An Essay about Time, not a Scientific Study Though

Time is man-made and it was developed as a result of needing to define a cycle of lightness and darkness.  These became known as Day-time and Night-time.  One cycle became known as a day, which very confusingly also contains a night.

The science Astronomy helped to define larger cycles as it was noticed that the Moon had cycles and months were born, and also that the position of the stars in the Night-time sky repeated giving birth to Years.

It should be noted that at the “time” of these definitions it was thought that the Earth was the center, or axis, on which both the Sun and Moon rotated.  When it was discovered that the Earth orbited the Sun, then why wasn’t a year redefined?  Because it was less about how things moved and more about how much “time” passed to complete the rotation.

As man evolved, he felt the need to further compartmentalize a single day into smaller units and mid-day, or noon, and mid-night, or midnight, came into existence.  These times were born of Astronomy also, in that they coincide with when the celestial bodies were directly overhead. Which caused the creation of “Time”-zones: because the Sun and Moon are directly overhead at different times for different places on the Earth.

Then hours came into play and minutes and seconds.  With our ever-evolving brains we started breaking down the seconds into ridiculously smaller units so that now you will often hear about Nanoseconds.  I ask, “When will the madness stop?”  But then that answer I receive with be supplied to me in units of time, which I of course set myself up for by asking the question “when”.

Here is another good question, “Why hasn’t time evolved more?”  We now have the metric system for measuring weight, distance and volume, but we still use an antiquated system of measurement for time.  Time is measured on a base-six scale, and that leads to all kinds of problems at least for me.  Have you ever been making a mixed-tape and tried to add up the length, as in duration of time-passed, of each song?  Just try adding these four times together.

3 minutes 43 seconds
4 minutes 39 seconds
2 minutes 05 seconds
4 minutes 22 seconds

If you come up with an answer let me know because I stopped trying to do that kind of math in my early twenties.  The problem arises when you try to carry a number from the ones of seconds to the tens of seconds and then again when you try to carry into the ones of minutes and so on.  You see, when you get to six it is time to carry your number over to the next column and reset your current column to zero.  We need a metric time system.

We could have ten hours in a day, and daylight would last for five hours and nighttime would last for ten hours.  We would only be working for about three hours a day, how awesome would that be?  But then what we do with the days and months?  It starts to get convoluted and I fear I have just answered my own question.  Plus the United States and England would definitely not adopt the new system and things would get really screwed up.  I mean you would call a friend in Germany and ask them what time it is there and they would say, “It is 7:84”.  You would ask am or pm and they would say “What do you mean?  We don’t have am or pm anymore.”

So I guess we have to live with this ancient concept of time.  But it really doesn’t exist on its’ own.  We applied a scale to measure the passing of time.  If you thing about it a yard, 36 inches, and a meter, a meter, don’t really exist either, they are just scales we have created to measure length, same for volume and weight.  That opens up a whole other line of thinking though, and my brain hurts now from thinking about time.  I need to rest, and maybe take an ibuprofen.

Tags: Essay, Human Condition, Nature, Prose