Since this is I’m gonna explain my question the same way.
Imagine there is a time-hating wizard who magically removes all time-keeping instruments like atomic clocks, phones and watches, so there is no way of knowing the time right now. If then we were asked to ‘bring back’ the old time that we used (e.g. so that we start again measuring 12:00 in London exactly when it was 12:00 in London before the wizard) could this be done? Is there something physical constant (like kg or meter) that determines what time of day it is? Or, did someone just say “we start measuring time from now, and I say that it is exactly 14:32…”?
Also, if there is this constant that allows us to know exactly when a certain time is, doesn’t that mean we don’t need atomic clocks and can just compare ourselves to this constant? Idk what this would be but perhaps when the sun is absolutely highest in the sky somewhere?
In: 40
I’ve seen some good answers, but in addition to that, we’d be able to calculate the time back pretty easily and quickly based on previous records. We know what time the sun rises and sets. There’s 2 data points and if you can get the clock running so both of those line up as intended, your clock is accurate.
Assuming we remember the units, we could end up with something quite comparable.
Broadly:
Find high-noon (eg: The middle of the day)
Then with any device that can keep a steady count (a metronome and a lot of patience would do it, though if you can automate it in any way that’d be great) you count until you get to the next high-noon.
That’s your basic metro-second count of the day. A Metronome isn’t exactly a second-per-tick, but it’s close enough. You probably have slightly less metro-seconds than there were real seconds because a metronome generally runs slower. This is a good thing because counting seconds would be mind-numbing.
Lets call it 80,000 metro-seconds between two high-noons, it’s probably a more annoying number, but the math is the same.
Now divide that into 24 blocks of 3,333 metro-seconds.
Divide that further into 60 blocks of around 55.5 metro-seconds and you’ve got your Metro-minutes.
55.5 metro-seconds is a minute. Which you know is 60 seconds.
Basic math says that a metro-second averages out at 0.925 seconds.
So now you have a standard for a second, you can use that to build out all your time-keeping infrastructure.
The question then arises for “what year is it?”
That’s a bit harder because all our date-keeping is based on an agreed-upon starting date.
Most of the western world agrees on a date 2,022 years ago as the start of the “Common Era”. You may even see the abbreviation CE sometimes. This is the non-religious direct equivalent of AD and pretty much the same thing.
In computing, we derive our date from Unix-Time. Which takes 01/01/1970 as an arbitrary starting date and counts in milliseconds from that point.
Given the massive upheaval of the Time Wizard’s actions, we might as well restart on 01/01/01 ATW (After Time-Wizard)
Iirc, the railroads made time aligned between locations. Until then, it didn’t really matter if the city 50km down the road had the *exact* same time on their clocks.
But when railroads were built and cities connected, they wanted to run “on time” and give schedules, so all the clocks needed to be aligned.
Before that, you could use the sun and get close enough.
When we started measuring time like everyone said it started with measuring 12:00 or the time when there was the least shadow, but due to seasons and the earths rotation that changed daily. Then sundials we’re invented and kept more consistent time but they were to heavy and couldn’t be carried with you. So then clocks were invented and if you only did business or met up with people from your area this was fine, everyone had their clocks set by the same or a similar 12:00. But once people started to travel and do business with others further away meeting times or delivery time ect were confusing and a wizard decided we need a standard time, and each country/region set their own standard time. Then at some point this still got confusing because it would still change from region to region so another wizard decided there would be a universal standard time around the world and since it benefits everyone it’s one of the few things all humans agreed on. So this wizard for some reason (the reason was that it benefits the largest number of people and puts the end of the day in the middle of the Pacific Ocean meaning that no country is forced to be on two dates at once) picked Greenwich, England as 12:00 or in this case 00:00. This means that all time zones are measured from that starting point and why we have a + or – on our time zones, for example, Sydney australia is +10 meaning 10 hours before Greenwich, and LA, USA is -7 meaning 7 hours after Greenwich. So this means that sunrise is always about 6am and sun set is about 6pm at the equator but varies because of seasons and the tilt of the earth. Like I’m australia we have daylight savings time with sets the clocks 1 hour back so the sun still rises about 6am but then extends the day so sun set is approximately 8pm, making better use of daylight rather than having a 5am – 7pm day when most people rise about 7am essentially “wasting” two hours of daylight
Edit* after reading I realised I didn’t really answer the question;
So to answer your question, yes we could, it would just be measured by the sun, the most and least consistent time keeper we have (inconsistent in the sort term, more consistent in the long term) but we have been measuring the sun and starts since the start of history and probably before and we still haven’t really nailed it down 100%. To be honest if we started from scratch we would people have a whole new system for keeping time but it would be at the essence the same thing, a way for anyone anywhere to communicate a period of time before they want something done, weather that’s to meet for lunch or to have a product/service made and delivered.
To answer your question about whether we could create a correlation between the “old time” and the “new time” if we somehow had a “gap” in between the two (a not totally impossible idea, if you had a total civilizational collapse and much later rebirth) — astronomical records can be used to make such correspondences. This is how we can figure out what the dates of some very old events are in our modern system, because in the past there were people who kept very good records of things like eclipses that we can, with modern astronomical models, very precisely date.
There is no “constant” for time in the universe of the sort that you mean. But if we define some sort of event as the “beginning,” we can certainly say that some measure of time (say, rotations of the Earth around the Sun, or Earth rotations on its axis, or the vibration of piezoelectric atoms at a given frequency of electricity, etc.) has passed since that moment. So we could say, “ah, it is day X since that wizard cast the spell.”
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