Time becomes time which has flowed, slowly been petrified, entered into sediments and deposits, and it fixes a beginning which can be dated for the history of the earth and of human beings. There thus arises at the same time the linear continuum, to which all other series of movements refer. But the decisive step is taken by the analogy with the machine. It becomes the vehicle of natural time when the series of movements prescribed by physics are built into it. It thereby becomes the regulator of the social time system of human beings, who have to conform to it. The time-structure of the linear, homogenized, arbitrarily divisible continuum is transferred through the machine from the realm of nature to that of society. The scientist feeds into the machine, which is his creation, the time of nature, whereby it was endowed with a temporal ordering power in the face of which all other social notions of time would prove inferior, if not impotent. In the social chaos which resulted from the industrial revolution and which was to lead society to the edge of the collapse of its old structures, science and technology became that authority and ordering power which appeared to be the saviour from collapse. In its name and in that of progress, there has been a demand ever since for the submission to a system of time which invoked natural time, and in accordance with which both machines and human beings had to move. The machine age, with its dominant conception of linear time, was able to remain unchallenged for so long not least because of this successful' connection between natural and social time, established by the transformation of the scientific conception of time.
The ousting of religion as a time-setting authority, and as the highest authority in determining time, thus had far-reaching consequences. Nobody would question the monopoly of definition on the part of science today, which since 1967, for example, has given the definition of a second as 9,192,631,770 periods of the caesium atom. Even if there are still various strange-seeming rearguard actions by religious fundamentalists, as in the USA, which find expression in so-called ‘creationism', attempts at a regressive departure from the scientific conception of time have no chance, and no significant consequences.
Cronos's Fear of the New Age
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