Who rules the time? Reflection upon the role of conventionalism in time measurement

Abstract

We try to rethink and actualise conventional understanding of time measurement. We discuss historic development of the “ideal” clock - one that measures time most accurately - through the history of natural sciences. We defend thesis that scientific revolution of the seventeenth century marks the essential rupture in the understanding of time measurement. In their late works Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei developed a new concept of time, the measure of which does not depend on specially selected particular natural movement (usually it was the rotation of the sky). At that historic moment time became a physical quantity, which is relationally defined by universal mathematical laws of Galilean nature. Time reflects parameter t from equations of mathematical physics as accurately as possible. This change in the concept of time was probably one of the key turns that made modern mathematical physics possible.