Part II: Mechanical time and its consequences

The clock – the ‘mother of machines’ – gave birth to philosophical changes, knowledge, precision measurement which helped usher in the Scientific Revolution and all our technological advances today

In Part I: Human Time and the Great Escape from Nature, we explored how the invention of time liberated humanity from the iron grip of nature and created human time: history and an awareness of the past, present and future. In this post, we explore the unintended consequences of that embodiment: the invention of the clock.

One of the most fascinating dim…