Thoughts on Time
Time is a funny old thing, and it can be very confusing. When we measure time, we choose an arbitrary system of counting seconds, minutes, hours, days and years, but we could just as easily choose an entirely different method. For example, the whole solar system travels through space at around 230 Km per second. So instead of saying that some task took an hour to complete, it would be just as accurate (but a lot more awkward) to say it took 60 times 60 times 230 Km, or 828,000 Km to complete the task. “Time isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.” Miles Davis To show how time is just a concept and not a real “thing”, consider the imaginary case of Bill and Fred , a pair of Chelsea fans from London. Last May, Bill splashed out all his savings to make the long journey to Baku, Azerbaijan, to watch his team play Arsenal in the Europa Cup Final, while Fred stayed at home and watched the game on TV. The match kicked off at 11 pm on Wednesday 29 th May in Azerbaijan, which was 8 pm in
have 168 hours to fill, with sleep, work, leisure, relaxation, reading Rush Community News, and worrying about Brexit. Assuming you sleep for 8 hours per night, that leaves 112 waking hours. Dressing, undressing, preparing and eating your meals takes perhaps 2 hours per day, leaving 98 hours each week. Assuming you are of working age, let’s say you spend an hour a day getting to work, another hour coming home, and 8 hours at work, 5 days a week. That’s another 50 hours off your allocation, so you are left with 48 hours. If you have two days free from work each week, that means that on those days you have roughly 5 ½ hours of “you time” each working day, and 15 ½ hours on each day off. That 5 ½ hours each day is the most valuable thing you own. It is further whittled down by essentials like showering, going to the shops, waiting for the bus, doing domestic chores, and so on. If these things take say an hour and a half from each day, then it means that you really only “own” three hours of each working day, and 14 hours of each day at the weekend. “A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.” Charles Darwin That three hours is the time you have left for relaxing, reading, watching TV, taking a walk, engaging in your hobbies, chatting with friends and family, playing with your children, going to the pub, giving your time to the local community, volunteering for something, and worrying about Brexit, or whatever else takes your fancy.
Wed. 29th of May, while Bill’s diary will record the date as Thursday May 30 th . Both brothers watched the match at the same time, so both are correct, but we all know that the same event can’t take place on two different days. To add further confusion, time moves more slowly the faster you are going. So if the International Space Station happened to by flying directly over Baku as the match kicked off, and again as the final whistle blew, the astronauts’ watches would show that the game took ever so slightly less time to play than if they went by the stadium clock. Over a period of a couple of hours the difference would be almost unmeasurable, but it is there nonetheless. In a full year, the astronauts in space age 0.014 seconds less than people on Earth. That doesn’t sound much, but it is significant enough that the clocks on GPS satellites have to be periodically adjusted to take into account the fact that they are travelling at great speed and for them, time travels more slowly than back on Earth. What you do with your time Back home, using the conventional way of measuring time, we have 24 hours (1,440 minutes) allocated to us for every day of our lives. In a week, we
London. That meant that it finished at around 1 am on
Thursday in Baku, but it was only 9.45 pm Wednesday in London. Fred’s memory of the match is that Chelsea beat Arsenal on
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