The Ordering of Time

Provides the history of the use and interpretation of time. Suitable for students and researchers in social and cultural history, this title examines the various ways that time has been calculated by numbers and measured by instruments through the ages, from the computus - an ancient method of determining times and dates - to the computer.

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This book is a concise history of the use and interpretation of time, written by one of the foremost historians in Europe today. Arno Borst examines the various ways that time has been calculated by numbers and measured by instruments through the ages, from the "computus" - an ancient method of determining times and dates - to the present-day computer. In a wide-ranging discussion, he analyses the classical Greek concepts of divine, natural and human time; the universal time of ancient Rome; the Easter cycle of the Middle Ages; the development of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; early modern chronology; and, twentieth-century data processing. Borst argues that although many centuries and countless different instruments - sundials, horologia, abaci, astrolabes, calendars, and calculating machines - separate the "computus" from the modern computer, each generation throughout the ages has had to answer the same question: how can we make the best use of our available time to improve our lives? The computer, he suggests, is merely a new instrument employed for an ancient purpose.
Lively and accessible, "The Ordering of Time" will be welcomed by students and researchers in social and cultural history, the history of science and mathematics, as well as anyone interested in the history of time and numbers.