re: Where did the concept of a clock come from?

Can you imagine if you dumped minds like daVinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Copernicus, et al, what wonders they might conceive. Even Einstein with the past 70 years of knowledge would be something to observe.

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Can you imagine if you dumped minds like daVinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Copernicus, et al, what wonders they might conceive. Even Einstein with the past 70 years of knowledge would be something to observe.

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They'd, unfortunately, likely do nothing. Genius is a product of its time. The first guy who made the intellectual leap to strap a rock to a stick and use it to hit that dude he hates at work in the back of the head was a brilliant armorer for his day, but that doesn't mean he can then understand a nuclear weapon if you plop one in front of him. Even if the level of raw intelligence two people have is equal, the experiences and baseline knowledge are not.

Think of it this way: Albert Einstein did nothing of note after 1915 and most of what he did was done in 1905. He died in 1955. For a brief moment he was at the cutting edge of theoretical physics. In 1905, his work on Brownian motion proved atoms existed and his work on the photoelectric effect (which won him the Nobel prize, NOT relativity) set in place the development, by others, of quantum mechanics. However, even the mighty Einstein was unable to believe in quantum mechanics (though he really was instrumental in triggering its development), and he was utterly unable to add anything further of note along that path of exploration for the rest of his life.

And that's just the example of Einstein not being able to do anything after 1905 with Brownian motion or the photoelectric effect. If we want to talk about relativity, Michelson and Morley did an experiment in the 1880s involving the speed of light that gave them results that didn't make sense. They measured the speed of light and just KNEW it had to be different depending on the details of the experiment. However, every time they measured the speed of light it was the same rock-solid and invariant value. They and the whole physics community just could not fully wrap their minds around the null results (invariant speed of light) they were getting. They, like Einstein later, were unable to make the conceptual leap that allowed them to progress beyond a certain point that their experiences and preconceptions defined.

It wasn't until 1905 that Einstein came along and was willing to take the results of Michelson and Morley's experiment (even if he wasn't directly influenced by the experiment) 100% at face value, to say that Michelson and Morley were correct in their findings, and figure out the implications of those findings. This is ALL that Special Relativity basically is: the assertion that the speed of light is invariant for all observers in inertial frames anywhere and anywhen in the universe and the implications of that assertion. For the next ten years he worked on the General theory. And then... nothing... for the next forty years. Michelson and Morley said the speed of light is invariant, but were ill-equipped to handle the implications of that statement and that's why you probably never heard of them before this story. Einstein was ill-equipped to handle the implications of his own work on the photoelectric effect and that's why you don't hear his name associated with quantum mechanics even though he was alive for it all.

Genius is part having the perfect surfboard, part being in the right place to catch the perfect wave for your board, and part recognizing that wave and having the balls to ride it.

Yep. Timekeeping as a concept only needs to be as accurate as your needs.

If you're an agrarian society, if you can measure time to an accuracy of seasons, you're golden because you'll know when to plant and when to harvest.

If you're a religious society that needs to pray several times a day, you need the time down to an hour or so in order to not offend the Lord.

If you're running a railroad, you need time accurate down to minutes so trains using the same track don't run into each other.

It's usually technological or societal demand for greater timekeeping accuracy that drives development of better clocks, not the other way around. People don't know they need better clocks until they realize they need better clocks, if that makes sense.

If you ain't got no job and you ain't got shite to do, you don't need an alarm clock to know when it's 6 am, you just need to know it's Friday. Someone inventing the alarm clock won't magically change that.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

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Standing on the shoulders of giants

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I loved that book. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Einstein, and Newton through the lens of Hawking.

Also, the phrase is 100% true. You can't run until you can walk and you can't walk until you can crawl. In science, someone's gotta learn the hard way to crawl before someone else has a chance to walk.

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They didn't have a metric system back then.

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Thank goodness. Gay-assed system.

Take out the trash.

I did.

When?

A dekaminute ago.

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And why are there counters like Seconds, minutes and hours?

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Because lasting under a minute sounds better than lasting three seconds, according to a friend.

The Mayans