Measurement of Time: From Kairological to Chronological

Measuring Time
Time's measurement is everywhere. Leaving London, Berlin, New York, Washington or Paris: at the airport every transaction, each ticket and money exchange is timed. Around Heathrow, as at any other major airport, there are clocks, blinking the date and time, down to tenths of seconds. Urban modernity lives under an assault of clocks. Alarm clocks put the frighteners on sleep: the first thought in so many people's minds, every single waking day is 'What's the time? Am I late?'

Digital clocks with their digitalsecond seem to speed time, relentlessly tightening deadlines.

People speak of the frenetic pace of modern society, everything is speede up, from fast food to fast clothes and fast knowledge.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day and every one is artificially pipped off, day in, day out, by the MSF service of broadcast standard frequency and time on wavelength 60kHz in the LF band. This is the time, since on the first of January 1972 the second was defined as the atomic second, and Co-ordinated Universal Time (abbreviated to UT) was set by international agreement, Roughly every year a leap-second is added to realign the time with that of the earth - it is added to 'accommodate' the earth's unreliable time. For the earth, you see, is too inaccurate for modernity's time measurement, because its spin changes by up to a thousandth of a second in some years. A thousandth of a second, indeed, tut tut, how unpunctual the earth is!

So the timekeepers of today must tell yje time from outside the earth itself, insisting that there is one time, abstract and universal, mono-time: the time. There is no such thing.