The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum  observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

It was not until the 14th century that scientists created the first sophisticated astronomical clocks.

nabled Tristram to date his conception very exactly. It also provoked The Clockmaker's Outcry against the Author: The directions I had for making several clocks for the country are counter- manded; because no modest lady now dares to mention a word about winding- up a clock, without exposing herself to the sly leers and jokes of the family ... Nay, the common expression of street-walkers is, "Sir, will you have your clock wound up

The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”