Journal
26 March 2004 | 1:05 PM
Time Is Man's Enigma
~~~
Day’s Verse:
This is the day the LORD has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Ps. 118:24
~~~
Time: born into it, dying in it, dependent upon it in the interim, yet what do we know of time? It’s a human construct, our hours minutes seconds microseconds nanoseconds – everything smaller and smaller. Clocks are placed strategically for those few, strange people who haven’t succumbed to wearing a watch. Many people have shifted to cell-phone clocks, because those are allegedly more accurate than watches, being updated by some mysterious outside source. But this whole idea of “time” as segments is both strange and natural. After all, every day we experience the sun’s rising and setting, the changes as a day goes by; yet are these what make us regulate days in 60-second and 60-minute increments? Does a day need to have 24 hours in it? Could not those increments be more usefully divided so that we didn’t need leap years? In fact, wouldn’t a base-10 system be best, where we had either 10 or 100 units in a day, and 10 or 1 sub-units, and after that 1/10th, 1/100th, etc? We seem to think of time as part of “nature,” possibly because the numbers involved don’t always work out as perfectly as we might hope; perhaps also this idea of time as natural results from having imbibed it so young. Remember: time is man-made, nothing more or less than an idea that makes our lives easier. It is a construct just like the shirt on your back—useful, regulatory, produced in a factory somewhere.
Because if all time-counters stopped, all clock-factories stilled, all the multitudinous ticking silenced… Time would stand still. And that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
- KF -
-----
Day’s Verse:
This is the day the LORD has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Ps. 118:24
~~~
Time: born into it, dying in it, dependent upon it in the interim, yet what do we know of time? It’s a human construct, our hours minutes seconds microseconds nanoseconds – everything smaller and smaller. Clocks are placed strategically for those few, strange people who haven’t succumbed to wearing a watch. Many people have shifted to cell-phone clocks, because those are allegedly more accurate than watches, being updated by some mysterious outside source. But this whole idea of “time” as segments is both strange and natural. After all, every day we experience the sun’s rising and setting, the changes as a day goes by; yet are these what make us regulate days in 60-second and 60-minute increments? Does a day need to have 24 hours in it? Could not those increments be more usefully divided so that we didn’t need leap years? In fact, wouldn’t a base-10 system be best, where we had either 10 or 100 units in a day, and 10 or 1 sub-units, and after that 1/10th, 1/100th, etc? We seem to think of time as part of “nature,” possibly because the numbers involved don’t always work out as perfectly as we might hope; perhaps also this idea of time as natural results from having imbibed it so young. Remember: time is man-made, nothing more or less than an idea that makes our lives easier. It is a construct just like the shirt on your back—useful, regulatory, produced in a factory somewhere.
Because if all time-counters stopped, all clock-factories stilled, all the multitudinous ticking silenced… Time would stand still. And that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
- KF -
-----
