Time and Spacing Out

Ladies and gentlemen, my title: It's About Time, and Spacing Out The philosopher Descartes came up with some extremely interesting ideas. One of them, which he used as a guiding principle, was that if you have a very clear notion about something, so clear that you cannot bring yourself to doubt it, it must be true.

In this century we seem to follow a different principle, especially in questions of science. Our guiding principle goes something like this: if we are told something, especially by a scientific researcher, that really baffles us and it just does not make the least bit of sense, then we accept it on faith.

I like the Descartes version better.

We've made it a habit to accept without question anything coming down from the pulpits of science. And I believe that in doing this we've often slipped, and stumbled from common sense to nonsense. Today I'm inviting you to join me on a quick recovery trip. And I'd like to start with the notion of time.

Okay, let's go back, way back. You're a toddler, and your mother is teaching you how to tell time. When the little hand is just here, Daddy will soon be home. You're learning how to use a clock, a basic life skill. Clocks will govern your going forth and your coming back, all the days of your life.

And what does a clock do? It divides a day into twelve pieces, and a night into twelve similar pieces, to give us 24 pieces. But, pieces of what? Well, pieces of how long it takes for the earth to do a full rotation, 24 one-hour pieces. We could have used degrees instead of hours, then we could say a day lasts 180 degrees or maybe pieces of arc under some other name. Did you know that in medieval times an hour was taken to be just one twelfth of the time from sunrise to sunset? So an hour at the equator was longer than one in England, and an English summer hour was longer than a winter one. The custom of making a day and night into one standard amount of time, divided into 24 equal hours, is a fairly recent innovation.