A Set of Don's Thoughts About Time

The concept of "Time" is a thing that dominates virtually every aspect of our lives, attuned to the rigid, unflinching regularity of hours, minutes and seconds
We all know of this today as something that "ticks" that (IMHO) began with the creation of our universe about 13.8 billion years ago… view a 30-minute video on YouTube?
I created a website a few years back about some historical perspectives around time that shares further info

Scientific perspectives show that its a measure of change within a physical system and therefore could not have been available before our universe. Alternatively, if time was just a property of existence itself, then something akin to time might have existed eternally in a higher-dimensional or in a quantum sense…… not very likely in my opinion!

The daily events around our lives since we were apes hundreds of thousands of years ago were each nature-based and were been ***exactly*** the same anywhere on Earth:
   the daily rising of the Sun to the east,
   it crossing the sky and setting to the west at various moments
   as our seasons changed from spring to summer, fall to winter;
   we were all awakened in the morning with the light and returned to sleep when it became dark!

Various features of time ( like the hours and minutes ) are described below and were named as such as they were invented by early mankind

In the late summer of 2025 I started gathering some various concepts of time ( a Sumerian view; details are below ) and created this interesting report on Time using AI ( ChatGPT ) to examine what time might be… an interesting read & a great introduction!! I also built some others for research, using Grok and Gemini

A book named Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer was written by Georges Ifrah (and translated by David Bello) in the late '90s:
"a wonderfully comprehensive overview of numbers and counting spanning all the inhabited continents as far back in time as records will allow us to look.
Beyond the ancient Babylonians, Sumerians, and Indians, Ifrah takes us farther south into Africa to examine an early decimal counting system and into ancient Mexico to reconstruct what we can of the Mayan calendar and numerical system. His thoughts share that he wants 'to provide in simple and accessible terms the full and complete answer to all and any questions about the history of numbers and counting, from prehistory to the age of computers,' which led him to wander the world for 10 years in the '90s, studying and learning; the scholastic pilgrim returned with amazing stories to tell, making the book truly universal"

Today, most adults are awakened with a time-based device: our iPhones, an alarm-clock, an automated light, etc and we return to sleep when we are tired

Measuring time-based events by us during a day didn't start until civilizations began to form several thousand years ago in the Mesopotamian area in the center of West Asia…

Previously, our ancestors who had lived in Africa several million years ago slept in trees at night for safety whilst foraging for food during the day; they later lived in caves, discovering fire and making it burn to be warm and to cook the meat. They broke rocks to form the sharp chisels that cut their meat & helped them skin their kills for blankets & warm clothes, with our Homo Sapiens species arriving there perhaps 300,000 years ago, eventually surpassing all other human species ( an hour-long YouTube report )

Looking further back at life on our planet, the existence of all life required the earlier stars to explode, creating from their hydrogen and helium molecules the essential parts of what makes us what we are, carbon, iron, etc. The very 1^st cell of life to replicate itself was clearly the result of innumerable attempts, created perhaps a billion years after the Earth was formed; while still not yet fully understood, its formation is assumed to have occurred a very long time ago deep in the oceans around the fumaroles at tectonic plate boundaries, wrapping the elements of the cell with a skin. The existence of life also totally depends on our magnetic core, which still today shields everything from the Sun's lethal radiation

While the concepts of "Time Travel" do exist ( as portrayed by Dr. Who on TV, watched by me back in 1963 ), its not physically possible as of this writing in 2025 for a human to do this!
Many books have been written, some fiction ( the H.G. Wells 1895 novel, The Time Machine ) & some not ( Sean Carrols' novel, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time )…its a fact that time does in fact change but in such small amounts that its not noticeable by us

About 4,500 years ago the ancient Sumerian people created in the city of Umma a system of measuring time
They established a way to use their fingers to record things, storing the results on clay tablets
They used the 3 sections of each of their fingers on their left hand to count, totaling up to 12, and with their right hand totaled things further: 12-24-36-48-60

Subsequently, an abacus was invented to improve counting

Moving on from counting & time, the Sumerians created a calendar using 12 lunar cycles, 354 days rounded up to 360, forming 12 months at 30 days each. What differentiated their calendar system from any other lunar calendars of this time was the way they measured time: calculations were all heavily based on the numbers 6, 12 and 60, and are still in use today
The Babylonians later created a different view of a calendar using the 12 constellations of the many in the sky about 3,500 years ago
They are (counter-clockwise) Aquarius (a Water Bearer) which represents January, Pisces (the Latin plural of a fish), Aries (the Ram), Taurus (the Bull), Gemini (the Twins), Cancer (a Crab), Leo (a Lion), Virgo (a Maiden), Libra (the Scales), Scorpio (a Scorpion), Sagittarius (the Archer) and Capricorn (a Goat)

This subsequently evolved to the usage of a seven-day week, based upon the celestial bodies that were visible to them: the Sun, the Moon, and five planets; they also used the approximate four-week cycle of the moon. It was later adopted by the Greeks from the people in the Near East and the Romans then adopted it from the Greeks. Around 46BC, Roman leader Julius Ceaser directed Sosigenes of Alexandria to devise a better calendar which was then in use

Measurements of today’s daily time are where a day has precisely 23 hours, 56 minutes and ~4.09 seconds and a year that takes 365.2422 of them: 365x+5 hours+48 minutes+46-ish seconds which will certainly change in the future! These were managed by the Babylonians and others by the use of a water clock, a "clepsydra" ( 1^st noted to have been in use around 1417BC, when the priests at Karnak were determining the idea of “hours” with these ) and the use of a Greek sundial, providing time measures during daylight.… This led to our hours & minutes in the early middle ages

Julius Ceaser restructured the Roman calendar to better cover each annual cycle that we made around the Sun ( once thought to be the Sun moving around the Earth, considered the central point of everything! ) from the then existing 10 months to 12 months. The name of the 1st month in a year was also changed at that time from March to January, and the 2nd month became February. July and August were also moved out to the 7th and 8th months and were renamed as July ( which had been named "Quintilis," Latin for fifth ) after Julius Ceaser in his honor, and August ( named at that time as "Sextillia," sixth ) was named after Augustus Ceaser 35 years later… The remaining months, September thru December still have names that reflect derivations of their Romanic index, September from "septem" ( seven ), October from "octo" ( eight ), etc, etc

As an interesting aside, Julian dates ( used in computer programming ) differ totally today: a Julian date is the number of elapsed days since the beginning of a fixed cycle, invented in 1583, designed to simplify computing a difference between two calendar dates. Today's Gregorian calendar had been amended in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII to correct for the inadvertent Leap Year error: an extra day had been inserted in the Julian calendar at the end of February every 4th year to correct for a year of 365.25 days, but because the Romans couldn't measure time with sufficient precision, a Julian year was discovered to be too long at that time by exactly 11 minutes and 14 seconds

A view of the Frequently Asked Questions in Cosmology by Prof. Edward L. (Ned) Wright is here and is of interest too

Well, that’s all I care to share here about time… please feel free to contact me (above) with your thoughts, comments or observations? Cheers!