Last week we went through the twice yearly ritual of altering the time by an hour on all our devices as we moved from summertime settings.
Altering the clocks for ‘extra’ summertime was based on the belief that we can extend the day. Its use during the First World War by Germany meant that it became popular across Europe.
This led me to think about the nature of time and how we measure it.
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As always there is both a philosophical and practical dimension to time.
The brilliant physicist Albert Einstein recognised that time is something that we can perceive as being flexible in that it passes more quickly when we are doing or experiencing things we enjoy.
As he is reputed to have observed, he found that when he was in the company of a young woman time seemed to fly by.
However, as we know, he was responsible for theories, most especially relativity, have led to the recognition that time as we understand it on Earth may be different elsewhere in the universe. According to such theories time is not linear in the way we experience it.
Being able to manipulate time is the long-cherished dream of many science fiction writers; not least HG Wells who wrote The Time Machine published in 1895.
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Being able to go to points either in the past or future would confer power that is almost beyond comprehension and hence the usual codicil that is added that so-called time travellers cannot alter history.
That said, who has not dreamed of being able to see into the future if only to know the balls that will be drawn in a large Euromillions lottery?
Time is a construct which effectively came from the observation of the way that every day has a consistency which, depending on the position of the observer, will govern the length.
As we also know there are seasons that alter according to latitude and that the further away from the equator one is the greater divergence between day and night there will be in the seasons.
The length of the night is one of the reasons why some ‘up North’ believe that we should not turn the clocks go back in October.
As to why we have 365 days is simply based on the fact that this is the time it takes for the Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun.
However, we know that this is not precise and as we know, every four years we have to have a leap year of 366 days to account for the fact the actual figure for an orbit is 365 days, five hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds.
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But even this figure is not constant because we are slowly getting further away from the sun there is a phenomenally small increase each year.
Curiously, the effects of gravity from the Moon and Sun are causing the Earth to rotate more slowly.
Because this is a very small figure of 1.7 milliseconds each day (two seconds every 10,000 years), it is not significant to the vast majority though nuclear clocks can account for alterations.
Anyone who invents a time machine and goes back to, say the early Carboniferous period (some 350 million years ago), would find that a year was 385 days and that a day was 23 hours long.
It was the Egyptians who divided the day and night into 12 equal parts, it is believed, to comply with the number of observed lunar cycles.
As we know, only those at the equator have days and nights of equal length but, as has already been explained the relative proportion of day and night will depend on latitude.
The subdivision of an hour into 60 minutes and seconds is believed to have originated with the Babylonian who carried out astronomical observations using 60 as a base; inherited from the Sumerians who developed it some 4,000 years ago.
Our ancestors’ lives were dominated by the seasons and in the absence of clocks the rising and falling of the sun (daylight). As always, the move to urban areas due to industrialisation gave rise to working days being dominated by exact time.
And it was the railways’ need to have consistency in time across the country that created conformity in time; hence our clocks being set in accordance with Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
Finally it is worth acknowledging that time is the most precious commodity we possess.
We don’t really know how much, or how little, we have until it is gone.
With this is mind it is recognising that we should use time wisely.
* Dr Steven McCabe is director of research degrees for Birmingham City Business School