“Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time”
By Lee Bright
Version 0.1
Time, that bastard. What is it? God knows. He created it. He transcends it.
What is there to transcend? The Arrow of Time. The philosophers don't give us much about Time. Scandalously, it is the scientists.
Because it can not be defined in any satisfactory way, any metaphysical argument or criticism that relies on Time is necessarily suspect and probably invalid. The Problem of Pain and the Problem of Evil both swim in Time. They are both probably invalid. While that satisfies no one, it does soften the blow.
By modern standards, Asimov’s historical time scale is conservative to the point of being traditional. <<Asimov's quote on time uncertainty. This speaks to his intellectual honesty, as skeptics often harp on chronological issues. Some big voices often claim otherwise, but the big questions in chronology have only been a little improved since Asimov first wrote. If anything, with more data, we know more about what we don’t know and have a stronger grasp on the precision and imprecision of various methods. This allows people with epistemic humility to come to probabilistic and bracketed conclusions.
There are two evidence pathways in which time is considered - relative time and absolute time. Relative time is concerned with the sequence of events, while absolute time is concerned with getting precise dates for events. These pathways are complementary - a discovery or confirmation in one leads to more clarity in the other. Still, the giant jigsaw puzzle of chronology is hampered by uncertainties in the interpretation of evidence, so much so that late Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen has talked of chronology as a disease.
There are no dates before the Bronze Age Collapse that can be considered true at face value.
Relative dating methods pottery, deposition layers, major technologies. relative and absolute dating methods are not closely coupled during the many uncertain times.
There are several direct methods for obtaining more precise absolute times:
Writings referencing events to other datable events
Tree ring counting and correlation
Date ranges of regional pottery styles
Radio-isotope dating, such as Carbon -14 dating
These methods are often synchronized together to give more precise dating. For instance,
Carbon dating relies on the assumptions that the concentration of Carbon-14 is the same seasonally, throughout the ages, and mixes equally in the atmosphere. For measurements within 10% precision, these assumptions are not true. Carbon dating, a continuous sequence of tree rings, can establish regional calibration curves that, in some cases, allow carbon dating to within 1% certainty.
Known events can validate and confirm dates established by carbon dating.
There are times when it doesn’t work out so well. For instance, over the past 40 years, there has been an ongoing debate over dates before about 1400 BC (15th century BC) in Egypt. Carbon dating has produced dates 70 years or more older than the well-accepted dates arrived at by relative dating methods. The controversy has been so divisive that many of those using relative dating methods have conducted their research independently of radio-isotope and tree-ring data. There are a variety of factors at play that make the absolute methods more uncertain than usual, including:
Relative flat areas - 'plateaus' - on the calibration curve that allow multiple valid dates from carbon dating. These dates could be hundreds of years apart.
No continuous tree ring sequence to establish a precise regional calibration curve in Egypt or the Levant.
Possible old carbon sources (low carbon-14 concentrations) from volcanic activity and/or upwelling of the Mediterranean Sea.
Though not the only big question in the field of chronology, this one casts a big question mark over chronology across Egypt and the Middle East before 1400 BC. Not only has it not been established how far North or East this discrepancy exists, but the chronology of much of the Middle East is also based on Egypt.
As in the field of Natural History, archaeologically informed chronology used named ages. Relative to a type of anthropological development, such as the ability to refine iron. Based on development, the absolute dates may be the same for all cultures.
Geologic time has eons, eras, periods, and epochs as divisions of time going from largest to smallest. A major advantage is how well this maintains the structure of evidence from relative dating, while an absolute chronology is constantly being modified. of events in Earth’s with major geologic events or extinctions at the boundaries