For a concept so utterly precise, “time” is surprisingly absurd. Not long ago I was on a plane that left Los Angeles at ten o’clock and got to Miami at eight. At first that sounded right. But then it didn’t, either. I mean, we left at 10 and arrived two hours earlier, at 8? Eight is less than 10, no? We made it in (-2) hours? On the way home we left Miami at 12. The pilot announced that flight time would be 5 hours and consequently (?) we landed in Los Angeles at 3 o’clock. Can it be that the flight actually took 3 minus 12, or (-9) hours? Descartes cannot be wrong. Must be me, then.
What happened, of course, is this: people mess things up, whenever possible. It began with the invention of the clock. Astronomers had already decided long ago that the earth rotates in a space of time which they mentally chopped up into twenty-four equal periods that they then called hours. Then somebody invented the clock. By accident, ignorance, or lazyness he designed a lovely clock face which, however, covered only half the earth’s rotation per day, i.e. 12 hours. How do I know that the inventor was a man? Simple. It could not have been a woman because women can’t afford to be so nonchalant about time. They must get breakfast ready and ship the kids out to school on time in the morning. They can ‘t just ignore the afternoon either because they have to cook and do their ironing. They need every one of those 24 hours.
Over the centuries we got used to that half-a-day clock face that tells us that the day goes from 12 o’clock to 12 o’clock. The numbers themselves are correct. They are both positive integers. In fact, they are the same two positive integers. But they do not stand for the same things. They do not say what they mean. The March Hare tried to explain the importance of that to Alice. But, like us, she did not get it either.
Stubborn as we humans are, we began to pretend that one “12” actually means 0 (zero), the beginning of the day. Others, looking at the case from the other side, eventually added a modifier to the number and called it “12 o’clock midnight”, the Witching Hour, the end of the day, or some other verbal description of what the first “12” means, other than the number 12.
No matter how you look at it, there is a second “12”. It is the very same “12” and it also is different. At the same time. Shades of quantum mechanics. But it does not designate the same time as the first. Thank God we found a word for it or we would never get our lunch at noon.
At Nassau in the Bahamas, where I attempted to relax from my trials and tribulations, I was so relieved when lunch was offered at 12, dinner at 19, and bed time was at 23:00 hours, Eastern time. In Nassau it is perfectly clear what the numbers mean. At home things run on Pacific time, three time zones away. I find it amusing that the international standard 24 hour clock has not reached the West Coast yet. Thus a person eating something at the same moment in Los Angeles would have had lunch at 9 (i.e.12-3), dinner at 4 (19-3 {19 being 7}), and gone to bed at 8 (23-3). Except that just then Los Angeles had given up daylight savings time and set the clock back an hour. Nassau had not. So our West Coast times would have been lunch at 8, dinner at 3, and bedtime at 7, by the clock, before mental AM/PM interpretation.
Makes me wonder what time it really is. Or if time really is, if time can be. Or which of us is crazy, me or the philosopher (Martin Heidegger) who wrote a book entitled Being and Time.
(c) 2016 by Herbert H. Hoffman