Kalyani Tupkary

Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. … But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. 

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.

Like so many botanical concepts, the flower clock originated with the Swedish ur-taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, in his 1751 treatise “Philosophia Botanica.” Based on field observations, he divided flowers into three categories. The meteorici open and close with the weather. The tropici follow the changing hours of daylight. And the aequinoctales, Linnae