It's About Time: What You Don't Know But Should
Humans invented the concept of time. It didn't exist, in the way we know time, before we came along. No other creatures on the planet have the same concept of time as we do. Or, if it did exist, who would know?
Is time real or imaginary? Einstein considered it real, counted it as a component of what he called the fourth dimension, space-time. Space-time figured prominently in projections based on his theory of relativity.
But so did gravity and some physicists (albeit far from a majority) wonder now if gravity is everything Einstein says it is. For example, where is all that Dark Matter that supposedly comprises far more of the universe than the matter we can detect? For that matter (excuse the pun, I couldn't resist), where is all the "real" matter that should exist but we're having difficulty finding since we became aware of the Big Bang and developed big telescopes? University of Maryland astronomer Stacy McGaugh's study shows that many galaxies have much less matter than should be there to account for their gravitational pull.
If gravity is not what Einstein said it is, then that messes up our concept of time. So does the average U.S. city commuter really lose 38 hours a year to traffic delays or is that just imagined? The answer (you're not going to like this, I didn't) is that most of what we believe about our lives is based on how we perceive it (what we imagine it to be) more than on reality. (Okay, I wouldn't have time to explain that even if I could.)
After nearly a century of using Daylight Saving Time (DST), we still aren't sure why we use it. Benjamin Franklin introduced it as a joke. He said that if we got up an hour earlier each morning we could get an hour's more work done in daylight and save candles in the evening. The U.K. adopted DST in 1917, most of the rest of the world followed. (Personally, I can't see sleeping through daylight in the early morning hours in summer when that's often the best time to work outside. The mosquitoes in our area agree.)
Daylight Saving Time accounts for a drop in electricity use. The U.S. Department of Energy claims power demand drops by 0.5 percent during DST, saving three million barrels of oil in the U.S. alone.
By the way, it's not Daylight Savings Time. It's Saving. Savings is an account you have at the bank. That is, you would if you had any money to keep in it.
One study watched how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked and mail clerks spoke and concluded that the fastest paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo and New York. (As an aside, I have often wondered if rats are insulted when we refer to the fast paced life of humans in cities as the Rat Race. If so, they had better get over it because half the population of the world lives in cities today, most in big cities.)
The psychologist who did that study found the slowest paced cities were Shreveport, Sacramento and Los Angeles. (Nothing in the report about the pace of life of rats in those cities.)
Back in the old days one second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. (We'll pause here while you fetch your calculator if you like.) A second can still be defined that way, but it will be a longer second. The friction of tides as a result of gravity by the sun and moon slow earth's travel, lengthening our day by three milliseconds each century. (Feel free to think of it as "mutual attraction" not gravity if my previous statements made you uncomfortable with that word.)
Let's put that into perspective. In the time of the dinosaurs the day was only 23 of our hours long. (You don't suppose they had a dinosaur version of Rodent Race that caused the dinos to die off.)
Speaking of things that slow earth's rotation, even the weather can do it. El Niño winds can cause earth's rotation to slow by a fraction of a millisecond over just 24 hours.
Technology can do better than that. In 1972 atomic clocks in more than 50 countries were made the final authority on matters of time. They're so accurate that they lose about a second in 31.7 million years. But in 31.7 million years our day will be a half hour longer, so won't all our atomic clocks be wrong?
Actually, no. To keep the clocks in synch with earth's rotation we now add a "leap second" every few years. The most recent leap second was added this past New Year's Eve. (I thought 2009 seemed longer for some reason.)
One clock does even better than the network of atomic clocks. The clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colorado, measures the vibrations of a single atom of Mercury and is accurate to less than one second of loss in one billion years. (Who knew an atom of mercury could shiver that long?)
We think of timekeeping as standard now. In fact we call it Standard Time. Until the age of trains that had to meet set schedules in the 1800s, every village had its own version of standard time. They used solar noon in their respective areas. As odd as it seems now, a few watches were made in those days of confused standard times for trains that kept track of two times, one the local standard time and the other "railway time."
The U.K. adopted Standard Time first through an act of Parliament. The U.S. came on board on November 18, 1883. Some people speculate that the adoption of Standard Time may have prompted Einstein to think about how space and time might be united in his theory of relativity.
Einstein said that gravity affects the passage of time. So a passenger in an airplane, flying where gravity is weaker, would age a few nanoseconds more than a person who kept his feet on the ground.
Quantum theory claims that the shortest possible period of time (known as Planck time after the German physicist whose work began the whole study of quantum theory) is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.
Most scientists today believe that time as we know it began with the Big Bang, created with the rest of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. If you care, stay tuned because that belief could change any time now.
Will time ever end? Three Spanish scientists claim it will. They say our expanding universe is not really expanding at all. Rather time is slowing down, making it seem to us as if the universe is expanding. According to their calculations, time will eventually stop, at which point everything we know will stop as well. (I was going to calculate when that would be, but I don't have time.)
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to develop all aspects of their lives at the right time.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: Discover, March 2009]
Showing posts with label clock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clock. Show all posts
Monday, June 07, 2010
Sunday, July 13, 2008
It's About time
For most of human history since the dawn of the agrarian age (about 12,000 years ago) our ancestors looked outside their homes in the morning, checked the sky and thought OK, I can do this task today (or I can't because the weather's not right). Though they had sundials and clocks existed in some places, most people told the time by the sun, or by the fact that they were hungry. And checking the weather meant looking up.
Today many of us check the weather forecast first thing after we put the morning coffee on, even though the chance of weather preventing us from doing most of the task we want to accomplish in a day is very small. We check the weather as if it might affect our whole future.
Time surrounds us, with clocks in every room and watches on our wrists. Though a few of us can still tell the time of day within a few minutes by the location of the sun, most of us don't have to look up to tell the time because we have checked a clock or our watch within a previous few minutes.
Time is so important to us that we speak of life ticking away, of each succeeding year seeming to be shorter, of our personal schedule (daytimer or PDA) being what keeps us on track to get done everything we have planned. We even have pithy saying such as "Time is money" that encourages us to avoid wasting time.
According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, we use the word "time" more than any other noun in the language. "Year" holds third place, with "day" coming in fifth and "week" seventh.
Although we invented the concept of time (no other living thing uses our system of timekeeping), it's not really a fixed thing. An hour spent waiting in a doctor's waiting room seems endless, whereas an hour spent enjoying the company of a loved one passes like lightning. In one experiment at UCLA, researchers rang a bell after test subjects had sat in silence for 53 seconds. Healthy-brained people thought that 67 seconds had passed, while those who were wired on stimulants such as caffeine thought that 91 seconds had elapsed.
In another experiment, the researchers found that people with a healthy brain who stared at a photo of an angry person for five seconds thought that more time had passed than if they looked at a picture of a neutral face.
Psychology Today reports that nostalgia--remembering times past--may be healthy. Reliving pleasant, happy or exciting events of the past can give our spirits a lift. Loyola University Chicago researchers found that thinking of good memories for 20 minutes a day can make people more cheerful and happier than if they think of their present lives. Most people don't indulge in such reverie. They don't have time.
Our media do everything they can to make us unhappy, even depressed about the condition of our lives and the state of the world in present times. Television news almost always reports bad news. Can you remember a newspaper ever reporting that we are living in good times? Newspapers always tell us that some times in the past were better--indeed, were good times--but never that the present times are good and rarely that the future will be better. The media thrive on presenting items that, if taken out of the context of the rest of our lives, would be depressing.
Alas, nostalgia for the good times of the past deceives us. The past was never better, in total. The present is never as bad as it seems, unless we persist in focussing on the negative parts of reality while ignoring the good parts. What we persist in seeing in the present is what we believe is the condition of our life and of the world in the present. If we believe the dark news the media presents, we will believe that the world is getting worse. Despite the evidence that the world today is a much better and healthier place than it has been for humans ever before.
Can we slow down the pace of our life? According to author James Gleick in his book Faster, "The historical record shows that humans have never, ever opted for slower." However, that claim is deceptive. Humans of the past had little option in most cases to slow down the pace of their lives because they spent almost every waking moment trying to earn a living to support a family (or to provide for one at home) and to survive the hardships of life as it was in their time. Today most of us spend time entertaining ourselves, though we claim to not have enough time to do it justice.
Our ancestors, in most cases, could not afford to slow down. We can. Much of the rush of our lives exists because we have adopted so many interests and responsibilities, often more than we can manage comfortably. If we give up those activities and responsibilities we have adopted because we believed someone else's claim that they made life better, more interesting, more worthwhile, we could devote ourselves to actually making our lives more rewarding.
Is it necessary that we commit so much of our life to time-oriented pursuits? We invented time and we invented the belief that time is critically important, that being late is a grievous mismanagement of time, that procrastination is bad and that so much of our time must be filled with doing something that we believe our own creations.
We should each rethink our commitment to a lifestyle oriented around time. We can't avoid some things related to time, such as our jobs. We can consider how devoted we must be to living a lifestyle proposed for us by people who have something to gain (usually a financial one) by having us centre our life around time.
For one thing, getting enough sleep is important to how we view the world and the life we live. So many people deprive themselves of so much sleep over a long period of time that they suffer from some symptoms of sleep deprivation. Those symptoms ensure that we can never be truly happy about our life. Get a good night's sleep every night and the world seems like a much better and more manageable place each morning.
Take the time. If the world and your life looks better as a result, it was worth the investment.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who have a balanced view of the important things in life, who don't want to provide more entrants for the rat race.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Today many of us check the weather forecast first thing after we put the morning coffee on, even though the chance of weather preventing us from doing most of the task we want to accomplish in a day is very small. We check the weather as if it might affect our whole future.
Time surrounds us, with clocks in every room and watches on our wrists. Though a few of us can still tell the time of day within a few minutes by the location of the sun, most of us don't have to look up to tell the time because we have checked a clock or our watch within a previous few minutes.
Time is so important to us that we speak of life ticking away, of each succeeding year seeming to be shorter, of our personal schedule (daytimer or PDA) being what keeps us on track to get done everything we have planned. We even have pithy saying such as "Time is money" that encourages us to avoid wasting time.
According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, we use the word "time" more than any other noun in the language. "Year" holds third place, with "day" coming in fifth and "week" seventh.
Although we invented the concept of time (no other living thing uses our system of timekeeping), it's not really a fixed thing. An hour spent waiting in a doctor's waiting room seems endless, whereas an hour spent enjoying the company of a loved one passes like lightning. In one experiment at UCLA, researchers rang a bell after test subjects had sat in silence for 53 seconds. Healthy-brained people thought that 67 seconds had passed, while those who were wired on stimulants such as caffeine thought that 91 seconds had elapsed.
In another experiment, the researchers found that people with a healthy brain who stared at a photo of an angry person for five seconds thought that more time had passed than if they looked at a picture of a neutral face.
Psychology Today reports that nostalgia--remembering times past--may be healthy. Reliving pleasant, happy or exciting events of the past can give our spirits a lift. Loyola University Chicago researchers found that thinking of good memories for 20 minutes a day can make people more cheerful and happier than if they think of their present lives. Most people don't indulge in such reverie. They don't have time.
Our media do everything they can to make us unhappy, even depressed about the condition of our lives and the state of the world in present times. Television news almost always reports bad news. Can you remember a newspaper ever reporting that we are living in good times? Newspapers always tell us that some times in the past were better--indeed, were good times--but never that the present times are good and rarely that the future will be better. The media thrive on presenting items that, if taken out of the context of the rest of our lives, would be depressing.
Alas, nostalgia for the good times of the past deceives us. The past was never better, in total. The present is never as bad as it seems, unless we persist in focussing on the negative parts of reality while ignoring the good parts. What we persist in seeing in the present is what we believe is the condition of our life and of the world in the present. If we believe the dark news the media presents, we will believe that the world is getting worse. Despite the evidence that the world today is a much better and healthier place than it has been for humans ever before.
Can we slow down the pace of our life? According to author James Gleick in his book Faster, "The historical record shows that humans have never, ever opted for slower." However, that claim is deceptive. Humans of the past had little option in most cases to slow down the pace of their lives because they spent almost every waking moment trying to earn a living to support a family (or to provide for one at home) and to survive the hardships of life as it was in their time. Today most of us spend time entertaining ourselves, though we claim to not have enough time to do it justice.
Our ancestors, in most cases, could not afford to slow down. We can. Much of the rush of our lives exists because we have adopted so many interests and responsibilities, often more than we can manage comfortably. If we give up those activities and responsibilities we have adopted because we believed someone else's claim that they made life better, more interesting, more worthwhile, we could devote ourselves to actually making our lives more rewarding.
Is it necessary that we commit so much of our life to time-oriented pursuits? We invented time and we invented the belief that time is critically important, that being late is a grievous mismanagement of time, that procrastination is bad and that so much of our time must be filled with doing something that we believe our own creations.
We should each rethink our commitment to a lifestyle oriented around time. We can't avoid some things related to time, such as our jobs. We can consider how devoted we must be to living a lifestyle proposed for us by people who have something to gain (usually a financial one) by having us centre our life around time.
For one thing, getting enough sleep is important to how we view the world and the life we live. So many people deprive themselves of so much sleep over a long period of time that they suffer from some symptoms of sleep deprivation. Those symptoms ensure that we can never be truly happy about our life. Get a good night's sleep every night and the world seems like a much better and more manageable place each morning.
Take the time. If the world and your life looks better as a result, it was worth the investment.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who have a balanced view of the important things in life, who don't want to provide more entrants for the rat race.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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