If you look up the term water clock in a certain online dictionary (which will remain nameless, though you can find it easily enough), you will find that the definition, in its entirety, is “A clepsydra.” (And you thought lexicographers didn’t have a sense of humor.) I’d like to be at least slightly more helpful here by telling you a bit about one of the oldest devices for measuring time.
Of course, units of measure like seconds, minutes, and hours are a mere arbitrary fiction. Days, years, seasons, and perhaps months (at least lunar months) correspond to easily observed natural phenomena, but any unit shorter than a day is a pure human invention. Had history unwound differently, a second might be shorter or longer than it is now, or we might have divided the day into, say, 537 bligrots. The specific choices our distant ancestors made are, in the grand scheme of things, not nearly as important as the mere fact that they figured out a way to quantify time, repeatably and fairly accurately. It is incalculably important that we be able to determine such things as how long a lawyer should be allowed to speak, whether the athlete who won the race today went faster than the athlete who won yesterday, or when lunch begins. [Article Continues…]
