Out on a limb: Time out

(Continued from last week.)

Consider how casually we treat time. For instance, in this country, most of us, twice a year (daylight savings time, eh?), up and change it just to suit our convenience. This has the effect of a makeover—one 23-hour day and one 25-hour day every year. And we think little of it.

Then there’s the matter of time zones. We divide the earth into 24 zones, to account for the 24 hours of its rotation (but how do we speed it up or slow it down to accommodate the 23- and 25-hour days?). Being round, the earth accounts for the 360 degrees of a circle. Dividing those 360 degrees by 24 hours gives us 15 degrees of longitude for each time zone.

Time warp? Time wrap?

Except, of course, where it’s not convenient for us. As an example, consider the gerryman- dering of the time line (see the inset map) along the borders of Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Montana.

Or we can time travel simply by moving about on the earth’s surface. On the continental USA we can change our time by as much as three hours. I’ve often wondered what might happen if one were crossing a time zone boundary precisely at the stroke of midnight. Do you travel through time by an entire day? Or might you slip into a rift in the fabric of time itself, reappearing in another dimension exactly like our own so that you would be unaware of the dimensional shift—but would you then be destined for an entirely different future? Maybe it’s already happened.

To cease belaboring the point: we really don’t take time all that seriously.

Stomping our collective foot, we whine, “But we do take time seriously! What about the saying, ‘Time is money’?"

Seriously? Is time money? Or is effort money? Or one’s determination and response? If time were money, might not we all be rich?

Taking this back to the realm of physics…well, let’s save that for next time.

To be continued. Sometime.

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