Barbara Adam says that the time of clocks is “an idea in practice,” and elaborates: “as a material expression of a particular understanding of the natural world, in which time is conceptualised through motion without change, as a spatial quantity which is infinitely divisible into units, which can be numerically defined, and where parts interact within abstracted wholes, to a design of invariant repetition, accurate timing, sequencing and spacing.”

Over time, as we regulate our lives by the clock, clock time comes to seem natural. It simply is time, rather than a particular (and very useful) abstraction from the varied reality of time.