Time and Its Measure: Historical and Social Implications

Abstract

Time and frequency are quantities that have seen a proliferation and diffusion of tools, unimaginable until a few decades ago, and whose application implications are multiplying in a digital society, now characterized by an absolute lack of temporal and spatial limits. Today’s world requires a perfect synchronism of human activities, both for the need to identify with certainty the moment of commercial transactions and to accurately describe biological phenomenologies, which affect the social life of individuals to the point of having repercussions on issues such as safety, production and manufacturing organization. In this regard, the recent award of the Nobel Prize for Medicine for the discovery of the gene capable of controlling our internal biological clock is significant. This paper describes the social implications connected to time measurements, analyzing some very original application effects, ranging from the typical cadences of production activities to sports applications, going so far as to highlight its apparent anomaly of adopting, unlike all other physical quantities, duodecimal and/or sexagesimal scales. Real time and perceived time can both converge and diverge, and this is almost never objectifiable, as it varies from individual to individual, according to individual experiences or sensitivities. This paper is a point of reflection attempting to understand how the chronology of major historical events influenced the organization of time as it is known today and how we arrived at actual measuring instruments so accurate and interconnected with the social sphere. The evolution of calendars and instruments for measuring relative time is described in terms of their specificity.