What time do you make it?

This is cross-posted from the Board of Longitude blog ...

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We spend a lot of time on the longitude project thinking about timekeepers. Both of the major methods for finding longitude at sea involve time, whether it be in the form of John Harrison's marine chronometers or the celestial clock of the moon and stars which Tobias Mayer, Leonard Euler and Nevil Maskelyne established together as the lunar distance method. But I've not previously thought of a person as a timekeeper. It sounds rather like a character from Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett.

But, that is exactly what the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL have created, appointing the artist and curator Cathy Haynes as their 'Timekeeper in Residence' responsible for thinking about different concepts of time in the museum. I was lucky enough to meet Cathy recently, and to be invited last week to the opening of her installation, A Storm is Blowing, which considers her thoughts on timekeeping so far. The Petrie Museum is a treasure trove of artefacts, and Cathy has created a glorious web of ideas at the centre. I mean this literally, she has installed a series of cases showing different representations of time, which are woven together with red chords that connect her objects out into the wider collection.

Cathy considers how different cultures and thinkers have conceived of time in different shapes - as a line, a circle, a snake, an arrow, a knot, a tree of branches, a wormhole, a star map, a statue - her point being that we tend too simplistically to think of time as a line these days. Thank you Facebook. I was struck by how much of her discussion of changing ideas of time focused on the eighteenth century, the history of science, and concepts relevant to navigation. She showcases Francis Bacon on history as a line of progress, and Charles Darwin on evolution as a tree. She tells us about Britain's switch to the Gregorian Calendar with reference to Hogarth and Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Both star maps and shadows feature as ideas of time.

All of these would tie the longitude problem into the centre of her web. For longitude, of course, stars and shadows are not only representations of time but also a means of measuring and marking it. I realised as I left the exhibition that what is missing is what for me now represents time: a timekeeper in the eighteenth-century sense of the word.