About time

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It flies when we’re having fun. It heals all wounds. It waits for no man. Time is the true ruler over our existence. But what is it? A second? A millennium? Our concept of time is necessarily linked with the way we measure it. Ancient civilisations relied on natural measures of time – the rising and setting of the Sun dividing day from night, the phases of the lunar cycle, the recurring seasons and the changing patterns of the stars. As time passed, humans began to develop more and more sophisticated and precise time-keeping devices.

The accuracy of a timepiece is determined by how much time it loses over a period, in relation to the Earth’s rotation. The ‘Essential facts’ (see box, below) looks at the development of time keepers from sundials, through to modern day atomic clocks.

Time for learning

As a topic, ‘time’ lends itself to a wide range of fascinating cross-curricular learning. Most children will be aware that there are 60 seconds in a minute or be able to convert an analogue clock to digital, but few will have stopped to really consider the concept of time, how it affects almost all aspects of our lives and how humans arrived at the measurements we take for granted today.