Last night during one of the commercial breaks of Dirty Jobs, I stumbled upon a show on the Science Channel about the concept of time (with Brian Cox, noted author and physicist).
The segment I caught discussed the fact that due to a variety of things, not the least of which is wind patterns, the earth turns either more slowly or more quickly on any given day. Meaning, as we all sort of knew, that not all “days” are 24 hours.
The point made at the end of that segment was that because of this, the age-old method of using the sun or other celestial object to tell the time is not particularly accurate, and so that in order to really tell the time, you have to stop looking up to the skies and start looking down, to the atom.
I presume then that the next segment went on to talk about using regularly decaying atomic matter to tick off time and therefore to have a standard that is universal.
But I’m thinking that well, it depends on how you need or want to tell time. Do I need to know what time it IS, or do I need to know how much time has passed since a specified event? Because the latter doesn’t really tell you anything about what time it is unless there is a universal “event” from which all subsequent elapsed intervals are measured (Greenwich Mean Time for example).
If you need to set a schedule for something that applies to all people everywhere, then sure, you need a mechanism that accounts for the regular passing of measured intervals. But if what I do and the people I interact with base what they do on the relative time of day (say, dawn to dusk, or mid-day) then I need to know what time it is RIGHT NOW. A point that has nothing whatsoever to do with how quickly time (or our concept thereof) passes.
Taking it one step beyond that (as I switched back over to Dirty Jobs), I was thinking, the idea of time then really provides a significant differential between the worker (the one who does a job) and the employer (the one who pays for time worked).
This eventually led me to why I get all bunged up about the idea of space-time and the notion that “as we peer into space, we are actually looking back into time.” Something I never really agreed with, but maybe I’ll look more into that later.
I dunno. Just thinking.
