History of Technology in India, Vol. I: From Antiquity to c. 1200 A.D. v1.c38.s3.1

v1.c38.s3.1

The ancients realized on the basis of a clearly agreed experience that there is a unique serial order of events (i.e. one dimensional). This was the foundation of a trustworthy system for the dating of events by the use of calendars, dynasties the primitive sundial and water clock. This notion of time is somewhat different from what it is to theoretical Physics or it is to thermodynamics or to evolutionary sciences such as biology. The early notion of time is mostly connected with the natural phenomenon of day and night. The concept of past, present and future has added an additional difficulty of another dimension into it. I am always in my ‘present’ and can experience no other parts of time which is ‘past’ or ‘future’. Only the ‘present’ is real and has the character of a knife-edge which separates non-existant past from a non-existant future. We will first compile sources on the natural phenomenon of time and then analyse its attribute and impact from different perspectives.