See: Microsoft Word – book 3 x01 p1-7.doc (illustratingshadows.com)
Sundials can tell the time but not at night or when it’s cloudy, raining or snowing. They are not accurate except during the solstices, (whatever they are, right?). So what good are they?
Well, … they were more than good enough for all of our existence on earth which is about 200,000 years. That’s a bit of an exaggeration because people didn’t even know about time way back then. Time wasn’t as important to early earthlings because the idea didn’t occur to them. Once they became aware of the existence of time they still had to discover how to refer to it and then how to describe it.
So time wasn’t around for people even though time has always been around because people simply didn’t grasp the idea of time. Sundials today are just curiosities because we not only have far better ways to know the time, we have very exquisite ideas about it’s importance. So why consider sundials? One, because they help understand how the earth actually moves around the sun even though the sun seems like it’s moving and the earth is standing still. That’s the idea that almost got Galileo killed by the church in all of it’s ignorance back in the day. The apparent movement of the sun is the beginning of understanding astronomy. Astonomy is the beginning of understanding space, the planets and the stars. They can be understood on a very simple level all the way to the complexities of travelling through space and to the path of sattalites like the amazing Voyager which was shot into space in 1977, 47 years ago that is 15+ billion miles away from us at the moment and still going further and further. So your study of sundials can lead to some amazing discoveries. Or, in very simple terms you can actually see the time.
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