8/13/2019 Adam Frank_ Set Your Clocks for the Twilight of the
Big Bang
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Set Your Clocks for the Twilight of the Big Bang
This Sunday marks the yearly orgy of clock-adjusting known as
daylight saving time. As an astrophysicist concerned withcosmology
and the origins of the universe, this is the best day of the year
to remind everyone that time, as we know it, doesn'texist.
For generations, we have been taught to think of time as
something absolute, dictated to us by God or the laws of nature or
theBig Bang. Yet on Sunday, 300 million Americans will wake up to a
7 a.m. that did not exist as 7 a.m. the day before.
Where did the hour go? And what does it mean to live in a world
where time can get shuffled around like books on a shelf? Itmeans
the time we live with is, essentially a cultural idea and not a
cosmic construction.
Let's think about what time was like 5,000 years ago. Back then,
humans had no concept of hours and minutes. Folks floatedon a
flexible time determined by nature: the sun, the moon and the
seasons. Even during the Greek and Roman Empires, timewas elastic.
Sundials counted 12 hours of daylight -- no night hours -- and the
length of these daylight hours changed with theseasons. An hour in
the summertime could be as long as 75 minutes and an hour in the
winter as short as 45.
By the 1700s, as clocks became portable and showed the minutes
of each hour, we began standardizing time. It's nocoincidence that
these more accurate portable timepieces eventually helped usher in
the Industrial Revolution and with it all thetrappings -- and traps
-- of modern life. The transportation, communication and
manufacturing industries grew becauseeveryone could be "on the same
clock." Indeed, it was during the 18th century that Ben Franklin
first proposed the idea fordaylight saving as a way to improve
worker productivity, an idea that finally became enacted by the
federal government in1966.
Greeks and Romans lived in a world bound by natural time; today
we live in a world bound by gadgets and technology andlaws that
regulate when we have to turn our clocks back. We live in a forced
time.
Why are we holding onto this old way of timekeeping?
Many physicists, myself included, will tell you not to.
Cosmologists are now second-guessing the 60-year-old theory of the
BigBang and working on new ideas about the universe that will
radically alter our understanding of time. Some of these
theoriessound a lot like science fiction involving parallel
universes and hidden dimensions. Others go so far as to tell us
that time is anillusion -- that each moment of our lives exists
separately and forever.
We do not know which of these theories is correct. But we know
that in 25 to 50 years our understanding of the universe -- andtime
-- will be very different from the one we live by today. Until
then, we should all take a deep breath and relax, knowing thatthe
tick-tock of our harried lives is not dictated by any natural force
in the universe. It's all... well, made up. Since we were theones
who figured out how to measure time; our task now is to invent a
better way to live with it.
February 3, 2014
Posted: 11/04/11 03:38 PM ET
m Frank: Set Your Clocks for the Twilight of the Big Bang
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-frank/daylight-saving-time
1 03/02/20
