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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Definition of term
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2003 Feb 4, 12:19 -0400
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2003 Feb 4, 12:19 -0400
Hi Martin, > How is it that "with the sun" is synonymous with "clockwise"? The way I > look at it, clock hands go around in circles, and the sun goes from east to > west. I know you're right, I'm not disputing that, but I don't get the > connection. Before there were hands on clocks (long, long before), there were shadows on sundials and even shadows of standing stones passing over assorted marks on the ground. North of the Tropic of Cancer, those shadows move each day from roughly west, through north to roughly east (though in the high north in summer, they can keep on going through south to west). Even without the shadow, an observer at most northern latitudes sees the Sun move with the same rotational sense: east through south to west. Since all of Earth's great civilizations (aside from ancient Zimbabwe, the Incas and the latter's precursors) had their roots astride or north of that Tropic, what we have come to regard as the proper way for clocks to rotate is the direction that shadows move on northern sundials. In short, "clockwise" is synonymous with "with the Sun" in the Northern Hemisphere because "clockwise" is defined to be the way that the Sun appears to move when seen from that Hemisphere (north of the Tropic anyway). None of this would make any sense to a Micronesian navigator, of course, who sees the Sun pass from east to west through the Zenith (give or take the width of a hand span held at arms length). But the Chinese, North Indian, Arabic and European cultures which between them invented so much of our technology, including clocks with rotating hands, were not centred in Equatorial regions and saw a Sun which rotated through much of the compass. Trevor Kenchington -- Trevor J. Kenchington PhD Gadus@iStar.ca Gadus Associates, Office(902) 889-9250 R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour, Fax (902) 889-9251 Nova Scotia B0J 2L0, CANADA Home (902) 889-3555 Science Serving the Fisheries http://home.istar.ca/~gadus