Time out

I lost two days last week.

I discovered I’d missed Wednesday about 6 a.m. on Thursday, when the casual disposition of my cursor on the desktop clock revealed that my own internal calendar was out of synch with the real world by a full day. Right there was a rap in the chops!

What’s worse, in the same fashion I found that what I thought was 4:15 on Saturday afternoon was actually 4:15 on Sunday afternoon. Twice in one week! Talk about being gobsmacked!

Now, I’ve lost track of days before, on extended vacations and since I’ve been retired. But never a full, 24-hour day. And never twice in one week.

I’m sure my heat-mitigating, topsy-turvy sleep pattern contributed to the confusion, but it was still a disorienting shock to the system.

Later, I was thinking about those incidents and how the arbitrary names of an otherwise indistinguishable sequence of solar cycles could cause an actual physical experience of wooziness, almost a mild nausea. Of course, that discomfort might be partially attributable to my OCD personality, though the current condition of my living quarters would seem to put the lie to that diagnosis.

Even so, it took me back to a long-standing curiosity about the nature of time, originating in my catechetical youth when the concept of eternity first wormed its way into my gray matter. This interest took an amusing turn when, following my Star Trek phase, I began to wonder about the time-travel value of crossing from one time zone into another. Especially, I was bemused with the notion of what temporal flux state one would occupy if one crossed precisely at the stroke of midnight. During those years I pictured every cross-country trip as a science fiction experience.

However, when I eventually had to deal with the repeated switches between daylight savings and standard time, I began to suspect that the whole notion of time might be just a capricious collection of classifications made up to distinguish otherwise nonexistent entities, like inch and gallon, names for units of measure but which did not themselves have actual materiality.  I mean, you can see a mile of highway, but a mile (or a kilometer) doesn’t really have substance unless it’s describing something else. Which is why there is not a one-word answer to the question, how many bushels are in a mile? Or does anyone even still remember what a bushel is? Or have bushels and pecks been subsumed by pounds and tons like rotary dial phones evolved into push buttons? It’s sad, in a way.

Is this getting too dense for this blog? Well, it’s about to get worse.

Physicist
Stephen Hawking

By the time I finally figured out that this whole time business fell within the realm of physics, not metaphysics (go ahead, paste it in your dictionary search engine, paying special attention to the religious connotation), even graduate school was but a distant memory. I was saved, however, by the invention of the internet and by books like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, attempts to simplify and popularize this topic.

To my chagrin, though, I was soon to discover that the concept of time had been repackaged as space-time, as in “the space-time continuum.” And now there was quantum physics which seemed to be able to twist time like Silly Putty; even some astrophysicists seemed stymied.

I felt like the kid who found lumps of coal in his Christmas stocking. What kind of deal was this? I spend most of my life trying to define time and, just when I think I might have it wrapped up, they go and introduce a new model.

Speaking of which, that brings up a unit of time uniquely specific to the automobile industry, the model year. So, are there model seconds and model minutes in a model day? Is there a model space-time continuum? 

Let me know if you can figure it out. I’m still wondering what happened to last Wednesday.