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Dictionary:

time

  (tīm) pronunciation
n.
    1. A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.
    2. An interval separating two points on this continuum; a duration: a long time since the last war; passed the time reading.
    3. A number, as of years, days, or minutes, representing such an interval: ran the course in a time just under four minutes.
    4. A similar number representing a specific point on this continuum, reckoned in hours and minutes: checked her watch and recorded the time, 6:17 A.M.
    5. A system by which such intervals are measured or such numbers are reckoned: solar time.
    1. An interval, especially a span of years, marked by similar events, conditions, or phenomena; an era. Often used in the plural: hard times; a time of troubles.
    2. times The present with respect to prevailing conditions and trends: You must change with the times.
  3. A suitable or opportune moment or season: a time for taking stock of one's life.
    1. Periods or a period designated for a given activity: harvest time; time for bed.
    2. Periods or a period necessary or available for a given activity: I have no time for golf.
    3. A period at one's disposal: Do you have time for a chat?
  5. An appointed or fated moment, especially of death or giving birth: He died before his time. Her time is near.
    1. One of several instances: knocked three times; addressed Congress for the last time before retirement.
    2. times Used to indicate the number of instances by which something is multiplied or divided: This tree is three times taller than that one. My library is many times smaller than hers.
    1. One's lifetime.
    2. One's period of greatest activity or engagement.
    3. A person's experience during a specific period or on a certain occasion: had a good time at the party.
    1. A period of military service.
    2. A period of apprenticeship.
    3. Informal. A prison sentence.
    1. The customary period of work: hired for full time.
    2. The period spent working.
    3. The hourly pay rate: earned double time on Sundays.
  10. The period during which a radio or television program or commercial is broadcast: “There's television time to buy” (Brad Goldstein).
  11. The rate of speed of a measured activity: marching in double time.
  12. Music.
    1. The meter of a musical pattern: three-quarter time.
    2. The rate of speed at which a piece of music is played; the tempo.
  13. Chiefly British. The hour at which a pub closes.
  14. Sports. A time-out.
adj.
  1. Of, relating to, or measuring time.
  2. Constructed so as to operate at a particular moment: a time release.
  3. Payable on a future date or dates.
  4. Of or relating to installment buying: time payments.
tr.v., timed, tim·ing, times.
  1. To set the time for (an event or occasion).
  2. To adjust to keep accurate time.
  3. To adjust so that a force is applied or an action occurs at the desired time: timed his swing so as to hit the ball squarely.
  4. To record the speed or duration of: time a runner.
  5. To set or maintain the tempo, speed, or duration of: time a manufacturing process.
idioms:

against time

  1. With a quickly approaching time limit: worked against time to deliver the manuscript before the deadline.
at one time
  1. Simultaneously.
  2. At a period or moment in the past.
at the same time
  1. However; nonetheless.
at times
  1. On occasion; sometimes.
behind the times
  1. Out-of-date; old-fashioned.
for the time being
  1. Temporarily.
from time to time
  1. Once in a while; at intervals.
high time
  1. The appropriate or urgent time: It's high time that you started working.
in good time
  1. In a reasonable length of time.
  2. When or before due.
  3. Quickly.
in no time
  1. Almost instantly; immediately.
in time
  1. Before a time limit expires.
  2. Within an indefinite time; eventually: In time they came to accept the harsh facts.
  3. Music.
    1. In the proper tempo.
    2. Played with a meter.
on time
  1. According to schedule; punctual or punctually.
  2. By paying in installments.
time after time
  1. Again and again; repeatedly.
time and again
  1. Again and again; repeatedly.
time of (one's) life
  1. A highly pleasurable experience: We had the time of our lives at the beach.
time on (one's) hands
  1. An interval with nothing to do.
time was
  1. There was once a time: “Time was when [urban gangs] were part of a . . . subculture that inner-city adolescence outgrew” (George F. Will).

[Middle English, from Old English tīma.]


 
 
Sci-Tech Encyclopedia: Time

The dimension of the physical universe which orders the sequence of events at a given place; also, a designated instant in this sequence, such as the time of day, technically known as an epoch, or sometimes as an instant.

Measurement

Time measurement consists of count­ing the repetitions of any recurring phenom­enon and possibly subdividing the interval between repetitions. Two aspects to be considered in the measurement of time are frequency, or the rate at which the recurring phenomena occur, and epoch, or the designation to be applied to each instant.

Time units are the intervals between successive recurrences of phenomena, such as the period of rotation of the Earth or a specified number of periods of radiation derived from an atomic energy-level transition. Other units are arbitrary multiples and subdivisions of these intervals, such as the hour being 1/24 of a day, and the minute being 1/60 of an hour. See also Day; Month; Time-interval measurement; Year.

Time bases

Several phenomena are used as bases with which to determine time. The phenomenon traditionally used has been the rotation of the Earth, where the counting is by days. Days are measured by observing the meridian passages of stars and are subdivided with the aid of precision clocks. The day, however, is subject to variations in duration. Thus, when a more uniform time scale is required, other bases for time must be used.

The angle measured along the celestial equator between the observer's local meridian and the vernal equinox, known as the hour angle of the vernal equinox, is the measure of sidereal time. It is reckoned from 0 to 24 hours, each hour being subdivided into 60 sidereal minutes and the minutes into 60 sidereal seconds. Sidereal clocks are used for convenience in most astronomical observatories because a star or other object outside the solar system comes to the same place in the sky at virtually the same sidereal time.

The hour angle of the Sun is the apparent solar time. The only true indicator of local apparent solar time is a sundial. Mean solar time has been devised to eliminate the irregularities in apparent solar time that arise from the obliquity of the ecliptic and the varying speed of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. It is the hour angle of a fictitious point moving uniformly along the celestial equator at the same rate as the average rate of the Sun along the ecliptic. Both sidereal and solar time depend on the rotation of the Earth for their time base.

The mean solar time determined for the meridian of 0° longitude from the rotation of the Earth by using astronomical observations is referred to as UT1. Observations are made at a number of observatories around the world. The International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) receives these data and maintains a UT1 time scale. See also Earth rotation and orbital motion.

Because the Earth has a nonuniform rate of rotation and since a uniform time scale is required for many timing applications, a different definition of a second was adopted in 1967. The international agreement calls for the second to be defined as 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation derived from an energy-level transition in the cesium atom. This second is referred to as the international or SI (International System) second and is independent of astronomical observations. International Atomic Time (TAI) is maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) from data contributed by time-keeping laboratories around the world. See also Atomic time.

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) uses the SI second as its time base. However, the designation of the epoch may be changed at certain times so that UTC does not differ from UT1 by more than 0.9 s. UTC forms the basis for civil time in most countries and may sometimes be referred to as Greenwich mean time. The adjustments to UTC to bring this time scale into closer accord with UT1 consist of the insertion or deletion of integral seconds. These “leap seconds” may be applied at 23 h 59 m 59 s of June 30 or December 31 of each year according to decisions made by the IERS. UTC differs from TAI by an integral number of atomic seconds.

Civil and standard times

Because rotational time scales are defined as hour angles, at any instant they vary from place to place on the Earth. Persons traveling westward around the Earth must advance their time 1 day, and those traveling eastward must retard their time 1 day in order to be in agreement with their neighbors when they return home. The International Date Line is the name given to a line where the change of date is made. It follows approximately the 180th meridian but avoids inhabited land. To avoid the inconvenience of the continuous change of mean solar time with longitude, zone time or civil time is generally used. The Earth is divided into 24 time zones, each approximately 15° wide and centered on standard longitudes of 0°, 15°, 30°, and so on. Within each of these zones the time kept is the mean solar time of the standard meridian. See also International Date Line.

Many countries, including the United States, advance their time 1 hour, particularly during the summer months, into “daylight saving time.”

 
Thesaurus: time

noun

  1. A rather short period: bit1, space, spell3, while. See big/small/amount.
  2. The general point at which an event occurs: occasion. Idioms: point in time. See time.
  3. A limited or specific period of time during which something happens, lasts, or extends: duration, span, stretch, term. See time.
  4. A particular time notable for its distinctive characteristics. age, day, epoch, era, period. See time.
  5. A span designated for a given activity: period, season. See time.
  6. A term of service, as in the military or in prison: hitch, stretch, tour. See time.
  7. A limited, often assigned period of activity, duty, or opportunity: bout, go, hitch, inning (often used in plural), shift, spell3, stint, stretch, tour, trick, turn, watch. See time.

verb

  1. To set the time for (an event or occasion): plan, schedule. See time.
  2. To record the speed or duration of: clock. See remember/forget, time.

 
Measures and Units: time

Our world presents three conspicuous units of time: the day, the lunar month, and the year, being respectively the rotation of Earth about its own axis, the orbiting of the Moon about Earth, and that of Earth about the Sun; they can be representatively defined as the time between successive high noons, full moons and midsummers. Mankind has constructed calendars, clocks, and other time matters on the basis of these three apparently unchanging units. However, all three are lacking in constancy within the sensitivities of scientific instruments, and are changing progressively over time. The irregular shape of Earth, for instance, affects its rotation. The fact that gravitational orbiting follows an elliptical path with the ‘central’ body at an offset focus rather than the geometrical centre complicates the timing of any orbital travel. Additionally, such elliptical travel is inherently not steady in speed. The tilt of Earth's axis relative to its plane of travel (its ‘obliquity’) and of the Moon's plane of travel relative to that of Earth add further perturbing complications. Gravitational effects between bodies include more than mere orbiting; they tend to slow individual rotations, alter the axial direction of a tilted body (nutation) and, more importantly from the perspective of time measurement, cause the point that is situated at the focus of the elliptical orbit to be a compromise rather than the centre of the commanding body. This is particularly significant for the Earth-Moon pair because of their relative closeness in mass; what follows the orbital path around the Sun is not the centre of Earth but a moving point (their barycentre) about 4 600 km (2 875 mi, 36% of Earth's radius) from Earth's centre towards the centre of the Moon. Exaggerating, the pair travel like a pair of disparate balls tied together with a length of string, then thrown. The other planets add their (varying) influences to these motions. The solar system itself, our Galaxy (the Milky Way) and other elements of the heavens at large are all moving minutely relative to the larger framework, making even the so-called ‘fixed stars’ not absolutely fixed.

The key natural unit of time for human purposes is the apparent solar day, i.e. the value of the observed time for passage between consecutive high noons or other marks on the sundial (also called sundial day). The standard day of our clocks is the average such, the mean solar day. By definition, this equals 24 (mean solar) hours. Time on this base is referred to as (mean) solar time. For use within astronomy, however, it is more appropriate to work in terms of the revolution relative to the fixed stars, which gives sidereal time, with the sidereal day of 24 sidereal hours. Sidereal differs crucially rather than pedantically from solar time because of the one rotation of Earth that is ‘lost’ by the traverse of an orbit, a factor readily observable as the progressively changing midnight sky and providing the basis for zodiacal horoscopes, and which puts 366 sidereal days in the normal 365-day year. Midnight in sidereal time is when a designated star is precisely on the local celestial meridian (i.e. the imaginary planar circular arc running between the north and south points on the horizon and through the zenith), which is often during daylight hours! (This makes that one star, and many neighbours, not observable, but the relative time-offsets of a wide range of significant stars are known and catalogued.) As the interval between consecutive overhead circumstances for any one star also varies very slightly, in 1960 astronomers adopted a corresponding artificial regular time called Ephemeris Time, based on idealized motions for the three key bodies, standardized to the tropical year of 1900. For relative values and further discussion see day.

For most of history, the (mean solar) day has been the standard for the measurement of earthly time, divided into 24 hours, each hour containing 60 minutes, and each minute containing 60 seconds. For scientific use the definition was changed drastically in 1967 from the solar base to an atomic one; instead of being a specified fraction of a day the second became the key unit of time, as equalling 9 192 631 770 oscillations of the atom of caesium-133, creating atomic time. Atomic clocks are now the primary clocks, their rigid day of 86 400 seconds building TAI. The various discrepancies between that absolute scheme and the vagaries of nature are attended to within the framework of Universal Time, and can result in a second being added to else subtracted from the master (secondary) clocks that provide the reference for the world of science and even the street. For astronomical reference, Terrestrial Time, employing the ‘atomic’ second, has succeeded Ephemeris Time.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: time

Measured or measurable period. More broadly, it is a continuum that lacks spatial dimensions. Philosophers have sought an understanding of time by focusing on the broad questions of the relation between time and the physical world and the relation between time and consciousness. Those who adopt an absolutist theory of time regard it as a kind of container within which the universe exists and change takes place, and believe that its existence and properties are independent of the physical universe. According to the rival relationist theory, time is nothing over and above change in the physical universe. Largely because of Albert Einstein, it is now held that time cannot be treated in isolation from space (see space-time). Some argue that Einstein's theories of relativity vindicate relationist theories, others that they vindicate the absolutist theory. The primary issue concerning the relation between time and consciousness is the extent, if any, to which time or aspects of time depend on the existence of conscious beings. Events in time are normally thought of in terms of notions of past, present, and future, which some philosophers treat as mind-dependent; others believe that time is independent of perception and hold that past, present, and future are objective features of the world. See also geologic time, Greenwich Mean Time, standard time, Universal Time.

For more information on time, visit Britannica.com.

 
English Folklore: time

The basic way of experiencing time is not as a succession of fixed units (e.g. hours), but through three natural cycles: night and day, the moon's phases, and the year. The first is the most immediate, and the most charged with symbolic and emotional meanings; darkness is equated with the unknown, evil, and death, while light is equated with goodness, activity, the familiar world, life, and ultimately God. Nevertheless, in mythic thought darkness precedes light, and night precedes day, as can be seen both in Genesis 1 and in the Germanic and Celtic custom of counting nights rather than days. In modern time-keeping, as in Ancient Rome, a day begins immediately after midnight, not at dawn; in liturgical reckoning, a day begins at sunset (e.g. the Jewish Sabbath includes Friday evening, the first Mass of Easter Sunday is held on the Saturday night).

Within the night/day cycle, special importance was given to midnight and midday, and to certain transitional moments or periods—the first cock crow, dawn, and sunrise. Night, especially the period around midnight, belongs to ghostly, devilish, and uncanny forces, which humans should not risk meeting; however, this taboo also makes it a time of power, suitable for divinations and sinister magic, and those born at midnight were thought to have occult abilities (see chime hours). Dawn (or cockcrow) drives away the evil spirits of night; sunrise is right for healing rituals such as passing a child through a split ash or a bramble arch, and for various luck-bringing customs such as gathering May dew. Sunset and twilight, though of course relevant to the routine of daily work, are not associated with customs or serious beliefs, though children were until recently threatened with various bogeys if they stayed out late (see poldies, hytersprites).

The moon was mainly associated with agricultural and medicinal lore, since its waxing and waning was thought to affect plants, animals, and humans; there are customs linking luck to the new moon, and magic to the full moon.

Theoretically, the natural annual cycle repeats the night/day cycle on a larger scale, with midwinter and midsummer corresponding to midnight and midday, and the equinoxes to sunrise and sunset. In practice, this pattern is lacking in English tradition: the equinoxes are ignored and midsummer has lost much of its significance, while the midwinter period of Christmas and New Year has become overwhelmingly important. However, its associations are now almost wholly cheerful and benign; eeriness has been transferred to Halloween, leaving only a vague idea that telling ghost stories is a fitting amusement at Christmas.

See CALENDAR, DAYS OF THE WEEK, FRIDAY, MOON.

 
Architecture: time

Time limits or periods stated in the contract. A provision in a construction contract that “time is of the essence of the contract” signifies that the parties consider that punctual performance within the time limits or periods in the contract is a vital part of the performance and that failure to perform on time is a breach for which the injured party is entitled to damages in the amount of loss sustained, or is excused from any obligation of further performance, or both.

 
Philosophy Dictionary: time

The nature of time has been one of the major problems of philosophy since antiquity. Is time well thought of as flowing? If so, does it flow from future to past with us stuck like boats in the middle of the river, or does it flow from past to future, bearing us with it? And might it flow faster or slower? These questions seem hard (or absurd) enough to encourage us to reject the metaphor of time's flow. But if we do not think of time as flowing, how do we conceive of its passage? What distinguishes the present from the past and future, or is there no objective distinction (see a-series, presentism)? What gives time its direction—what accounts for the asymmetry between past and future? Can we make sense of timeless existence, or can we only make sense of existence in time? Is time infinitely divisible, or might it have a granular structure, with there being a smallest quantum or chunk of time? Many of these problems are first posed in Aristotle's Physics, in the form of paradoxes or problems about the very existence of time. One problem is that time cannot exist, for none of its parts exist (the present instant, having no duration, cannot count as a part of time). Again, if we ask when the present instant ceases to exist, every answer involves a contradiction: not at the present, for while it exists it exists; not at the next moment, for in the continuum there is no next moment (any more than there is such a thing as the next fraction to any given fraction); not at any subsequent moment, for then it is already gone. But we cannot think of the present instant as continuously existing, for then things that happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with things that have happened today. Aristotle's puzzles, and Zeno's paradoxes of time and space, encouraged atomistic solutions, in which the structure of time is made granular. Partisans of atomism included Diodorus Cronus (fl. c. 300 BC) and Epicurus, but they were opposed by the Stoics; the countervailing arguments on each side were marshalled by Sextus Empiricus as grist to the sceptical mill. A fundamentally idealist solution, allowing different times to exist in the sense of being simultaneous objects of contemplation, is propounded by Augustine, in the Confessions, Bk. 11, and is visible in Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, and Bergson. Other perplexing problems include the question of whether time may have a beginning, and whether there can be eventless time. See also space-time, relativity theory.

 
Archaeology Dictionary: time

[Th]

As the indefinite continued progress of existence, time is one of the key dimensions used in archaeological research and is seen in two ways. Measured time, chronology, can be viewed as a series of blocks of defined duration that occur in sequence and which can be counted, like the ticking of a clock. Such time is an artificial social construction tied to observable events, often the movements of celestial bodies, and for convenience archaeologists frequently back-project modern notions of time (for example, years, centuries, and millennia in the western Christian calendar) onto earlier societies. In contrast, temporality refers to the human experience of time in terms of the sequence of events which may not be entirely successive and which defy measurement.
 
Sports Science and Medicine: time

A quantity measuring duration. Time is measured in seconds in SI units. Time is often an independent variable used in scientific investigations to which other physical magnitudes are related. An example is the change in oxygen consumption with respect to time where the origin in time can be any arbitrarily selected instant: negative values refer to events occurring before, and positive values to events occurring after that instant.

 
US History Encyclopedia: Time

The first issue of Time magazine appeared on 3 March 1923. The magazine was founded by the twenty-four-year-old Yale graduates Briton Hadden and Henry Luce. They created a distinctive newsweekly that was "Curt, Clear, and Complete" to convey "the essence of the news" to the "busy man." Emphasizing national and international politics, Time contained brief articles that summarized the significant events of the week. Its authoritative and omniscient tone was created through the technique of "group journalism," in which the magazine was carefully edited to appear the product of a single mind.

Time peppered its articles with interesting details and clever observations. It sought to make the news entertaining by focusing on personality. In its first four decades, over 90 percent of Time's covers featured a picture of an individual newsmaker. In 1927, the magazine began its well-known tradition of naming a "man of the year," making aviator Charles Lindbergh its first selection. Time's formula proved successful, particularly in appealing to better-educated members of the white middle class. By the end of the 1930s, circulation neared one million and its journalistic innovations were much imitated—newspapers were adding week-in-review sections and former Time employees launched Newsweek in 1933.

Particularly after Hadden's death in 1929, Time reflected the empire-building vision of Henry Luce. Beginning in the 1930s, Luce expanded the operations of Time, Inc. In 1930, he created Fortune, a business magazine widely read by the nation's economic leaders. In 1936, he created Life, a vastly popular magazine that summarized the weekly news events through pictures and had a seminal influence on the development of photojournalism. Luce also launched "The March of Time," both a radio program and a newsreel.

Luce became a well-known advocate of the global expansion of American power and influence. In a famous 1941 Life editorial, Luce called for an "American Century" in which the United States would "accept whole-heartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and … exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." Luce's essay anticipated America's leadership of the capitalist world in the Cold War years, while his publications helped promote his patriotic, internationalist, and procapitalist views.

In the Cold War years, Time's reporting of the news reflected Luce's anticommunism. Throughout the 1940s, Time contained flattering portraits of the Chinese dictator Chiang Kai-shek and urged greater U.S. effort to prevent the victory of Mao Zedong and communism in China. The magazine's support of Cold War principles is clearly represented in a 1965 Time essay declaring the escalating battle in Vietnam to be "the right war, in the right place, at the right time." The Cold War years were a time of great expansion for Time, as it became America's most widely read news magazine, reaching a circulation of over four million by the end of the 1960s.

After Luce's death in 1967, Time made a number of changes to its distinctive journalistic style. In response to the growing influence of television news, Time granted bylines to writers, expanded its article lengths, shifted its focus from personality to issues, and added opinion pieces. However, much of Time's original journalistic vision of a news summary delivered in an authoritative and entertaining tone persisted, not just in Time, but also in the news media as a whole.

Meanwhile, Time, Inc., continued to expand. In the 1970s, Time acquired a large stake in the developing field of cable television. In 1989, it merged with Warner Brothers to become Time Warner. In 2001, it merged with America Online to become the gigantic media conglomerate AOL Time Warner, with large operations in television, publishing, music, film, and the Internet. Thus, even as the journalistic vision of the original Time had lost its distinctiveness, Luce's plan to make Time the cornerstone of a media empire was far more successful than his wildest expectations at the magazine's founding.

Bibliography

Baughman, James L. Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Elson, Robert T. Time, Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–1941. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

———. The World of Time, Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1941–1960. New York: Atheneum, 1973.

Herzstein, Robert. Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century. New York: Scribners, 1994.

Prendergast, Curtis, with Geoffrey Colvin. The World of Time: The Intimate History of a Changing Enterprise, 1960–1980. New York: Atheneum, 1986.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: time,
sequential arrangement of all events, or the interval between two events in such a sequence. The concept of time may be discussed on several different levels: physical, psychological, philosophical and scientific, and biological.

Physical Time and Its Measurement

The accurate measurement of time by establishing accurate time standards poses difficult technological problems. In prehistory, humans recognized the alternation of day and night, the phases of the moon, and the succession of the seasons; from these cycles, they developed the day, month, and year as the corresponding units of time. With the development of primitive clocks and systematic astronomical observations, the day was divided into hours, minutes, and seconds.

Any measurement of time is ultimately based on counting the cycles of some regularly recurring phenomenon and accurately measuring fractions of that cycle. The earth rotates on its axis at a very nearly constant rate, and the angular positions of celestial bodies can be determined with great precision. Therefore, astronomical observations provide an almost ideal method of measuring time. The true period of rotation of the earth, that with respect to the fixed stars, defines the sidereal day, which is the basis of sidereal time. All sidereal days are equal. The period of rotation of the earth with respect to the sun (i.e., the interval between successive high noons) is the solar day, which is the basis for solar time. Because of the earth's motion in its orbit around the sun, the sun appears to move eastward against the fixed stars, and the earth must make slightly more than one complete rotation to bring the sun back to the observer's meridian. (The meridian is the great circle on the celestial sphere running through the north celestial pole and the observer's zenith; the passage of the sun across the meridian marks high noon.) But the earth's orbital motion is not uniform, and the plane of the orbit is inclined to the celestial equator by 231/2°. Hence the eastward motion of the sun against the stars is not uniform and the length of the true solar day varies seasonally, but on the average is four minutes longer than the sidereal day. True solar time, as measured by a sundial, does not move at a constant rate. Therefore the mean solar day, with a length equal to the annual average of the actual solar day, was introduced as the basis of mean solar time.

Mean solar time does move at a constant rate and is the basis for the civil time kept by clocks. Actually, the earth's rotation is being slightly braked by tidal and other effects so that even mean solar time is not strictly uniform. The law of gravitation allows prediction of the moon's position in its orbit at a given time; inversely, the exact position of the moon provides a kind of clock that is not running down. Time calculated from the moon's position is called ephemeris time and moves at a truly uniform rate. The accumulated difference between mean solar and ephemeris time since 1900 amounts to more than half a minute. However, the ultimate standard for time is provided by the natural frequencies of vibration of atoms and molecules. Atomic clocks, based on masers and lasers, lose only about three milliseconds over a thousand years. See standard time; universal time.

Psychology of Time

As a practical matter, clocks and calendars regulate everyday life. Yet at the most primitive level, human awareness of time is simply the ability to distinguish which of any two events is earlier and which later, combined with a consciousness of an instantaneous present that is continually being transformed into a remembered past as it is replaced with an anticipated future. From these common human experiences evolved the view that time has an independent existence apart from physical reality.

Philosophy and Science of Time

The belief in time as an absolute has a long tradition in philosophy and science. It still underlies the common sense notion of time. Isaac Newton, in formulating the basic concepts of classical physics, compared absolute time to a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. In everyday life, we likewise regard each instant of time as somehow possessing a unique existence apart from any particular observer or system of timekeeping. Inherent in the concept of absolute time is the assumption that the simultaneity of two given events is also absolute. In other words, if two events are simultaneous for one observer, they are simultaneous for all observers.

Relativistic Time

Developments of modern physics have forced a modification of the concept of simultaneity. As Albert Einstein demonstrated in his theory of relativity, when two observers are in relative motion, they will necessarily arrange events in a somewhat different time sequence. As a result, events that are simultaneous in one observer's time sequence will not be simultaneous in some other observer's sequence. In the theory of relativity, the intuitive notion of time as an independent entity is replaced by the concept that space and time are intertwined and inseparable aspects of a four-dimensional universe, which is given the name space-time.

One of the most curious aspects of the relativistic theory is that all events appear to take place at a slower rate in a moving system when judged by a viewer in a stationary system. For example, a moving clock will appear to run slower than a stationary clock of identical construction. This effect, known as time dilation, depends on the relative velocities of the two clocks and is significant only for speeds comparable to the speed of light. Time dilation has been confirmed by observing the decay of rapidly moving subatomic particles that spontaneously decay into other particles. Stated naively, particles in motion decay more slowly than stationary particles.

Time Reversal Invariance

In addition to relative time, another aspect of time relevant to physics is how one can distinguish the forward direction in time. This problem is apart from one's purely subjective awareness of time moving from past into future. According to classical physics, if all particles in a simple system are instantaneously reversed in their velocities, the system will proceed to retrace its entire past history. This property of the laws of classical physics is called time reversal invariance (see symmetry); it means that when all microscopic motions of individual particles are precisely defined, there is no fundamental distinction between forward and backward in time. If the motions of very large collections of particles are treated statistically as in thermodynamics, then the forward direction of time is distinguished by the increase of entropy, or disorder, in the system. However, recent discoveries in particle physics have shown that time reversal invariance is not valid even on the microscopic scale for certain phenomena governed by the weak force of nuclear physics.

Biological Time

In the life sciences, evidence has been found that many living organisms incorporate biological clocks that govern the rhythms of their behavior (see rhythm, biological). Animals and even plants often exhibit a circadian (approximately daily) cycle in, for instance, temperature and metabolic rate that may have a genetic basis. Efforts to localize time sense in specialized areas within the brain have been largely unsuccessful. In humans, the time sense may be connected to certain electrical rhythms in the brain, the most prominent of which is known as the alpha rhythm at about ten cycles per second.

Bibliography

See S. V. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, Discovery of Time (1965); S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988).

 
Psychoanalysis: Time

The notion of time in psychoanalysis intersects several other concepts such as repetition, regression, fixation, and rhythm, though Freud also discussed the idea of time directly. He began by emphasizing the atemporality of unconscious processes: The unconscious ignores time, and he suggested that the origin of the representation of time could be found in the discontinuous relation the preconscious-conscious system maintained with the external world, the time dimension then being associated with acts of consciousness. He related the representation of time to the representation of space, in that space could replace time in unconscious processes. Finally, pathology shows how temporal progression is ignored, a characteristic which is also seen in fantasy, where past, present, and future are united in one representation, and in the transference neurosis, which is based on the anachrony of affect.

The atemporality of unconscious processes is present in Freud's earliest writings. In Manuscript M (1950a [1892-99]), James Strachey refers to a sentence in which Freud points out that the chronological information ignored in fantasy is dependent on the conscious system. But it is in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) that the indestructibility of unconscious processes is proposed, along with its corollary—the impossibility of recognizing the passage of time that would bring about the end of something; its belonging to the past; and eventually its forgetting. In a note added in 1907 to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b), concerning the indestructibility of memory traces, Freud wrote that "the unconscious is completely atemporal."

Freud continued to repeat the same ideas, devoting considerable space to it in his essay on the metapsychology of the unconscious. "The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. Reference to time is bound up, once again, with the work of the system Cs." (1915e, p. 187). In the November 8, 1911, session of the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg and Federn, 1962-75), Stekel and Mein-hold were rapporteurs for the topic under discussion, "the supposed timelessness of the unconscious," (Vol. 3, pp. 299-310) and during the discussion there arose a number of difficulties concerning the definition of time. In his conclusion Freud pointed out five arguments in favor of the atemporality of unconscious processes: the incorrect temporal orientation of dreams; the fact that condensation is possible; the lack of effects of temporal transition; the attachment to objects; the characteristic tendency of neuroses to become fixed. He concludes: "If the philosophers maintain that the concepts of time and space are the necessary forms of our thinking, forethought tells us that the individual masters the world by means of two systems, one of which functions only in terms of time and the other only in terms of space" (p. 308).

While the processes of the unconscious are atemporal, Freud continued to remind us of the importance of the temporal factor as an element of reality. This is true of the process of maturation, which is the central element of the theory of libidinal states, but which also distinguishes normal from pathological mourning. (Time appears to be inevitable, to the extent that it seems endowed with intrinsic action while it is, in fact, the duration necessary to establish a process, work of some kind.) Conversely, time as experienced, the feeling of time, is shown to be relatively independent of the objective reality of the time shown on clocks and watches. We see this in the painful acceleration of duration constituted by the feeling of the ephemeral (1916a [1915]), but also, and in reverse, in the interminable extension of the boredom or impatience of the child who wants to "grow up," that is, who wants to abolish the time that separates him from the age of his parents. Passion and the illumination or rush of the drug addict reduce duration to a point, the instant when the alpha and the omega meet.

Freud believed that the temporal dimension is accessible to us only as a function of acts of consciousness. Because these acts are not continuous but, like the "mystic writing pad," depend on the innervation of the cathexes directed from the interior by rapid, periodic bursts into the preconscious-conscious system, this perception of time is also discontinuous. "I assumed," Freud wrote, "I further had a suspicion that this discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time" (1925a, p. 231). Although time is ignored by unconscious processes, this does not mean it can't be represented in unconscious formations, which translate it as they see fit. This corresponds to what could be called "psychic temporality."

After Freud other authors returned to the question of time in analysis and in psychopathology. Piera Aulagnier has shown the importance of anticipation in the relation between mother and child and in the process by which a subject identifies with it, a process that, as it turns out, the psychotic is unable to complete (1975), being condemned to repeat the same thing over and over again.

Bibliography

Aulagnier, Piera. (1975). La violence de l 'interprétation. Du pictogrammeà l'énoncé. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4-5: 1-625.

——. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.

——. (1925a). A note upon the "mystic writing pad." SE, 19: 225-232.

Nunberg, Hermann, and Federn, Ernst. (1962-75). Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. New York: International Universities Press.

Further Reading

Loewald, Hans W. (1962). Superego and time. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 43, 264-268.

—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR

 
Food & Culture Encyclopedia: Time

Time. "Time" may not spring to mind immediately when one thinks of food, but time is always a factor. After all, recipes generally incorporate an element of time (for example, "let rise for four hours" or "bake for forty-five minutes"), cooking preparation involves time, and various demands drive the length of meals. Thus, time has an impact on one's daily food and food-preparation routine, and this impact is a particularly gendered process.

In nearly all parts of the world, cooking is a female task (Murdock and Provost, 1973). Women's time is bounded by food-preparation tasks, particularly if they must perform those tasks several times a day (for example, tasks such as tortilla preparation, millet pounding, and the preparation from scratch of several meals a day). Alteration of a daily routine, for example, the intrusion of a more "urban" or fast-paced schedule, can alter food-preparation patterns. If women enter a market economy, they have less time to prepare food, which leads to, among other things, increased purchases of prepared food and more business for the fast-food industry. Time and food preparation are also markers of rank or class, since elaborate meals are generally costly in terms of time preparation as well as ingredients—in most societies, only the well-to-do, who have either time or help or both, can prepare elaborate meals. These widespread changes in food-preparation patterns are part of urban Western culture, where convenience and fast-food items (the names of which indicate their purpose) are replacing daily meal preparation. The Italian "slow food" movement is counterpoised against this trend.

Food Preparation

The preparation of foods—the transformation from a raw or unprocessed state to one suitable for consumption—occupies a major portion of many women's time throughout much of the world. For rural women and those in developing nations, preparation of meals may take up the major portion of a woman's waking life. Since staple foods must undergo a lengthy preparation process, women can spend much of their time processing grain, nuts, or tubers, in addition to meal preparation itself. (This pattern has antecedents in the West, as well: consider the time needed to make bread and churn butter.)

Accompanying this ongoing preparation of staples is the routine of meal preparation. For example, Andean Ecuador meal preparation, which is performed from scratch twice a day, generally involves two to three hours of potato peeling, water boiling, and construction of the soup that constitutes the staple meal (Weismantel, 1988). In southern Mexico, rural Maya women may prepare up to two hundred tortillas per day, grinding and cooking them at each of two or three meals (Eber, 2000). In rural Africa, women farmers grind the standard grains, usually millet or sorghum, into flour for porridge or soup on a daily basis. Pounding millet, as this process is called, occurs at least once a day, and sometimes more often as needs demand. African women are also responsible for preparing and assembling meals. In Western urban settings, the food-preparation process may be slightly less rigorous, but often remains time-consuming, since the cook must peel, chop, and cook.

Scheduling and Meals

The timing of meals is culturally determined and is linked to preindustrial work patterns, particularly the agricultural cycle. Throughout Latin America, the main meal of the day traditionally falls in mid-afternoon. The siesta, stereotypically seen by North Americans as a sign of indolence, is actually the main meal of the day. This pattern remains intact in smaller cities and rural areas, though the demands of global business are increasingly pushing urban workers into the short noon lunch typical of the United States. Among rural indigenous peoples, however, mealtimes may differ, following much more closely the requirements of subsistence farming. Breakfast is eaten very early in the morning, and a second, larger meal follows in the late morning or early afternoon. Another meal occurs in early evening, with an occasional snack before bedtime (which also occurs early, often shortly after sundown). At the same time, much of the urban world has already adopted a meal schedule that better conforms to the demands of industrialism. Such changes may alter or eliminate traditional meals or reduce the time families spend together (Rotenberg, 1992).

Food, Time, and Class

Social standing shapes the ways in which food and time intersect. For those with sufficient income, only one member of a family need work, leaving the other family members at home to prepare traditional meals. Another alternative to preparing food for oneself is to hire a professional cook, who is also able to prepare meals from scratch.

For those with little money and little time, the options decrease. Convenience and fast-foods are expensive for what they provide, and they are often limited to single or perhaps two servings. Time, money, and class intersect in other ways that affect meals, as well. For the working poor, hours of overtime, or even two jobs, may take up the time that would otherwise be spent preparing and eating meals; meager wages may also reduce one's housing choices. In her book on the working poor, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich describes this housing process: Unable to afford housing with a kitchen, the worker cannot purchase foods to prepare in bulk and cannot store or freeze these foods. Such workers are sometimes entirely dependent on meals they can purchase and eat immediately, such as fast-food or the kinds of over-priced but affordable snack food sold in convenience stores.

Changing Time and Changing Food

The impact of urban work patterns has affected mealtimes, food choices, and diet throughout the world. As workers move from an agrarian life to one driven by waged work, they shape their mealtimes to that of the workplace rather than the farm. The kinds of foods workers choose to eat are likely to be those that can be taken to the workplace or eaten on the run. The rise in sales of prepared foods appears to inevitably accompany women's entry into the workforce, and sometimes women themselves enter the workforce to provide the prepared food, a pattern seen in Peru (Babb, 1998), rural Africa (Clark, 1994), and elsewhere. The ability to bring home prepared food enables women to spend longer periods of time working in a pattern that parallels western women's purchase of fast-food dinners for the family. For the westerner and the rural worker alike, elaborate meals requiring lengthy preparation become increasingly associated with ritual and holiday feasting. The role of time in the preparation of holiday foods rather than (or in addition to) the use of special ingredients marks them as special treats. This stands in contrast to the faster and less elaborate meals consumed during a regular workweek. Sidney Mintz, in his work Sweetness and Power, has further suggested that the increasing consumption of sugar in tea allowed the shift of displaced rural English into industrial labor—they could consume cheap quick meals of tea and bread and spend much of their time working.

The speedy meal is familiar also in the form of the fast-food industry that the demands of postindustrial capitalism shaped. The busy worker can order, pick up, and pay for a quick and generally tasty meal, all without ever leaving the car. Eric Schosser has described in-depth the quite extensive impact of the fast-food industry on diet, food production, and meal patterns in his book Fast Food Nation. While answering the demand for quick, easily consumed meals, the fast-food industry has also shaped marketing, taste preferences, and even agricultural practice.

The "slow food" movement has arisen in opposition to the pervasiveness of the fast-food industry. Founded in Italy, "slow food" promotes local and organic foods, family mealtimes, and the role of food in social life. In general, this movement opposes the increasingly mechanized and driven work life that the fast-food industry and North American culture represent (Inouye, 2001).

Bibliography

Babb, Florence. Between Field and Cooking Pot: The Political Economy of Marketwomen in Peru. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Clark, Gracia. Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Eber, Christine. Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town: Water of Hope, Water of Sorrow. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001.

Inouye, Brenda. "Slow Food." Alternatives Journal 27, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 4.

Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.

Murdock, G. P., and Catarina Provost. "Factors in the Division of Labor by Sex: A Cross-Cultural Analysis." Ethnology 9 (1973): 122–225.

Rotenberg, Robert. Time and Order in Metropolitan Vienna: A Seizure of Schedules. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2001.

Weismantel, M. J. Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.

—Robin O'Brian

 
Law Encyclopedia: Time
This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

It is legally recognized that time is divided into years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. The time kept by a municipality is known as civic time. A local government may not use a system of time different from that adopted by its state legislature. During daylight saving time, the customary time system is advanced one hour to take advantage of the longer periods of daylight during the summer months.

Time Zones

In the past, the states followed various standards of time until the railroads of the nation cooperated in establishing a standard time zone system, which was then adopted by federal statutes. Under the stan- dard time zone system, the continental United States is divided into four different zones. The time in each zone is based upon the mean solar time at a specified degree of longitude west from Greenwich, England. Eastern standard time is based on the mean solar time at 75° longitude west; Central standard time, on 90° longitude west; Mountain time, on 105° longitude west; and Pacific time on 120° longitude west.

Calculations

A year is the period during which the earth revolves around the sun. A calendar year is 365 days, except for every fourth year, which is 366 days. The year is divided into twelve months. A week ordinarily means seven consecutive days, either beginning with no particular day, or from a Sunday through the following Saturday. A day is twenty-four hours, extending from midnight to midnight. When distinguished from night, however, a day refers to the period from sunrise to sunset.

In calculating a specified number of days, it is customary to exclude the first and include the last. As a consequence, when a lease provides that it shall continue for a specified period from a particular day, that day is excluded in computing the term. This rule is applied in calculating the time for matters of practice and procedure. The rule governs, for example, the period in which a lawsuit may be commenced, so that the day the cause of action accrues is excluded for statute of limitations purposes.

The general rule is that when the last day of a period within which an act is to be performed falls on a Sunday or a holiday, that day is excluded from the computation. The act may rightfully be done on the following business day. This rule has been applied in figuring the deadline for conducting a meeting of corporate shareholders; for filing a claim against a dead person's estate; for filing a statement proposing a new ordinance for a municipal corporation; for recording a mortgage; and for redeeming property from a sale foreclosing a mortgage.

 
Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia: Time

Time is an element of uncertainty in paranormal functions. Yet we know from hypnotic experiments that the subconscious mind has a remarkable faculty in estimating time. J. Milne Bramwell made classical demonstrations, such as suggesting to a hypnotic subject, Miss A., that at the expiration of 11.470 minutes, she should make a cross on a piece of paper and note the time. Out of 55 similar experiments, 45 were completed successfully.

One would expect that if an entity, communicating through an entranced individual, was either a hypnotic or secondary personality, that the entity should demonstrate the same consciousness of time discovered by Bramwell. Such has not been the case. Its surprising absence needs an alternative explanation. Certainly fraudulent production of the entity by the medium would explain the lack of time consciousness. Spiritualists have suggested that the odd relationship to time, often manifesting displacements of a day or more, provides additional proof of the presence of extraneous entities in séances.

In one instance, "Pelham," a spirit control of Leonora Piper, was often asked to go and see what a certain friend was doing at the moment. The account that he gave on his return often contained descriptions that applied to happenings a day after or what he thought a day before.

The psychical researcher S. G. Soal received through Blanche Cooper communication from Gordon Davis, a friend who, a few months after, turned up alive. Through the medium, he gave a description of his house. The description was incorrect at the time he turned up but perfectly matched his home a year after.

In clairvoyant perceptions, a similar uncertainty is often noticed. The percipients often do not know whether the visions of events that unfold themselves refer to the past or future. There is a good instance in Quaker history. George Fox cried "Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield" as he passed through it, and discovered later this was not a prophecy but a psychometric sensation of the martyrdoms in a past age. The British investigator J. W. Dunne observed a mixture of past and future elements in dreams, as described in experiments he conducted.

Sources:

Bramwell, J. Milne. Hypnotism. London: G. Richards, 1903.

Dunne, J. W. An Experiment with Time. London: A. & C. Black; New York: Macmillan, 1927.

 
Essay: Telling time

In ancient time-measurement systems, including those of both Egypt and China, daylight and nighttime were each given 12 hours. This was convenient for use with sundials, which are known from Egypt as early as 1500 bce, although telling time "by the Sun" probably predates the first humans. Because the length of daylight and nighttime varies with the season, so did the length of the Egyptian hour. When water clocks came into use, shortly after sundials, a conflict between the two forms of measurement was apparent.

A water clock works because water from a container flows through an opening at a nearly steady rate. The amount of water in another container is used to move an indicator of some kind -- in simplest form, the level of water in a container. Since the water flows at an almost steady rate, the indicator shows the hours as it moves along a marked face. But when the length of the hour changed from season to season, a different water clock was needed for each month. Ancient peoples solved this problem in various ways, such as by having different marked faces for each month. In that way the water clock was never far out of line with the sundial, which also remained in use. Later, instead of modifying water clocks to change with the seasons, sundials were constructed to show hours of the same length all year.

In the eighth century ce, the Chinese began to fashion water clocks with primitive escapements. The escapement is a ratchet that causes a wheel to move only so far and then stop, so that there is no runaway action when the clock is fully loaded with water. Continuous motion is replaced with discrete "ticks." By the beginning of the 14th century, the concept of an escapement was known in Europe. The escapement was used to slow down the motion of a falling weight attached to it by a cord or chain. This motion could then be converted with gears to turn the dial of a clock. Mechanical clocks using escapements and weights were gradually improved and put in towers all over Europe.

 
Word Tutor: time
pronunciation

IN BRIEF: What the clock tells you.

pronunciation Is it time for lunch yet?

 
Wikipedia: time


This article is about the measurement concept. For the magazine, see Time (magazine). For other uses, see Time (disambiguation).

There are two distinct views on the meaning of the word time.

One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured. This is the realist's view, to which Sir Isaac Newton subscribed, and hence is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[1]

A contrasting view is that time is part of the fundamental human intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which we sequence events, quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them, and compare the motions of objects. In this second view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows", that objects "move through", or that is a "container" for events. This view is in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[2] and Immanuel Kant,[3][4] in which time, rather than being an objective thing to be measured, is part of the measuring system used by humans.

In