by Adam Frank
22. Mithen, Prehistory of the Mind, 54–55.
23. Ibid., 71.
24. The circadian rhythm is entrained to the exposure to light and dark in an animal’s environment. That is, it is governed by the cycle of daylight. In mammals, the circadian rhythm relies on two clusters of neurons above the optic chiasm. David Sadava et al., Life: The Science of Biology, 9th ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2009), 1128.
25. The time it takes for the moon to complete one orbit is actually less than the synodic month. This period is called the sidereal month and it lasts just 27.3 days. The difference occurs because the Earth is moving in its orbit around the sun as the moon moves in its orbit around the Earth. Thus even if the moon completes one orbit in a sidereal month, it has to move a bit further to line up with the sun (the synodic month), which has shifted its position in the sky due to the Earth’s motion.
26. Eliade notes that myths relate to “primordial Time, the fabled time of the ‘beginnings.’” In this way myths correlate to the impulse of modern science to explain the beginning of earthly and cosmic time. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998).
27. Ibid., 9.
28. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 122.
29. Mithen, Prehistory of the Mind, 47.
30. Ibid., 47.
31. Ibid., 47.
32. Ibid., 48.
33. Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (New York: Canongate, 2005), 14–15.
34. Ibid., 13.
35. Ibid., 15.
36. Ibid., 15.
37. Ibid., 16.
38. Armstrong notes that often this sky god appeared to retreat and have no dealings with people. He is said to have “left” or “gone away.” Ibid., 21.
39. Mithen, After the Ice, 12.
40. Peter Wilson demonstrates the radical nature of the shift from hunter-gatherer to domestication and its impact on the evolution of culture in The Domestication of the Human Species (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
41. Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (New York: Random House, 2007), 70.
42. An excellent exploration of the role physical embodiment may play in consciousness can be found in Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
43. Mithen, After the Ice, 178.
44. David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 227.
45. Ian Shaw and Robert Jameson, A Dictionary of Archaeology (Padstow, Cornwall: Blackwell, 2002), 546; Rodney Castelden, The Stonehenge People: An Exploration of Life in Neolithic Britain, 4700–2000 BC (New York: Routledge, 2002), 101.
46. Renfrew, Prehistory, 133.
47. Colin Renfrew argues that the construction of Stonehenge brings about a “grander social reality” and simultaneously represents “the deliberate attempt to align the human society in question with the cosmos.” Ibid., 155.
48. Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 41.
49. Ibid., 43–44.
50. Ibid., 55–56.
51. Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 54.
CHAPTER 2: THE CITY, THE CYCLE AND THE EPICYCLE
1. Tamsyn Barton, Ancient Astrology (New York: Routledge, 1994), 12. There is some debate about the exact date of Ammisaduqa’s reign but some scholars estimate 1646 or 1581 BCE as a possible date for the beginning of his reign. Herman Hunger and David Pingree, Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 38.
2. There are no records of Ammisaduqa enacting such a treaty but we know that astrological predictions played a role in arranging marriages. Barton, Ancient Astrology, 29.
3. Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States and Civilizations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 210–11.
4. The Indus Valley society, called the Harappan culture after one of its major cities, flourished between about 2600 and 1900 BCE. Charles Gates, Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece, and Rome (New York: Routledge, 2005), 67.
5. The city of Ur reached its apogee in the late third and early second millennia BCE. The First Dynasty of Babylon spanned 2000 to 1530 BCE, when Hammurabi’s rule began. Ibid., 53, 56.
6. Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (New York: Routledge, 2006), 14.
7. Anthony Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002), 67.
8. Some research indicates that coin use may be traced back to early as 8000 BCE. These small cones, spheres, disks or cylinders served as counters for Neolithic people. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 7–9.
9. Ibid., 117–18.
10. Henry George Fischer, “The Origin of Egyptian Hieroglyphs,” in The Origins of Writing, ed. Wayne M. Senner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 67–70.
11. Gates, Ancient Cities, 71.
12. Ibid., 71.
13. Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (New York: Random House, 2007), 99.
14. Aveni, Empires of Time, 114.
15. E. G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
16. Ibid.
17. Aveni, Empires of Time, 99–100.
18. Helge S. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.
19. Ibid., 7.
20. Ibid., 8.
21. Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
22. Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (New York: Dover, 1969).
23. Ian Johnston, “Device That Let the Greeks Decode the Solar System,” Scotsman, November 20, 2006; Ian Sample, “Mysteries of Computer from 65 BC Are Solved,” Guardian, November 30, 2006.
24. The Hellenistic period was an explosive moment in Western thought. It marks the advent of new methods of inquiry and interactions with the surrounding world. For more on the Tang Dynasty, see Charles D. Benn, China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
25. Aveni, Empires of Time, 36–46.
26. Ibid., 36.
27. Ibid., 37.
28. Ibid.
29. The following sections are quoted by line number from Hesiod, Works and Days, in Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972).
30. Aveni, Empires of Time. 43-44.
31. Ibid., 45.
32. Ibid.
33. Kosmos is a vast and complicated concept in ancient Greek thought, but the meaning most germane to our project is a universal, celestial order that links the Earth and the heavens. Paul Cartledge, Paul Millett and Sitta von Reden, Kosmos: Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
34. Edward Harrison, Masks of the Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 50–51.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 51.
37. Carl Huffman, “Pythagoras,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2009 ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/#LifWor (accessed January 30, 2011).
38. Harrison, Masks of the Universe.
39. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 17.
40. Christopher Shields, “Aristotle,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2009 ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/aristotle/ (accessed September 27, 2010).
41. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 20.
42. Epicycles were used by a number of greek astronomers including Hipparchus sometime between 147 and 127 BCE. Ptolemy’s theories on epicycles depend he
avily on the frameworks Hipparchus put in place. Hugh Thurston, Early Astronomy (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 133, 143–170.
43. John Palmer, “Parmenides,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2008 ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/ (accessed October 21, 2010).
44. Daniel W. Graham, “Heraclitus,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2008 ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/heraclitus/ (accessed November 10, 2010).
45. John Rist, The Stoics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 183.
46. Sylvia Berryman, “Leucippus,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2010 ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leucippus/ (accessed November 8, 2010).
47. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 18.
48. Marcelo Gleiser, The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), 3.
CHAPTER 3: THE CLOCK, THE BELL TOWER AND THE SPHERES OF GOD
1. On occasions reformist Benedictine monks corresponded with Rome hoping for the appointment of similarly reform-minded bishops. Laura Swan, The Benedictine Tradition: Spirituality in History (Collegeville, MN: Order of St. Benedict, 2007), 35.
2. St. Benedict placed a heavy emphasis on his fellow monks honouring God through their work. Mayeul de Dreuille, The Rule of St. Benedict: A Commentary in Light of World Ascetic Traditions (Leominster, Herefordshire: Newman Press, 2000), 235.
3. The sacrist (less commonly, sacristan) was the monastic keeper of time as well as keeper of the ceremonial vestments. He directed the ringing of bells, though it’s not clear whether he rang them himself. He may have had subordinates. David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of Its Development from the Times of St. Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 940–1216 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 429–30; E. K. Milliken, English Monasticism: Yesterday and Today (London: George G. Harrap, 1967), 73.
4. The main offices of the Church are: matins (also called vigils) during the night, lauds at dawn, prime in the early morning, terce at midmorning, sext at midday, none in midafternoon, vespers in the evening, and compline before bed. Only matins, lauds and vespers were repeated in church. The rest were said in private. David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of Its Development from the Times of St. Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 940–1216 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 378, 449–51.
5. While this date is debatable, it marks the point after which medieval universities were founded and scientific thought regained a widespread foothold in European thought.
6. E. G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 219.
7. Ibid., 210; Anthony Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002), 91–92.
8. Aveni, Empires of Time, 89, 98.
9. Ibid., 99.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 100.
12. Richards, Mapping Time, 215.
13. Aveni, Empires of Time, 100.
14. Ibid.
15. Richards, Mapping Time, 239–46.
16. This phrase is borrowed from the title of Charles Freeman’s famous study of the European Middle Ages. The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
17. David Martel Johnson, How History Made the Mind: The Cultural Origins of Objective Thinking (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2003), 92.
18. Ibid.
19. David Allen Park, The Grand Contraption: The World as Myth, Number, and Chance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 168.
20. Helge S. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34.
21. Adrian Keith Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 2–3.
22. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 36–37.
23. Ibid., 37.
24. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 204.
25. Part of this grievance with Aristotelian cosmology resulted from the line in Genesis regarding the waters above the firmament that could not be accounted for if the outermost space was a vacuum. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 38.
26. Ibid, 42.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 45.
30. Gilbert of Mons, Chronicle of Hainaut, trans. Laura Napran (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 115.
31. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
32. Aveni, Empires of Time, 80.
33. Ibid., 80.
34. Ibid., 80–81.
35. Using differentiated time would have been characteristic of only the educated classes during this time period. Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, 18–19.
36. The Rostrum and the Grecostasis. Aveni, Empires of Time, 81.
37. Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, 57–59.
38. Lewis Mumford, “The Monastery and the Clock,” in Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), 13–14.
39. Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, 29
40. Ibid., 36.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 37.
43. Ibid., 37–38.
44. Ibid., 208.
45. Ibid., 248.
46. Ibid., 200.
47. Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 295.
48. Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, 45.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 129–33.
51. Ibid., 146
52. Ibid., 282
53. Mumford, “The Monastery and the Clock,” 17.
54. Basil S. Yamey, “Double-Entry Bookkeeping, Luca Pacioli and Italian Renaissance Art,” in Art and Accounting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 125.
55. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1977), xvii.
56. Nancy Smiler Levinson, Magellan and the First Voyage Around the World (New York: Clarion, 2001), 52.
57. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 50.
58. John North, A Norton History of Astronomy and Cosmology (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 283.
59. Ibid., 319.
60. Henry C. King, The History of the Telescope (New York: Dover, 1955), 30.
61. Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 101.
62. Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2002), 14, 15.
63. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 57.
64. William Gilbert, On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies and on the Great Magnet the Earth, trans. Paul Fleury Mottelay (New York: John Wiley, 1893).
65. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 63.
66. Martin Gorst, Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 15.
67. Ibid., 40.
68. John North, God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (New York: Continuum, 2006), 201.
69. Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 97.
CHAPTER 4: COSMIC MACHINES, ILLUMINATED NIGHT AND THE FACTORY CLOCK
1. Alec Skempton, A Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland 1500–1830 (London: Thomas Telford, 2002), 160.
2. M. W. Flinn, Men of Iron: The Crowleys in the Early Iron Industry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962), 200–2.
3. Crowley lived from 1658 to 1713, Newton from 1643 to 1727 by the Gregorian calendar.
4. Skempton, Biographical Dictiona
ry, 160.
5. J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 351.
6. Ibid.
7. Flinn, Men of Iron, 53.
8. Skempton, Biographical Dictionary, 160.
9. Those who ran the ironworks after Crowley’s death in 1713 continued to build on the Law Book.
10. Allen C. Bluedorn and Mary J. Waller, “The Stewardship of the Temporal Commons,” in Research in Organizational Behavior: An Annual Series of Analytical Essays and Critical Reviews, vol. 27, ed. Barry Staw (San Diego: JAI Press, 2006), 377.
11. Ibid.
12. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society, 353.
13. Skempton, Biographical Dictionary, 160.
14. Edward Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century: The North-East, 1700–1750. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 341.
15. Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 168–69.
16. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 287.
17. Newton was born on Christmas 1642 according to the Julian calendar, which was in use at the time. By his death, England had switched to the Gregorian calendar making the date of his birth January 4, 1643. David Berlinski, Newton’s Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World (New York: Free Press, 2000).
18. Ibid., 152–54.
19. L. W. Johnson and M. L. Wolbarsht, “Mercury Poisoning: A Probable Cause of Isaac Newton’s Physical and Mental Ills,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 34, no. 1 (July 1979).
20. Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 345.
21. Stephen D. Snobelen, interviewed by Paul Newall, “Stephen D. Snobelen: Newton Reconsidered,” 2005, http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php?/page/index.html/_/interviews/stephen-d-snobelen-newton-reconsidered-r39 (accessed September 21, 2010).
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Edward Grand, Much Ado About Nothing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 10.
25. Ibid., 54.
