I see that South Koreans have recently managed to find a way of reversing the aging process! Their new law adopts the international norm for calculating age from date of birth whereas previously one traditional system assumed everyone aged by a year on 1st January disregarding their birth date and another deemed everyone a year old at birth effectively counting the period from conception as part of their age and then rounding up as necessary. As a result of the change some people have become two years younger!

It all goes to show what an elastic concept time is as we all know from the difference between time as we experience it, sometimes fact and sometimes dragging, and as the clock now tells it. And we easily forget that the uniformity of modern standardisations is relatively new.

I have just visited Florence where the Duomo clock was designed to show Italian time as measured until Napoleon. The clock has only one hand and moves anticlockwise on a 24 hour system but one which starts and ends at sunset rather rather than midnight.

The synod of Whitby was a famous debate over whether Easter should be calculated according to the Roman or Celtic tradition and Julius Caesar’s most lasting impact was perhaps the reform of the annual calendar as a result of which July was posthumously named after him. Carlo Rovelli has written a wonderful book that makes you think with the really big picture about time from the perspective of a a theoretical physicist.

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