What is the time ?

But that would have been 06:31 in Adelaide - and 23:01 here ...

The Tyranny Of Modern Time

This morning when you got up, did you feel anything different? As you rushed through getting your kids ready for school, grabbing breakfast and slogging through the morning commute, could you feel the celestial milestone you were passing? Probably not. And that is exactly why the crisis we face as individuals and as a society is so difficult to recognize.
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Today hardly anyone notices the equinox. Today we rarely give the sky more than a passing glance. We live by precisely metered clocks and appointment blocks on our electronic calendars, feeling little personal or communal connection to the kind of time the equinox once offered us. Within that simple fact lays a tectonic shift in human life and culture.
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Today, I begin a four-part series of posts — I'll try and do one each week — about the unspoken cultural assumptions defining time in our era. I will to start with physics and cosmology, then go further. The issue I want to address is how we have been trained to see and use time. I want to talk about how it stalks us, driving our lives and culture past sustainable limits.

This series will be based on research I did for my book that comes out next week, About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang. The book includes a great deal about the history of cosmology and new ideas that are poised to replace the "big bang" (see last week's discussion on the end of the big bang). In this series of posts, however, I will focus mainly on human side of the equation: the history of the human experience of time.