Time wasn't really invented. After all, it's always been around since…well…the beginning of time! Some people think of it as a dimension that helps to order our lives. Time can be thought of in many ways.
“If we look at the late 19th century, we see something happening which very much would suggest that... in fact, people had to come to create the concept of time as we know it now.” Yes, time – or our modern conception of it – was invented.
ACCORDING TO archaeological evidence, the Babylonians and Egyptians began to measure time at least 5,000 years ago, introducing calendars to organize and coordinate communal activities and public events, to schedule the shipment of goods and, in particular, to regulate cycles of planting and harvesting.
Although we can't know for certain how the earliest human beings kept track of the time, scientists believe they probably relied upon the natural world around them. For example, historically, humans have relied upon the movement of the Sun across the sky to track time.
That, though, is how time works—and how it has always worked. Time as we think of it isn't innate to the natural world; it's a manmade construct intended to describe, monitor, and control industry and individual production.
Albert Einstein famously expressed this point when he wrote to a friend, “The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.” Einstein's startling conclusion stems directly from his special theory of relativity, which denies any absolute, universal significance to the present moment.
Albert Einstein once wrote: People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Time, in other words, he said, is an illusion. Many physicists since have shared this view, that true reality is timeless.
Sundials. The earliest known timekeeping devices appeared in Egypt and Mesopotamia, around 3500 BCE. Sundials consisted of a tall vertical or diagonal-standing object used to measure the time, called a gnomon.
Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.
Clocks were invented to measure the motion of the sun, water, and sand. The Earth's motion became the standard of time when humans found out that the Earth rotates. The display on a clock shows time, so the time keeps track of our daily activities.
The ancient Egyptians are seen as the originators of the 24-hour day.
THE DIVISION of the hour into 60 minutes and of the minute into 60 seconds comes from the Babylonians who used a sexagesimal (counting in 60s) system for mathematics and astronomy. They derived their number system from the Sumerians who were using it as early as 3500 BC.
The measurement of time began with the invention of sundials in ancient Egypt some time prior to 1500 B.C. However, the time the Egyptians measured was not the same as the time today's clocks measure. For the Egyptians, and indeed for a further three millennia, the basic unit of time was the period of daylight.
While our ancestors have been around for about six million years, the modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started in the earnest only in the 1800s.
Approximately 300,000 years ago, the first Homo sapiens — anatomically modern humans — arose alongside our other hominid relatives.
The oldest hominins are thought to have appeared as early as 7 million B.C.E. The earliest species of the Homo genus appeared around 2 million to 1.5 million B.C.E. Current evidence supports modern Homo sapiens appearing around 190,000 B.C.E.
Broadly speaking, evolution simply means the gradual change in the genetics of a population over time. From that standpoint, human beings are constantly evolving and will continue to do so long as we continue to successfully reproduce.
After the dinosaurs died out, nearly 65 million years passed before people appeared on Earth. However, small mammals (including shrew-sized primates) were alive at the time of the dinosaurs.
More reproduction followed, and more mistakes, the process repeating over billions of generations. Finally, Homo sapiens appeared. But we aren't the end of that story. Evolution won't stop with us, and we might even be evolving faster than ever.
Scientists still don't know exactly when or how the first humans evolved, but they've identified a few of the oldest ones. One of the earliest known humans is Homo habilis, or “handy man,” who lived about 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa.
The Egyptians also divided the dark hours into 12 sections based on the appearance in the night sky of 12 stars as the night advanced. So with 12 hours of daylight and 12 of night, the 24 hour day was established.
Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, adam is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as "mankind".
Some theorists have even argued for more, up to an indefinite number of possible dimensions. Other physicists suggest that experimental results have thrown cold water on the case for higher dimensions, leaving us only with the familiar three dimensions of length, width and height, plus the dimension of time.
Physics > Space and Time
According to Einstein , you need to describe where you are not only in three-dimensional space — length, width and height — but also in time. Time is the fourth dimension. So to know where you are, you have to know what time it is.
In its simplest form, the type of change that time measures is that of spatial position of objects relative to each other. This is the fundamental basis of its existence, as observed long ago in the daily changing position of the sun in the sky.