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To continue with the sensibility of holiday themed posts,
let's take a short look at New Years.
 See it? Ok, that
look was long enough. Unless I'm actually watching a title fight between the
2013 baby and the 2012 old man, I think that small glance exceeded my
patience of this holiday called "New Year's."
I reckon my low tolerance of this holiday comes directly
from the arbitrary nature of time overall. It is by far the most indiscriminate
unit of measurement. It has no constant quantity, yet it is perceivable by just
about every cognitive being and it helps define everything we do. Interestingly,
time is largely considered undefinable, as accurately describing it requires a
preconception of event order.
Anyway, let's get on with this
examination of time. And for the record, this has nothing to do with The Time, the best
band ever. Don't you
ever say anything bad (strong language) about Morris Day and The Time!
 The best operational definition available would probably be that
time is a unit represented by a cyclical event. If there was no such thing as
'night,' we would have nothing to contrast with 'day', and therefore we would
have no days, weeks or months. Yet, even
if the night/day paradox took exceptionally longer than they do currently, we'd
still have a repetitive unit which we can count that provides us another
representation of order. Another example would be the pendulum of a clock
ticking away seconds, Yet unlike days or seasons the pendulum is a man-made
institution and it uses midnight as its reference point-but midnight is again a
human construct. This is the problem with defining time as it is constantly at
odds with itself.
Calendars in ancient periods were imperfect; seasons floated
through the 12 proposed months because they had trouble calculating one
completion of Earth's orbit, and when things got confusing (because people
relied on these for harvests) societies would add a thirteenth month or hit the
reset. Today's standard calendar, the Gregorian calendar, was proposed by Pope
Gregory XIII to account for the error of the Julian calendar: one Earth orbit
takes 365.2425 days-not 365.25. After 1,500+ years of using the Julian version,
Holy dates had been misaligned by ten days. Christian nations shortly adopted
this calendar and as European imperialism spread this calendar gained
prominence. By the time Russia and Greece finally adopted this calendar in the
1920s, a full 13 days had to be struck from their first year to catch up.
Though many other calendars retain cultural significance the Gregorian is
widespread today.
Of course, we can't have any unit of measure without ISO
getting involved; so in 1988 they published ISO 8601, which
standardizes international dates, times and their  numeric representation. The
time as it would be represented, right
now as I write this, would be 2012-12-20T011:09:32Z--the 'Z' representing observation
of Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). This is the average time represented by 70
atomic clocks located around the world, but it also incorporates 'leap seconds'
to account for the Earth's slowing rotation. The last one was added in June
2012, and for one second time was withheld from proceeding.
While UTC is accepted worldwide, it does not help the
subjectivity of time. Pilots use a 24-hour system to ensure appropriate time
keeping even when flying across time zones. In 1754, French mathematician Jean
leRond d'Alembert proposed decimal time, whereas a day takes ten hours, an hour
lasts 100 minutes, and a minute lasts one hundred seconds. It was furthered in
1788 with a ten day week and a ten month year. The French Revolution issued a
compulsory decree where the country would switch to decimal time in September
1794. Decimal time lasted a whole eight months before being abandoned in the
same legislation that instituted the metric system as France's units of preference.
Unix time began January 1, 1970 and is measured strictly in seconds. It is
helpful in some Unix-based computer systems, and the current Unix time is 1355945070.
Further time
ambiguity is encountered during space travel. Here we encounter Albert  Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Each location in the universe is connected and can be traversed to by going
up/down, left/right, or forward/back. But these locations are also connected on
a timeline so there is another method of reaching them. It is this theory that leads to our best
attempts at time travel. Check out this video for more
information on wormholes and how they would work. Check out this video to see how Marty
McFly and Doc Brown travel time. Check out this video to see how
Bill and Ted accomplish this (actually, also by wormholes).
Astronauts and cosmonauts, upon returning from space, have actually aged
less than their mission control staff, though just fractions of a second. At
speeds comparable to that as the speed of light, time slows in comparison to an
identical, stationary measurement. This furthers the Theory of Relativity; to
an individual travelling at or near the speed of light, time and the person's
sense of time never change. The same is true for a stationary observer. Yet
when the traveler returns to his stationary counterpart, he finds that decades
have passed, when he only sensed a few minutes; and both measurements of time
are correct. Why? The Law of Invariant Light Speed indicates that the speed of
light is always the same. Consider this video, where a
light clock does a good job illustrating the increased distance visible light
must cover while moving at extreme speed. Since the speed of light never
changes the only way to compensate this change in light reflection is via an
increase in time increment. It's important to note that this is only noticeable
when compared, as both the traveler and stationary observer will not notice any
difference and both are correct.
 I write this sentence just upon the cusp of December 21
(though it won't be posted for yet a week more), a date in contention for being
the end of the world. Why? Because some lazy Mayans made a calendar that
stopped on that date, but by now archeologists have found another conflicting version.
I don't think the world is going to end in a few hours and reports from New
Zealand and Australia have been encouraging, but there is a chance tomorrow
could be that day. If it is the
apocalypse as foretold then you probably won't be reading this post anyhow,
which also means that this could be one of the last records of human history,
which means aliens may carry on my words
for centuries. I better come up with something substantial then: "Be excellent to each other…and, party on dudes!" After all, it
is New Year's (supposedly!).
Resources
Images credits: Keybar; MP Christianity; Wikimedia; Newspaper.li; Nathan Lee; Meme Generator
Wikipedia - The Gregorian calendar; ISO 8601; UTC; Spacetime; Decimal time;
Quora - Why does time slow down as you approach the speed of light?
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