Tempus fugit - or time flies - is a saying we all know and can agree with at many times. The old toilet roll analogy - the further you travel along it, the faster it seems to go!!

Time is defined as “The indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, to the future.” Seconds become minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia… but as we know, tomorrow never comes!!

Humans have been measuring and recording time in many different ways since the dawn of civilisation, both with clocks and with calendars.

From sundials, water clocks, and candles that took a certain length of time to burn… to hourglasses, analogue clocks, and the latest digital clocks and smart watches. Alarm clocks - the bane of a working life - cuckoo clocks, pendulum clocks, carriage clocks… so many different designs. But all designed to record the unstoppable march of time.

Early humans used the phases of the moon to form a basic calendar. There is evidence that this was being done as long as 6,000 years ago.

But lunar years are 354 or 384 days based on 12 or 13 lunar months, and the solar year is 365.24 days, so there was an increasing drift between date and seasons unless regular corrections were made. Mayan calendars were astronomically based and were made up of 18 months of 20 days each.

In 45 BC, Julius Caesar attempted to bring the world’s calendar into line and introduced his Julian Calendar, which was based on the sun and not the moon, but this still was adrift due to the 0.24 extra day each year, which that calendar didn’t allow for.

In 1582, pope Gregory introduced the calendar in the most widespread use today, the Gregorian Calendar, which has leap years every 4 years, thereby mostly correcting for the 0.24 of a day discrepancy each year. Some cultures and religions do still use the Julian calendar and are now 13 days behind the rest of the world.

According to the various laws of physics and relativity, time travel is theoretically very possible - going into the future anyway - if we had spacecraft that were capable of travelling at a reasonable fraction of the speed of light. You could head off into space, turn around at some point, and come back to Earth, and while a short period of time would have passed on board the spaceship, a much longer period would have passed on Earth… and you would be, in effect, in the future!!

Going back into the past is much harder, as you would need to head off again, and travel faster than the speed of light , which isn’t currently possible unless there happens to be a wormhole - a tunnel through spacetime - that the spaceship could use. But as our understanding of physics stands now, that target point in time couldn’t be before the time that the wormhole itself was created. So, time travellers would find it far easier going forward in time than backwards.

Or easier still, just get yourself a Robert Rankin style time-travelling sprout!! 😁

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