Word: timed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sometimes it flies, sometimes it crawls, but it always passes inexorably. We mark it, save it, waste it, bide it, race against it. We measure it incessantly, with a passion for precision that borders on the obsessive. Time is so vitally enmeshed with the fabric of our existence, in fact, that it's hard even to conceive of it as an independent entity--and when we try, the result is less than enlightening. Pondering the mystery of what time really is, St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, "If no one asks me, I know; but if any person should require...
Indeed, while scientists have harnessed the power of the atom, cracked the genetic code and probed the very edges of the universe, they still don't understand time much better than St. Augustine did. Yet now, as the last few days of the second millennium tick rapidly away (though diehard purists still insist it doesn't really end for another year), we seem more fascinated with the subject than ever. At the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, crowds are flocking to a new exhibition, "The Story of Time," which examines time from cultural, religious, artistic and scientific viewpoints. On this...
...illusion that has appeared in very different guises to different groups. Says Greenwich observatory director Kristen Lippencott, who put together the British exhibition: "Time is not the thing on our wrists. Time is a cultural object." For many outside the Western European tradition, for instance, time is a circle that turns on a daily, yearly and even a cosmic scale. The Hindu concept of reincarnation is perhaps the most familiar example, but the Hopi in the American Southwest and the Inuit in the Arctic also look at the world as a series of repeating cycles with no beginning...
...Judeo-Christian West, however, time is a line, marching steadily from the past to the future. As Lippencott puts it, "God never moves backward." Deward Walker, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that this way of viewing time is "part of the reason we have such an advanced science, technology and economy, such mastery of nature and dominance of the universe...
Technology, in turn, has led to our obsession with ultraprecise timekeeping and time management. Before the Industrial Revolution, the exact time of day or year mattered only to those in specialized jobs, such as astrologers and sailors. For the rest, the day began at dawn, noon was when the sun was highest in the sky, and sunset wrapped things up. Says Carleen Stephens, who curated the Smithsonian show, in 1790 fewer than 10% of Americans had a clock of any kind in their homes, and most of those had no minute hand...