Related to this, from Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps by Peter Galison:
Over the last thirty years it has become a commonplace to pit bottom-up against top-down explanations. Neither will do in accounting for time. A medieval saying aimed at capturing the links between alchemy and astronomy put it this way: in looking down, we see up; in looking up, we see down. That vision of knowledge serves us well. For in looking down (to the electromagnetically regulated clock networks) we see up: to images of empire, metaphysics, and civil society. In looking up (to the philosophy of Einstein and Poincaré’s procedural concepts of time, space, and simultaneity) we see down: to the wires, gears, and pulses passing through the Bern patent office and the Paris Bureau of Longitude. We find metaphysics in machines, and machines in metaphysics. Modernity, just in time.
rdn32 