While studying in schools and colleges, we feel bad about one thing that every student wants the same. During the last class of the day, every student will be waiting for the class to be finished soon and get out of the school.
But the time goes dead slow and we all feel bad about that, whereas, it moves faster when we are at home or sleeping or playing. We wonder how it could not move fast but don’t really bother or pay attention to it.
Had you ever thought of the hands of a clock always move in the clockwise direction and not counter-clockwise?
But when we think about the reason no one could find it. Here is the reason, and surprisingly, it is much simpler than you might think.
To find the answer, you need to turn back the clocks. In olden days, there was a readily available timepiece that our ancestors followed which is known as Sun. It is not exactly the sun, but shadows. Ancient Egyptians came up with the idea of using these shadows to determine the time, but Greeks were the first who created a ‘sundial’.
A typical sundial usually is made up of a rod or a wedge called a gnomon, which casts a shadow on a plane surface. Generally a sundial in the northern hemisphere points towards the North Pole and a sundial in the southern hemisphere points towards the South Pole. Looking towards the equator from the northern hemisphere, the sun goes from left to right.
“The shadow of the sundial in the northern hemisphere goes from north to east to south to west. And because people from the northern hemisphere were the first ones to make mechanical clocks, they decided to go with the direction they saw the shadow moves, and that is the direction we now call clockwise.”
But how the southern hemisphere had got to building mechanical clocks before the northern geniuses? Because the direction the sun moves in the southern sky is the opposite of the direction it moves in the northern sky.