The Beginning Of Civilization

It is generally believed that human civilization began with the development of the ability to write, to record information. To get to this phase with permanent settlements, in contrast to the earlier nomadic hunting and gathering of food, two vital steps are acknowledged to have been necessary: the growing of crops and the control of fire.

At some point, nomadic pre-historic people noticed that if they dropped the part of food plants that we today call seeds and then happened to pass by the spot later, duplicates of the plant would be growing. This was the beginning of agriculture and is recognized as the most important of the two vital steps in the beginnings of civilization by making permanent settlements possible by eliminating the necessity of wandering in search of food.

The other of these two vital early steps was the control of fire. This made the cooking of food possible and also provided heat and light. Maintaining a fire at a settlement kept wild animals away and, in time, people would discover that it made the smelting of metals from ores possible.

However, I would like to add a third vital step in the beginning of civilization to the first two. It is the measurement of time. Without this step, civilization would have been impossible, regardless of the other two.

First of all, any kind of sustained agriculture would be impossible without an understanding of the seasons. Fortunately, we have a ready-made seasonal timepiece, the moon, with it's predictable phases. The moon orbits the earth, while going through it's series of phases, in twenty-nine days. I am certain that we are greatly underestimating the importance of this to the beginning of human civilization. Early agriculture, which was the very basis of civilization, was completely dependent on the convenient measure of time provided by the moon.

When the Industrial Revolution came along, I do not believe that it's centerpiece was the steam engine, as is generally believed. My hypothesis is that it relied upon the development of reliable and accurate clocks. Indeed, the workings of a steam engine bears a similarity to that of pendulum-based clocks, which came first.

In agriculture, the most important measure of time is the calendar. It is the cycle of the seasons that is important to the farmer. The time of day is unimportant, whether the farmer plows or plants in the morning or in the evening makes no difference whatsoever.

But when the Industrial Revolution comes and people are working in factories rather than on farms, it is the clock, rather than the calendar, which is most important. If a factory laborer (labourer) must report to work at 4 PM to replace the worker on the previous shift, it is the exact time of day that counts, the season is unimportant. Regardless of progress in other areas, the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible without accurate clocks and the development of such clocks brought about the mechanical skills to build the steam engines and other features of the revolution.

Global navigation also relied upon the development of accurate clocks that were not dependent upon the movement of a pendulum. It is easy to measure the latitude of one's location by use of the North Star or the equivalent point in the southern hemisphere. But measurement of longitude is more difficult and was solved by carrying an accurate clock on a ship set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and comparing it to locally measured solar time. Pendulum-based clocks are not reliable on ships at sea because the rolling and pitching of the ship in rough waters interfered with the operation of the pendulum.

The progress that human beings can make depends upon our mastery of the smallest essential time frame involved. This goes for both technology and scientific discovery. Time is the fundamental dimension and it is the most important quantity of which we take measurements. Humans have mastered nuclear reactions and can build computer CPUs only because we have mastered the required time frames. We have not mastered the electron orbitals around an atomic nucleus and still consider them as governed by uncertainty simply because we cannot yet handle the time frame involved.