How We Created Time

Run a small nightmare experiment.

The Sun still rises—but not reliably. Dawn comes early for a week, then late for three days, then not until mid-afternoon. The Moon’s phases wobble like a drunk lighthouse. Winter arrives, leaves, returns—no pattern anyone can trust.

In that world you’d still have change: storms, aging, growth, decay.

You wouldn’t have time in the usual sense—days that mean the same thing to everyone, months you can plan around, years you can farm by, hours you can schedule a meeting inside.

“Tuesday at 12:45” would dissolve.

Time (everyday time and scientific time) isn’t a substance. It’s a coordination system: a shared interface we built by tying our plans to repeatable rhythms.

Time is a ledger: a public way of counting and comparing change, not a hidden river that causes change.


Before “time,” there was rhythm

Long before clocks, we lived inside patterns:

These aren’t “signs of time.” They’re reliable recurrence—the world doing something close enough to again that you can coordinate around it.

“Meet after the next full moon.”

“Plant when the floods retreat.”

“Travel when the winds turn.”

Time begins as an agreement built on repeating change.


Calendars turn the sky into a schedule

A calendar isn’t a discovery like a mountain. It’s an invention like a map.

It starts from nature—sunrise, lunar phases, seasonal drift—then adds standardization: names, boundaries, rules, and corrections.

Nature repeats, but it doesn’t click into neat boxes.

A lunar month won’t fit cleanly into a solar year. Earth’s spin isn’t perfectly uniform. Seasons don’t arrive like a metronome.

So calendars become control systems: ways to keep civic life aligned with messy cosmic recurrence.

That’s why calendars need patches—leap months, leap days, periodic resets—bookkeeping that prevents the ledger from drifting away from the rhythms it’s meant to track.

Timekeeping isn’t worship of perfect cycles. It’s the craft of making usable ones.


A cautionary tale: Rome let politics break the map

In the late Roman Republic, the official year was short (about 355 days) and required occasional correction with an added intercalary month. 

The power to insert the extra intercalary month sat with political-religious authorities, and it was often abused. By adding or withholding that month, they could effectively lengthen a friendly magistrate’s year, shorten an enemy’s, and shift the timing of elections, taxes, and obligations—until the civic calendar drifted more than eight weeks away from the seasons and sky it was supposed to track.

That drift wasn’t just embarrassing. Festivals and civic duties were tied to the agricultural year. As dates slid, “spring” ceremonies crept toward summer; rituals meant to bless sowing arrived after seeds were already in the ground. Farmers still worked by sky and soil, but the state’s calendar stopped describing the world it claimed to govern.

By about 50 BCE the vernal equinox—meant to fall in late March—was landing around mid-May. The map no longer matched the territory. 

Caesar’s fix began with an emergency reset: 46 BCE was stretched to 445 days to realign civic dates with the seasons, then replaced by a new rule-based system designed to end arbitrary tinkering. 


Every clock has the same skeleton

Zoom in from months to minutes and you’ll find the same three parts inside every clock:

A sundial: Sun repeats, shadow shifts, lines translate motion into meaning.

A water clock: flow repeats (roughly), level rises, marks define the unit.

A pendulum: swing repeats, escapement counts, face displays the ledger.

The universe supplies rhythms. We supply the accounting.


Accuracy improved by upgrading the repeater

Clocks got “better” by swapping in more stable repeaters:

Nothing mystical changed in reality. Our ledger got sharper.

Modern metrology is blunt about this. The SI second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation associated with a specific transition in the caesium-133 atom. 

That number isn’t sacred. It’s a convention chosen so labs, satellites, computers, and global networks can stay synchronized.


Relativity: excellent clocks disagree

There is no universal master clock.

Different clocks—moving differently, sitting in different gravitational conditions—accumulate different tick counts between the same meetings.

Reality gives you local rhythms. “Time” is what you get when you compare ledgers.

Satellite navigation makes this practical: precise timing underpins GPS-style positioning, and it only works because engineers continuously manage synchronization across systems.


Even civil time is patched together

Atomic clocks are astonishingly steady.

Earth’s rotation is not. It wobbles, speeds up, slows down, and drifts over long timescales.

Civil time (UTC) is a negotiated compromise. It is built on atomic time, but it has historically been kept roughly aligned with Earth-rotation time using leap seconds. The current offset is TAI − UTC = 37 seconds.

The rules are still being revised. In 2022, the CGPM directed a plan to change how UTC handles the growing mismatch between atomic time and Earth’s rotation by or before 2035, aiming to keep UTC continuous for at least a century.

This is the map-and-terrain lesson made explicit: 

We use extremely stable rhythms—atomic transitions—to track something far less steady: the changing orientation of a wobbling planet. When the map drifts, we patch the map. We do not demand that Earth spin more neatly.

That is what time looks like when it is understood correctly: an engineered ledger, continually adjusted to follow real change.


The reification trap

When a coordination tool becomes universal, it turns invisible.

Then we start speaking as if the ledger is a substance: time “flows,” “runs out,” “catches up,” “makes things happen.”

A cleaner sequence:


The arrow doesn’t require a cosmic river

Many processes are directional. Eggs don’t unbreak. Smoke doesn’t crawl back into the cigarette. Memory points one way. Entropy tends to rise.

Changism accepts the arrow. It rejects the extra mythology: a flowing substance called Time.

Picture a spiral staircase:

Cycles can repeat inside irreversible change. No cosmic conveyor belt required.


So—did we create time?

We didn’t create sunrise. We didn’t invent seasons. We didn’t manufacture change.

We created time as a shared ledger that turns nature’s recurrence into public coordination:

calendars, clocks, time zones, synchronization protocols, standards, correction rules.

Time isn’t a thing you’re trapped inside.

It’s a tool you can understand—and redesign—and use more wisely.