A Year of Reading: Time by Alexander Waugh reviewed by Katherine Roberts

This month, I take a look at Alexander Waugh's 1999 discussion of Time as we know it (or as we think we know it). This book begins at the beginning and works fairly logically through our accepted periods of time from smallest to largest, starting with a chapter on seconds and progressing through minutes, hours, days, weeks, to eras and aeons. It ends with a discussion of simple and complex time, followed by a final chapter tantalisingly entitled 'End' - which, as I read through the earlier chapters, I imagined to be a mind-blowing comment on the end of days but actually involves a discussion of death and the afterlife according to different religions. (If you're wondering about the words in bold, I thought it might be fun to highlight our attempts to divide and control time - just consider how his post might read without those useful labels!)

Time by Alexander Waugh

While it's tempting to compare this book to Stephen Hawking's book 'A Brief History of Time' (1988), particularly since it seems the author has reviewed Hawking's earlier book, the two have different approaches to the subject. They should probably be read together, although I could only get my brain around one of them for this review. The chapter on years details our ancestors' various attempts to create a calendar that works accurately with the orbit of the Earth around the sun and the moon around the Earth - although it seems we haven't quite got things right yet! At several points in history, it has been necessary to adjust the previous (inaccurate) calendar in less-than-ideal ways, such as deleting 11 days from September in the year 1752 to align the British calendar with the rest of Europe. The Gregorian calendar we use today comes very close to keeping time with our planet's orbit, however has left us with weird glitches, such as a 28-day February when all the other months are either 30 or 31 days, with an extra leap day on the 29th February every four years - unless it's a century year (1900, etc), when we miss the leap year unless it is also divisible by 4000... which is why the year 2000 was still a leap year despite being a century year. Even with February's rather awkward adjustment, our current calendar is apparently still a fraction of a second out, so at some point in the fairly distant future someone somewhere will have to adjust it again and deal with the resulting chaos. In an effort to standardise time globally and even out the months, a World Calendar has been proposed but never adopted - mainly, it seems, because the religious traditions behind our current calendar oppose the change and no current leader is powerful enough to enforce such things on the rest of the world. This World Calendar is illustrated below, 'World Days' (W) being extra days without specific dates that will be public holidays worldwide.

(proposed) World Calendar

There is a fair amount of history in Waugh's book with some fascinating primitive methods of measuring time such as "rice bowls" (the length of time taken to eat a bowl of rice in 18th century China), to water clocks and sun dials. Other interesting details include a sand clock used to limit torture sessions that had to be moved out of sight of the victim to stop them resisting torture in the knowledge that their pain would stop once the sand ran out, which might make a good basis for a horror story. However, I'm not sure that I really enjoyed the read as a whole. Dividing the book into chapters, starting with seconds and working through to aeons, seems logical enough but inevitably means the early chapters are mathematics heavy, since they need to explain why we use our accepted measurements of time and how exactly these work with the Earth's orbit. This leaves later chapters (assuming you've fought your way through the maths) rather light in discussion and fluffy with religious and historical anecdotes. I found this book most interesting when it discusses space-time and whether time can ever end, or indeed when did it begin? The idea that time is linked to space is not new, and I can distinctly remember lying in bed as a child trying to 'see' the fourth dimension (which many consider to be time). Needless to say, my ten-year-old younger self failed to get her head around the concept, yet I still believe it must be there lurking somewhere out of sight... which feels a bit like reading Waugh's book.

Conclusion? Time, it seems, runs along quite happily, no matter how hard we try to label it, slow it down, speed it up, or otherwise control it. Things like 'leap years', 'daylight saving time' in the UK (one of my pet hates, which gives us depressingly darker evenings in winter), and the International Date Line (where crossing it from east to west means you miss a day of your life - or do you?), are merely mankind's attempts to control a primal force that does very well, thank you very much, without our interference. Whether it runs at the same speed, is linear or bends around space, or acts differently according to the laws of relativity, I suspect time will continue in its mysterious fashion long after we, and all our inaccurate calendars, are gone.

*

Katherine Roberts trained as a mathematician, worked with racehorses for a while, and ended up writing fantasy and historical/legendary fiction for young readers. Older readers might enjoy her short fiction previously published in genre magazines and since reissued as a series of Ampersand collections.

Weird and Wonderful
short science fiction tales
by Katherine Roberts

Find out more at www.katherineroberts.co.uk