Kalyani Tupkary

The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks. What makes a Tuesday a Tuesday, and why does it come, so remorselessly, every seven days? A week is mostly made up.

We live with these realities because they make the rest of our lives feel manageable. But time did not have to be arranged that way. We have  imagined  time, at least in Western countries, as subservient to commerce, and attempted to export or forcibly impose that understanding worldwide.

But while nature may mete out time’s passage in these horological devices, it takes human observation of the heavens to set them. Even the most precise atomic clock must be periodically tweaked to account for variations in the earth’s rotation. Some clocks, however, are tuned more directly to nature.