There’s something pretty interesting about time. It’s a concept, law, enemy, friend, goliath and midget. It exists, but not physically. It can be altered by our perceptible reality, and by many accounts is our perceptible reality. Things happen inside of time. But things can happen at different times inside of time? The logic of it is monstrous. Think of a black hole. Or, don’t do that if you’re scared of the reality of our little spot in space. They’re spooky things. Anyways, think of a black hole if you’re comfortable with the implications they have on our reality. Then think about one of those implications. Time is a victim of black holes. Their gravity is so strong, they literally suck in time. If you get stuck in a black hole, time will lose meaning. The closer you get, the slower you go, and it is a hell of a trip, apparently.
But hey, that’s far up and away in space. Something we definetely don’t need to worry about. Ok, sure. But hey, how about this. Look at time from a closer perspective. Say… Earth’s orbit? Look at Scott Kelley. Spent a whole year in space. And thanks to the weirdly wobbily timey wimey nonsense of relativity, he aged 5 miliseconds slower than us earthly anchored fools. That’s right girlfriends, look a whole 5 miliseconds younger with this simple trick. His older brother Mark used to be 6 minutes older than him, but then the ol’ Scottster pulled off a truly stellar manouver and aged at a slower rate due to time dilation science stuff.
Bottle that and sell it I tell you.
But, if you remain a skeptic at the absurdity of time, try our own Earth. Here, luckily for those of us who don’t know Einstein’s middle name (psyche, he didn’t have one), we’re only going to be addressing what we ourselves as humans have done with time. For example, the Gregorian Calendar. It’s a pretty neat thing, runs the whole world. And that’s the weirdness of it. Time is so decisively important and bizzare, somehow we’ve all agreed that good ol’ Gregory XIII (who’s pre-Pope name was Ugo, but that looked bad on the tin) happened to nail it with his commissioned design, and everyone else in the world has since adopted it. Aside from the fact that it’s pretty cool that the context of the times means that a Pope gave us an extra day commonly associated with frogs every four years, that means that somehow humanity figured out a common system for something that’s been universally adopted. Universally! Sure, the Chinese Lunar Calendar holds a symbolic prescense and North Korea gets away with saying it’s the year 109 (because of course they do), but everyone has agreed that time is good this way.
And it’s not just calendars either! Seconds are universal! So are hours! Days! Weeks! Even the concept of a year is universal! The way humanity has evolved culturally and politically means that we’ve found a system of measurement we can agree on. And it’s for something mostly intangible and incredibly inane but also so big, universal and measurable.
But the US still thinks using someone’s foot is a good system of measurement. Whaddaya know?
The World Makes Sense
The World Makes Sense 