Time

[Wayne Goodwin]

When Did Time Start ?

Could it be when the big event happen ?

Just don't think so . Maybe Time started when Adam took his first gasp of Air , bet he didn't know what air was . 

Could it have been when Christ died on the cross , dought it . Me thinking it was when Christ arose and descended in Heaven . That seems what our time is based on by Man ...

[Lifesighs]

Billions of years ago, I hope you're joking about the biblical stuff Wayne. The universe has been around for a long time it didn't start with religion, even the older religions.

[Wayne Goodwin]

I AM not saying Religion started time . Who started the time we live by . All I have to go by is BC and AC . Sure we know that Earth is billions of years or more old . When did the calendar , who started it .

[Snagg]

Wayne, "We" don't all use the SAME calendar; Many observant jews use their own calendar. (According to them, it's currently the year 5774.)

The Western world used the Julian calendar (named for Julius Caesar) until 1580-something, when we switched to the Gregorian system - So named because pope Gregory got fed up with the Julian's sloppiness, which was messing up the roman catholic church's desire to keep Easter in the early spring - So he ordered some tweaking done.

I think it's the Mayans who have the most accurate earth-based calendar in history; Thousands of years before we quibbled over Julian or Gregorian, the Mayans had figured out a system so dead-on that they never needed Leap Years.

Many cultures have had their own calendar systems - The ancient Chinese used the Han calendar, which was based on cycles of both the sun and the moon. The Egyptians had a year of 360 days with five leftovers to party with. Many modern businesses use something called "Julian dating" for document registration. There IS no hard and fast "first" calendar.

[Wayne Goodwin]

Thanks

[Shadowman]

There is a cultural view of time attributed often to the rise of Christianity and that is linear time, that is, a beginning and end. The opposing view of the ancients, many eastern religions, pagans, and some of the native religions is that of cyclical time. But with Christianity came the beginning in their view and some day the End of Day, End Time, the Apocalypse, etc..

 

To add to Snag's account, cultures sometimes measured time from the eruption of a volcano, or since the reign of king so and so, or a war. Or in the case of the Romans the mythical Year of the Construction of the City (Rome), Anno Urbis Conditae.  So calendar studies are full of designations for ways of measuring time: AUD, AD, BC, BCE, BP, AH (Anno Hijra, which is the year Muhammed traveled from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD), etc.  The current Islamic year is 1435 AH which ends in October. The math between 622 and 1435 in AH does not come out for us because they measure in lunar months which average a little over 29.5 days. And so it goes. Think of all the grief historical and scientific writers have to go through to make all the dates correspond to our equivalent.

[P.A.]

Wayne may I recommend "A Short History of Time" by Stephen Hawking. That should clear up any questions you have.

[Shadowman]

Yes, Hawking's book is good. Also Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything covers this a little and "Everything" as well. Both can be found on CD or Audio Book version as well I believe. On the other hand, time may just be something peculiar to the human mind to help make sense of it all. We use cause and effect, movement, aging, change in location, form, etc. to make sense of the universe and at least for humans none of that works without the element of time (and space). I am paraphrasing Immanuel Kant here I am sure.

[Snagg]

A quote attributed to John Wheeler: "Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

[Wayne Goodwin]

Plan on reading Hawkins book . Right now I'm reading  Cosmos by Carl Sagan .

[crestofwaves]

After reading all this, I have a question: When did all the cultures get on the same page with time? The religious stuff is not too far fetched. Remember BC and AD?  That doesn't mean there is actual mysticism behind those dates, but they were all about the birth of Christ.  Did the Church start time all over the world?  How did we agree on those dates?

[Snagg]

The Gregorian calendar, I believe, became the kind-of world standard in the 1600's, as more and more once-isolated cultures began to plow into each other, and the necessities of trading and commerce underlined the need for a commonly-shared system for coordinating shipping schedules, arrivals, payments, debts and the other requirements for basic book-keeping. It was there, it was less complicated and fussy than some other cultures calendar's and it just kind of got adopted as a result.

I think that's reasonably accurate - Been a long time since I read about that topic, but that's how I remember it...

[crestofwaves]

Thanks, Snagg.  Makes sense.