based off of only a perception that is distorted due to a learned set of beliefs and a current understanding because it has been already predefined and is what we are expected to conform to. Disregard the fact that for thousands of years people have already determined that their are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week and 365 days in year. We only know each time frame for what we believe it is by the way we were ingrained to think of it and by how it has already been understood. However I would like to ask this, what really determines how many days are in a week or what we are to call a week, for example one could call the time frame of 10 days a week or 50 days a month or 500 days a year and they would be just as correct as the people who originally decided on our current model. Is this not so? Am I right in this way of thinking?
Last edited by iwantyall2know; 12-26-2011 at 06:06 AM..
Reason: typo
And it is some other time somewhere else... But irregardless of actual time what or who determines that 24 hours is a day other then the people who originally decided that other then the world that continues to go by that. Couldn't what we consider a day just of easily been any other number of hours or what we call a week be any other number of days? I see your attempt to be humorous though.
Last edited by iwantyall2know; 12-26-2011 at 06:10 AM..
Reason: error
Okay, so I was just sitting here and thought to myself you cant hold time in your hand and you cant see it in the physical world, therefor it would seem that time would only be a concept that is based off of only a perception that is distorted due to a learned set of beliefs and a current understanding because it has been already predefined and is what we are expected to conform to. Disregard the fact that for thousands of years people have already determined that their are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week and 365 days in year. We only know each time frame for what we believe it is by the way we were ingrained to think of it and by how it has already by understood. However I would like to ask this, what really determines how many days are in a week or what we call a week, for example one could call the time frame of 10 days a week or 50 days a month or 500 days a year and they would be just as correct as the people who originally decided on our current model. Is this not so? Am I right in this way of thinking?
Short answer: yes, it is an interesting concept to learn about.
You will learn, for instance, that our concept of a day is not 'thousands' of years old. Indeed, I believe that back in the days of Jesus a 'day' was considered sun-up to sun-down, with sun-down to sun-up being yet another 'day'.
The 365 days per year is also a rather recent historical concept. There will be others herein more knowledgeable than I, but early on you had civilizations that recognized the 'lunar' year: i.e., 12 full moons equal one 'year'. That did not really work, of course, since a lunar year does not equate the 'solar' year by some 11 days or so, hence in pretty short order the 'seasons' were messed up.
I am not sure when the concept of dividing up the day into 24 hours arose. I believe it was in or soon after the 'dark ages'. We certainly had clocks by the time of Shakespeare (1600), since he famously messed up by (in the play Julius Caesar) having a Roman character refer to 'what o' clock it was', long before clocks were invented. I believe that the invention of a 'clock' helped early explorers sail around the Earth.
I think maybe you misinterpreted me, I was not suggesting that our concept of a day is thousands of years. I was saying that 'even' thousands of years ago ancient people were saying that a day was 24 hours. And yes maybe back then that is what people considered it and today what people consider it as well but since it seems to be simply a concept of 'our' understanding of time and what constitutes a day or even a week for that matter may not even be the same as to what God meant when he said a week or even a day. Not only concepts but meanings of words change throughout time. Therefor is 24 hours in a day or 7 days in a week an accurate account of how many hours or days are really in a day or week or can we even really say other then apply to it what we would like it to be? I would try to keep this conversation secular though if possible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by legalsea
Short answer: yes, it is an interesting concept to learn about.
You will learn, for instance, that our concept of a day is not 'thousands' of years old. Indeed, I believe that back in the days of Jesus a 'day' was considered sun-up to sun-down, with sun-down to sun-up being yet another 'day'.
The 365 days per year is also a rather recent historical concept. There will be others herein more knowledgeable than I, but early on you had civilizations that recognized the 'lunar' year: i.e., 12 full moons equal one 'year'. That did not really work, of course, since a lunar year does not equate the 'solar' year by some 11 days or so, hence in pretty short order the 'seasons' were messed up.
I am not sure when the concept of dividing up the day into 24 hours arose. I believe it was in or soon after the 'dark ages'. We certainly had clocks by the time of Shakespeare (1600), since he famously messed up by (in the play Julius Caesar) having a Roman character refer to 'what o' clock it was', long before clocks were invented. I believe that the invention of a 'clock' helped early explorers sail around the Earth.
I totally disagree. I've been doing a lot of thinking about time since, like everyone else, I'm running out of it, and I going to aim my ire at Islam for this one. Although I do think network TV should share some of the blame, along with internet porn, the CIA, the dairy industry, and to a lesser extent, the NBA's Denver Nuggets.
It takes the Moon to revolve around earth approximately 27 1/4 days- This is basically how we determined how many days are in a month, although I'm not sure why certain months have 31 days, while others have 30 days and only one has 28(close to the Moon revolution). I need to brush on that, but it's all based on what astronomy tells us.
I definitely believe that biological time is real. I figured if it weren't real, then we wouldn't be getting old in the face, arms, the entire body and becoming weaker in age after prime years.
Last edited by Chicagoland60426; 12-26-2011 at 09:19 AM..
There are some aspects of time that are completely objective, including:
A day is the length of time that it takes the earth to make on complete rotation on its axis,
A solar year is 365.24 days, and
A lunar cycle is 29.53 days.
Outside of these objective measurements, time is subjective, and humans have spent centuries trying to mesh these measurements together in a coherent system, as the need to figure out optimal planting and harvesting times became important for the agriculturalists.
Because the year is so long, the need to break down the year into smaller divisions sparked the the concept of months. Some groups tried to do this using a lunar month, but a lunar year is only 354/355 days, so this system became out of sync with the solar year (which was more important to track than the lunar year). In any event, since most solar years have 12 lunar months, the concept of 12 months a year was born. Other groups used star groupings (constellations) that became visible at certain times of the year to divide the year into months, and still others counted the number days between the equinoxes and the solstices to predict the seasons.
Months were further broken down into weeks to make things a little more manageable. It is speculated by many historians that the concept of 7 day weeks stems from the fact that a each of the four phases of the moon is roughly 7 days.
The 24 hour day probably originated with the Egyptians who used base 12 math instead of base 10 math. They divided daylight into 12 hours and nighttime into 12 hours. Because the amount of sunlight varied at different times of the year, there was no set time for each hour. Only with the advent of clocks did hours become a fixed length.
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