Saturday 18 July 2009

The Most Precious

I know this sounds pretty bland, but this topic, dear Reader, is about time. Think about it for a moment, really think about it. As your reading this, subconsciously, you're either hoping this doesn't take long or this takes as long as you can imagine. Today's post will explaining how we have depended on time, how it's viewed in science and different views on time.

Time seems to be everything. We get paid per time, our life relies on every minute, every hour and even years. We celebrate an annual event that occurs when we are either conceived or born. For those married, you have an anniversary - returning every year - a yearly celebration of your marriage. But it seems much more important than this.

As Our Lady Peace said in R.K. On Death, "[Death] gives importance and value to time.
Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it." I find this to be absolutely true. If we never concieved an idea to measure amounts of different periods, we would never care about what we do as humans.

I'm sure you have heard of this: Space-time. Do you really understand it's meaning? Well, space-time is what are known as dimentions. You see in 3-D, three dimensions. You can see up and down, left and right, and because you have 2 eyes that are far enough apart, you can see depths. Well, time has been added to the well known dimensions, for scientific pruposes to understand things at the quantum level and on a grander scale alike. Einstien used it for his Theory of Reltivity. Using a 4th dimension helps to illustrate what would happen to us if the sun just vanished out of thin air (we would still move around the Sun's orbit until we about 8 minutes [speed of light from Earth to the Sun]. Then we would float away).

The reason why I have posted this topic is because a pseudo-suggeustion from a friend made me curious about a website, timecube, which should be bashed, in my opinion. But main concept is a bit weird, he claims we live on a 4 cornered planet in which we experince 4 days instead of 1. this is interesting because we have thought for the longest time, until explorers from Asia and Europe travelled to the Americas. We even have travelled to space and have taken many images of our own planet. The result: We are still spherical. He bashes the education system, because it teaches the 24-hour system. Needless to say, Time Cube is not a likely thing to be taught in any school in the near future. We have made a system that works out mathematically and seems suffcient enough.

I also recently completed a book by Canadian author, Robert J. Sawyer. The main plot revolves around a neanderthal being quantumly transported to our part of the multiverse universe. They have a metric time system. That is to say, a day is 10 hours long. Metric time probably could work, if we thought it out properly, but very unlikely to work. We already use the metric system for time, before a full second aka milliseconds and after a full year aka decade, century, millenium ect.

How could metric time work? Well, let's do a few calculations:
We have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365.25 days in a year (every 4 years is a leap year). So we will multiply each value.
60 * 60 * 24 * 365.25 = 31557600
Because we don't have that many zeros ending this number, this is difficult to do. We just would have the same amount of daylight in a day as we do now.

Hope you enjoyed, and wasn't a waste of time. Sugguestions for new topics and comments are always welcome.

2 comments:

JPoisson said...

It doesn't sound bland but quite an interesting topic about the dimension of time. But what about those that live coherent with time and never worry about where a min gain or lost really matters. Are they subconsciously effected by time or not.

Keith said...

If they look at a watch/clock then they are affected by time.