More than 200 years ago Benjamin Franklin coined the now famous dictum that equated passing minutes and hours with shillings and pounds. The new millennium--and the decades leading up to it--has given his words their real meaning. Time has become to the 21st century what fossil fuels and precious metals were to previous epochs. Constantly measured and priced, this vital raw material continues to spur the growth of economies built on a foundation of terabytes and gigabits per second.

An English economics professor even tried to capture the millennial zeitgeist by supplying Franklin's adage with a quantitative underpinning. According to a formula derived by Ian Walker of the University of Warwick, three minutes of brushing one's teeth works out to the equivalent of 45 cents, the compensation (after taxes and Social Security) that the average Briton gives up by doing something besides working. Half an hour of washing a car by hand translates into $4.50.

This article was originally published with the title Real Time.

1 Comments

1. 1. phayez 12:35 AM 12/27/08

   Before the blogs were canceled here on Sci Am I had a blog under the username "PHAYEZ" which dealt with, among other things, time and measurement. I put forward that time only exists as a feature of three dimensional existence. Time is the "velocity/distance of 3D matter relative to the velocity/distance of other 3D matter". Outside of three dimensions "TIME" as such does not exist and infinity is equal to zero "time". Also outside of three dimensions measurements cannot be made of anything which makes mathematics, with all due respect, irrelevant since the language of mathematics has, as a syntax, products of measurement. The existence and non-existence of time is a spatial relationship oxymoron which is difficult to grasp when you are an entity who is wholly dependent on being made up of atoms which are moving through space.
   One final comment, if I may, on the speed limit of light and the fact that even information cannot exceed the speed of light. At the speed of light time is zero, in other words for the light there is no time that passes so that regardless of where it arrives, it arrives instantaneously. Nothing can move faster than instantaneously, even information...
   Pierre
   username: PHAYEZ (Edmonton,Alberta,Canada)

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