ABSTRACT
Kirsten Lippincott was talking about people’s attempts to understand and measure time in the context of a fascinating exhibition devoted to this endeavour. Perhaps we should not be surprised to discover, given the complexities of Einstein’s space-time continuum, that time is not quite the simple matter of a linear progression from birth to death, from generation to generation, and so on, that it might at first appear to be. Moreover, people’s conceptions of time have varied across the ages and according to their culture. However, one of the things which caught my interest in both The Story of Time exhibition and book, was the role of naming and measurement in mythology, theology, philosophy, and the history of ideas. For what else are we doing when we attempt to assess human characteristics, but trying to identify and name what these characteristics are and then to measure the extent to which any one person possesses them?
