Conclusion

These ideas about evolutionary time are the foundation for the concrete time periods we in the West have constructed. Thus, the course of Western history—and concerns human and civil, religious and, lately, scientific and technological—have been responsible for our unique view of time. We have borrowed heavily from the Greeks: their logic, idealism, and reason lie at the foundation of how we think about time and its relationship to the natural world. The practical elements associated with time, the ones found when I unpacked the calendar unit by unit, seem to be descended directly from the Romans and their version of timekeeping, the ideas about time in the Middle Ages, especially its endowment with a linear quantity, having grown out of Christian beliefs propagated by the Eastern Holy Roman Empire, the formal bureaucratic structure that survived Rome. As mechanism replaced animism in the Enlightenment, and mechanistic determinism became the preferred form of reasoning, the world machine offered the most felicitous explanations about the history of the universe. Making good ideas to explain how things work was part of the success story of the Western invention of good things to simplify life. New technology was accompanied by new empiricism—a pair of compatible forces welded together by the desire for precision and regulation that had stemmed from medieval ecclesiastical concerns and was later fueled by the rise of the merchant class. Time's line became more continuous than discontinuous and, like the mechanical clock, was engraved with a carefully tooled set of fiducial marks to quantify its course, every indication on the measuring stiek having been placed there as a result of direct experiment.

In the Renaissance, Greek idealism resurfaced in the form of the quest for underlying fixed and eternal first principles—the need to fit individual events into a general set of laws. The dialogue concerning these principles could best he conducted in the language of mathematics.

The spatialization of time, vividly expressed in the twentieth-century "world diagram" of figure 4.5, also started with the Greeks, who gave us logic in a most unusual and succinct form—one not practiced as extensively anywhere else in the world. It is Greek geometry that has allowed modern cosmology to be so spatial, so orbital and planar, and is the basis of "space science," the geocentric, heliocentric, and galactocentric coordinate systems, and the cartesian reference frame. In our visually oriented world view, time has been seen in reference to space; and since the time of Descartes, we have laid out space in concrete terms.

Our last few hundred years of thinking about time began optimistically—a decided upswing in the pendulum's amplitude from the protracted medieval pessimism over the failed Second Coming. Even the nineteenth century's last holdouts began to despair of that long-anticipated Resurrection and Assumption. The notion of temporal continuity coupled with optimism made for a progressive way of thinking about change that is still operative. And our passionate love of progress coupled with our insatiable appetite for technology may know no limits.