Topic
Timekeeping
5 articles
History of science
Why did ten days vanish in 1582?
People went to bed on the fourth of October and woke up on the fifteenth. Nothing happened to the Sun, and nobody lost any time. A rounding error had been accumulating for sixteen centuries, and somebody finally paid it off.
Society
Why does time feel faster as you get older?
Every adult says it and every child finds it baffling, because a summer holiday is obviously enormous. Nothing is wrong with anybody's clock. The difference is in how much of the summer gets written down.
Astronomy
Why isn’t the earliest sunset on the shortest day?
The shortest day of the year ought to have the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise. Check a timetable and neither of them lands there. The sunsets start getting later a fortnight before the days start getting longer.
History of science
Why are there 60 minutes in an hour?
Everything else we count goes in tens. Time stubbornly does not, and the reason is a choice made five thousand years ago by people who had no easy way of writing a third.
Technology
How does your phone know where it is?
Open a map in a town you have never visited and a blue dot lands on you within seconds. Nobody told the phone anything, and nothing up there answered it.