Horology (continued) / Newtonian Time vs. Darwinian Time / Time for Prayers / Time aboard a ship at sea

Click on chart for larger.

Horology is the branch of the quantitative sciences which deals with Time, its nature, its properties, measuring it, and inventing, improving and fixing machines which measure it -- clocks, sundials, cylindrical candles, water-dripping contraptions (clepsydra, if you must know, from the Greek κλέψτε), etc. It is a very ancient science, because the human desire to know what time it is -- and the date, too -- is an ancient and important desire.

When you and your extended family are wandering Nomads, you can get by with Day, Night, Summer, Winter, Spring, Fall and Moon Phase.

But when you settle down and start to grow a domesticated starch plant for your primary sustenance, the nuts and bolts of Time and the Calendar become extremely important. People start wanting to know if it's 2:30 pm yet, and they start inventing machines to tell them if it's 2:30 pm yet.

Here are the names of the daily Christian (almost all denominations, communions and rites) prayers, which cloistered orders still observe each day -- well, here's the Wiki with information and the names:

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Canonical hours
Prior to the Second Vatican Council

By the end of the fifth century, the Liturgy of the Hours was composed of a Vigil or Night Service and seven day offices, of which Prime and Compline seem to be the last to appear, since the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions VIII, iv, 34 does not mention them in the exhortation: "Offer up your prayers in the morning, at the third hour, the sixth, the ninth, the evening, and at cock-crowing".

These eight hours were known by the following names:

* Matins (during the night), sometimes referred to as Vigils or Nocturns, or in monastic usage the Night Office; it is now called the Office of Readings

* Lauds or Dawn Prayer (at Dawn)

* Prime or Early Morning Prayer (First Hour = 6 a.m.)

* Terce or Mid-Morning Prayer (Third Hour = 9 a.m.)

* Sext or Midday Prayer (Sixth Hour = 12 noon)

* None or Mid-Afternoon Prayer (Ninth Hour = 3 p.m.)

* Vespers or Evening Prayer ("at the lighting of the lamps")

* Compline or Night Prayer (before retiring)

Saint Benedict of Nursia (c. 480 – 543) is credited with having given this organization to the Liturgy of the Hours. However, his scheme was taken from that described by John Cassian, in his two major spiritual works, the Institutes and the Conferences, in which he described the monastic practices of the Desert Fathers of Egypt.

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On a ship at sea (or docked or berthed or at anchor), time is reckoned according to the chart (filched from the "Ship's Bell" Wiki) at the top of the post. The pattern of rings of the ship's bell is also shown.

(Leave a Comment if you know these phrases in any other lingo, I would really appreciate it.)

A year is divided into 365 (or 366) days; a day into 24 hours; an hour into 60 minutes; a minute into 60 seconds; and so forth. How much further can Time be divided? Infinitessimally?

Physicists don't talk about it much, but there's a theoretical indivisible time particle called the chronon, and that's the smallest increment of time; a chronon cannot be further divided into a smaller duration of time. I don't know how short a chronon is, but it's real brief. If you know anything else about chronons, please Leave a Comment.

The classical physics exemplified by Isaac Newton describes physical motion by equations which, curiously enough, run mathematically equally well in both directions; cannonballs fall up as well as down; planets go around the Sun clockwise or, the same equation says, counterclockwise.

But by the 19th century, it became clear that these Newtonian equations -- brilliant and useful as they are -- are deceptive and do not truly reflect the way the Universe works.

There is an Arrow Of Time, and it points in just one direction. The Past is fundamentally different from and cannot be mistaken for The Future.

Time that goes in only one direction is often called Darwinian Time, after the system of biological evolution which Charles Darwin first described.

In Darwinian Time, an amoeba can evolve into a lizard or a baseball player in a few billion years and a few million generations.

But a baseball player can never reproduce to "devolve" into a future amoeba. Evolution cannot turn back on itself, and neither can pre- or non-biological phenomena which changes with time. Throughout the Biota, it is easy to see which forms arose earlier than (and are descended from) other forms.

The Arrow Of Time, in fact, points eventually toward The Heat Death Of The Universe -- a future state in which everywhere in the Universe will be equally cold, and therefore lack the physical or chemical potential for any change to take place. (This won't happen anytime soon, you have time to make plans, achieve career goals, and make new friends.)