Die Zeit - Die Null - Das Alter - Die Lebenserwartung (English shop)

John Graunt (1662) und Edmund Halley (1693)

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Time is unhesitatingly treated as symmetrical and thus reversible, even though every human being experiences it as irreversible. There are evidently two aspects of time. A fact that led the Nobel laureate Prigogine to speak of time in physics as the forgotten dimension. Inspired by his fundamental works and Isaac Newton’s axioms as relative and absolute, as well as by the historian Koselleck’s distinction between singular events and structures of repetition in history, I have taken up the bipartition of time as two aspects of the same phenomenon and presented it in outline. The graphic on page 26 visualises the relationships between the two aspects as I have worked them out. I distinguish:

1. The ageing processes to which, according to Prigogine, everything is subject. The arrow of time can be regarded as the symbol for irreversible, directed movements. I designate this aspect of time as time-aspect T.

2. In the analysis and handling of ageing processes in time-aspect T, “de-temporalised” states are recorded by the observer and transferred into a measured time (Wickert). Measured time is based on a symmetrical coordinate system in a reversible, mathematical time. As the origin of the coordinate system, zero is a meta-numeral. It marks the trace of the One-who-counts-and-produces-the-sequence-of-numbers (Brian Rotman). I designate this aspect of time as time-aspect ±t. Using the conceptual approach of the two aspects of time, I have analysed, as an example, human age and life expectancy. I have gone back to the origins of mathematical demography, which rest on the works of Graunt and Halley. In doing so I came upon fundamental problems in the treatment of age and the misinterpretation of Halley’s table, which have been the scientific standard for over 300 years. In the conclusions I have attempted to indicate the potency concentrated in the meta-numeral zero, by which the initial conditions for individual coordinate systems are determined. For this I was able to start from Graunt’s confirmation of the age of the world according to the Bible and to refer to the Big Bang of modern physics, as well as to draw on examples of population projections from official German statistics. They make it apparent that in the meta-numeral zero not only the origin of every coordinate system is to be sought, but also the knowledge and the beliefs of the individual and of society. I have been a member of the Arbeitskreis Historische Demographie in the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Demographie since its foundation in 1994. From the outset, the focus of my work has been the topic of life expectancy throughout the entire course of human history and prehistory. A fundamental publication on this was: Langner, G. 1994: Fertility of populations as a function of the attained level of life expectancy in the course of human evolution; in Historical Research, Vol. 21, Cologne 1996.