David Peat

116 From Certainty to Uncertaintyrepeat itself. In his research Poincaré was touching something verydeep, no less than civilizations’ entire way of understanding time andwhat it means to live within a cyclical nature. In doing so he was touchingthe seeds of chaos, and maybe this is the reason that the term“chaos” and the notion of a chaos theory has proved to be so disturbingto a mind that seeks order, regularity, and predictability.The Womb of TimeEarly human societies were embraced within the rhythms of nature.They lived with the rising and setting of the sun, the heat of middayand the cool of the evening breeze, the long days of summer and frostynights of midwinter. Nature’s rhythms were so ubiquitous that humansbent to their demands.Then at the end of the thirteenth century the first mechanicalclocks appeared on public buildings and, in towns at least, people becameaware of a new quality of time. It was a time measured mechanically,a time divided and subdivided into equal proportions. No longerdid it matter if it was winter or summer, if there was plowing or harvestingof grain to be done, for the mechanical hours each lasted thesame duration. Irrespective of work to be completed, or the amount ofdaylight remaining, clocks ticked away the hours and minutes equallythroughout the seasons. (Before the advent of clocks the “hour” wasprobably of a more flexible nature.)Where previously time’s qualities had been measured by cycles,seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, the canonical periods ofprayer, and the chanting of the offices of the day, now time was quantifiedand reduced to numbers. But numbers can be easily arranged on aline—which mathematicians refer to as “the number line.” So it wasquite natural that, in place of cycles within cycles, time should also bestrung out on a line and counted off in so many hours and minutes.Now instead of time cycling and returning it would stretch out indefinitelyfrom past to future.Time in other cultures was the god Chronos, the rotations of thegods of the Mayan calendar, the old man with his scythe, the figure