Information: Abstraction or Reality?

Abstract

Our perception of the world is the product of our historical experience. Historically, it was not until we had significant experience with time machines — mechanical clocks — that our concept of time developed. As Professor Whitrow (1975) has pointed out, most civilisations prior to post-seventeenth century Western civilisation, tended to regard time in a rather diffuse manner, and then as cyclic rather than linear [p. 11]. Clocks dissociated time from human event. Christian Huygens’ invention of a successful pendulum clock in the middle of the seventeenth century provided the world with a device which could define time in terms of small, even and repetitious units. Furthermore, for all practical purposes grandfather’s clock could go on ticking for ever. Thus Western culture became permeated with a sense of time passing, minute by minute, with time exhibiting the properties of homogeneity and continuity — a force in its own right [pp. 21–22].