That was how we started our discussion on concepts of Time, which turned out to be lots of fun and quite wide-ranging.
The perception of time is often quite subjective, but the measurement of time is culturally dictated.
I recalled when I was a child and had trouble understanding how to use a calendar. The use of a wall calendar can seem quite intuitive to adults, but it requires some underlying assumptions that are not in place with children. Adults tend to have figured out how to keep track of what day of the week it is, and usually have some sense of how deep they are into any given month. Both types of information are necessary to pinpoint "where we are" on a calendar and identify the day of the month, and thereby get connected up to the right reminders. Phones are nice because they keep track of both time and date on the basis of outside infrastructure!
How do you tell one day from another? Religious observations can create a sense of differentiation, as can school, work, and other habitual activities. How do you tell one week from another? Japanese has words that describe different sections of the month. Something like Advent can help you keep track. What other indicators might you use?
Cliff mentioned "Repent Harlequin..." in which time was revoked from a person's life if they were late. It was a tyranny of time. He also noted that when he was little his teacher used to write the date in numerical format on the board, and he watched it change but it never meant anything to him.
Teaching kids to tell time is a culturally important activity but it is also far more challenging than just learning numbers. What the numbers mean is not necessarily clear. We often assume experience that children don't or can't have.
There are many different types of calendars. Some of these are: Mayan, Gregorian, Muslim, Jewish, Chinese. Some groups use more than one type of calendar at a time.
Different cultural groups don't necessarily agree on when the day starts. Does it start at midnight? At sunset? At sunrise?
Different things on the calendar are considered important by different cultural groups.
The French Revolutionaries invented their own calendar, which is not used today.
I talked about "baby time," which is how a new parent's perception of time gets distorted. The minutes and hours feel like they are very long, but the weeks fly by. Having children also made me feel like I had "restarted time," because at a certain point in my life the years became so similar it was hard for me to tell if I had done something 3 years ago, say, or 5 years ago. Children provide a distinct form of time cue, both visual and developmental.
Boredom can make time stretch. Dread can make time stretch, or contract. Adrenaline can cause our perception of time to change, a phenomenon which is often shown in movies using slow-motion action.
The 6 Million Dollar Man's super-speed was rendered in slow motion. The Bionic Woman's speed was rendered by showing her in fast motion.
When you tell a child it's going to be "one more minute," how does that affect their learning about time?
People have often tracked the passage of time by watching the sun, stars, and moon phases. On the sea, people have used the stars to navigate, as well as time tracking.
Earth's rotation is actually slowing down very gradually. In the time of the dinosaurs, a day was only 21 hours long.
How do you tell time in space when days are not the same length? Martian days are called sols, and if you are working on the Mars Rover, you measure your time in sols as well.
Vernor Vinge in his books used seconds as a measurement to create a widely applicable time system. In this system, a kilosecond was one of the measurements. Some fictional time systems have run on the basis of the operations of a computer system.
In Cliff's Martian Steampunk story, Mars had to run off Greenwich mean time, which caused plenty of trouble.
What about time zones? Time zones are relatively recent invention, and Paul noted that on their borders they get a little weird. It means we have to be accustomed to specifying which time zone we are in when we have an arrangement to make (like Dive into Worldbuilding!). What if there were no time zones? If it were the same numerical time across the world, sunrise and sunset would be at very different hours across the world, as would work hours. You would always know the time across the world, but you wouldn't necessarily know what the time meant about what people would be doing.
"Zulu" time is linked to Greenwich mean time.
24 hour clocks are used in many places across the world. In France they are used for official scheduling but not for casual discussions of time.
There tends to be a cultural standard for when people are expected to be awake and to be asleep.
Before time zones, everywhere had its own time, and you had to look to a central indicator like the town clock tower to see what local people understood the time to be. The development of rail made synchrony necessary.
Morgan pointed out that time perception might also be influenced by longevity. Vampires, who are long-lived but started as human, would likely perceive 24-hour days, but their perception of years would be altered. Anne Rice handled this quite well in Interview with the Vampire, when her characters would lose track of decades. They lived in one endless night, but they had human time perception.
What about long-lived aliens interacting with humans? Vernor Vinge's skroderiders had no short-term memory and used carts to help them with that. Tolkien's ents took forever to have a conversation and thought everyone else was hasty. In Robert Forward's Dragon Egg, people lived on the surface of a neutron star, and the high-gravity field meant that time went faster. Black holes and faster-than-light travel can lead to temporal paradoxes.
Tools for timekeeping: calendars, clocks, watches, shadows, megaliths
Musical time is another form of time measurement. Language has its own time measurements as well (syllables and morae).
On a planet without moons, how do you measure time? Do you have such a thing as a month? I mentioned the meme I had seen on facebook about an early calendar that was a bone with twenty-eight scoremarks. The text said that this had been called "man's first calendar," but in fact perhaps it should be "woman's first calendar." One could use cyclical body processes like periods to help keep time.
What happens when artificial intelligences perceive time? Ann Leckie does an interesting job with that in her books. Frederik Pohl had a virtual reality space with uploaded humans, and talked about how "meatspace" was very slow. People who had been uploaded would create an avatar to speak for them, step away to do other things and then come back at the end of the interaction.
Some calendars are anchored by major historical events. The "seasons" in N.K. Jemisin's broken earth series are time markers, and each one is named for a terrible thing that happened during the upheaval. You could imagine a village that had been attacked by a dragon calling that year "the year of the dragon." (There's a very different kind of year of the dragon in the Chinese zodiac cycle.) In the Dragon Age universe, what they had planned to call the Year of the King became the Century of the Dragon. The Japanese calendar counts years based on who the emperor is at any given time, and concurrently counts years in the international standard. The international standard, of course, counts time based on the birth of a religious figure (approximately). The Jewish calendar counts from the creation of the world, which it calculates on the basis of the descriptions of the generations in the Bible. Rome counted years since its foundation as a city.
Why would you pick one of these or the other? Sometimes it may be arbitrary/intuitive, but sometimes it might be for a particular reason. In my world of Varin, the years are tracked from the start of a particular ruler's reign. This got started because someone in history thought it was important to obscure the actual number of years that the society had actually existed. In The Left Hand of Darkness, in Karhide, the current year is always the Year One, and everything else has to be recalculated on that basis. The Shire has its own calendar.
Sometimes a calendar will have "extra days" at the end of a year. The Aztec calendar had five days at the end of the year where you weren't supposed to do anything. We have leap years where we add an extra day.
Let's think about hours, minutes, and seconds. Why do we use a base-60 system for measuring time? I actually learned about this from one of my kids' books, and it's really cool. We often think of base-10 as intuitive because we have 10 fingers. In fact, base-60 is intuitive for the very same reason. Imagine that you are going to use your right thumb to point and count. Start by pointing it at each of the knuckles of your fingers on your right hand: you will get to 12. Then multiply those 12 by the 5 fingers of your left hand, and you will get 60!
I talked about designing the time scheme I use for Varin. I decided they gauged seconds on the basis of the fluctuation of a star that they were able to observe, and then worked through doubling. The weird result is that Varin minutes have 64 seconds and Varin hours have 64 minutes. The day is about the same length as ours, so they only have 22 hours. People immediately told me this would be very confusing. And it would, except that I never actually mention the details of how their time system works. Varini will talk about forenoon and noon and afternoon (noon is 11 o'clock). The only thing that should stick out to people reading the book is that people tend to estimate minutes in multiples of 4 instead of multiples of 5.
If you are working in a secondary world, make sure you think through how people talk about time. There are a lot of non-numeric ways to refer to it.
You know when "dinnertime" is. But the hour at which it occurs depends on the country you live in, and your age. At my college it was 5pm. In France, it's 7:30pm or later. In Spain, it's generally 9 or later. This can vary widely.
Paul remarked that in his childhood he used to have a snack at 8pm, so he'd call that snacktime "eight o'clock," as in, "What's for eight o'clock?"
There are analog ways to measure time as well as digital.
We often use spatial metaphors to talk about time.
Cliff pointed out you can count time with a metronome. You can also count musical time based on your breath, as they do in gagaku, where the Taiko player is the one who provides the time guidance for other members of the group.
You can use a drummer to time the use of oars.
Tonya told us about a story she wrote where a person could time travel if they had a photo to focus on to take them to that time (and developed an addictive habit of visiting a dead girlfriend).
Overall, this was a fast-moving and fascinating discussion. Next week, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet on Thursday, September 6 due to Labor Day and my husband's birthday. We will be discussing Attraction, Affection, and Love (and how we talk about them). I hope you can join us!
#SFWApro
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