Do mechanical clocks produce mechanical time?

 “Once a new technology comes into the social milieu, it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.”  Marshall McLuhan  Time is a social concept (in a non-fuzzy way!)  The Gods Must be Crazy The Gods Must be Crazy  Each society conceives time uniquely  Western clocks are machines the output of which is linear numerical time.  ‘time’ in the West is a mechanical product

 From Latin, clocca = bell ◦ In medieval monasteries, an automatic system of bells which rang to mark the seven hours of prayer.  Properly speaking, a clock is simply a machine which displays a fixed numerical series.  An act of the human mind is required to associate this successive display with time.  This means that the society is what makes the equation “linear numerical series = time.”

 In is an anachronism in the first case and civilisation bigotry in the second to say that methods of measuring time are ‘clocks’.  Another way of saying this is that neither pre-modern or non-Western concepts of time are ‘clock-time’ ◦ A sundial matches the movement of the sun, but it can have religious or aesthetic motivation and experience  Self-evidently—experientially- not ‘clock-time’

 Chinese & Japanese monks using incense burning to mark time  Involves scent with its power of memory as well as sight  Direct religious aspect  Similar to original ‘clocks’ which were not visual but auditory

 Clock-Time is a numerical and geometric concept: ◦ an absolute of logic, geometry and space ◦ an abstraction: a theoretical first-principle. ◦ Newton needed an absolute space and an absolute time to make his formulae—and his full science— work ◦ Einstein’s counter-concept is that time is experiential: relative to the situation of the ‘experiencer’.

Albert EinsteinQuotation  “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."

 Marshall McLuhan presents number as an extension of touch. ◦ We count the trees in the forest because we can’t touch them all.  Touch—the haptic sense—is a fundamental human experience. ◦ deprived of touch a child will grow insane or sociopathic  Resurgence of touch in computers is a response to the amputation of the haptic sense in a numeric and visual world ◦ part of the ‘global village’ consequence of electronic speed.