Time Lord Read Online Free
Author: Clark Blaise
tentative proposal for linking time and longitude—that is, for rationalizing the dimensions of time and space—would be launched.
The surveyors’ instruments have their great and small applications, from establishing the earth’s longitudes and building railways, to determining property lines. They have analogies to timekeeping. Verniers and theodolites date from the sixteenth century, and both were in Fleming’s trunk carried from Scotland. When John Sang and his sons were forced to sell their instruments in a bankruptcy proceeding, they were giving up the tools of their identity.
ON THE quantum level, as we now say, 140 years later, time and space are indistinguishable, as they are in relativity, as they presumably were before the big bang, and as they are over the “event horizon” of the black hole. Time and space are, in some ways, identities; they can be expressed in mutual terms—“a day’s ride,” “a ten-minute walk.” A student of mine in Montreal, fluent in English but foreign to some of its idioms, once listened to a weather forecast of “five quick inches” of snow on an English-language radio station and asked, panicked, “How big is a ‘quick inch’?” Space, like time, has been measured civilly, legally, astronomically, and politically.
The meter, which is one ten-millionth of a quarter-arc of the earth from equator to pole as measured by the French two centuries ago, and offered to the world as the objective standard for all measurement, can be alternatively defined as the distance light travels in .000000003335640952 of a second. But the fact remains: we have measured time with extraordinary precision, and we still haven’t seen it and can’t say what it is. And of course, the meter is not “objective” at all; it’s merely French. The Germans measured the same quarter-arc in the 1880s and came up with a different figure, a German meter. Today’s measurements by laser from orbit revise it further: an American meter. We are post-Heisenberg; we know that we can’t escape our subjectivity. We’re postmodern; we can’t ignore our cultural bias.
We know that time and space are being “created” (like ourlives, like the expanding universe, like the future) and that those times and places will be rich and deep—but that we’ll never see them. It is an insult to our intellectual vanity, our Faulknerian and Keatsian and Trekkie souls that we’ll never leap ahead to the future we imagine, nor ever walk the streets of an historic Else-when. We yearn to. The dream of stopping time and shrinking space is a marker of our humanity. Our dream is of universal, eternal, and instant communication. Our minds soar with instant connection, but our feet are stuck in temporal boots. At the outer rim of our soaring ambition, we are still confined by time, the unbreakable barrier of the speed of light, which is another way of saying the speed of time. Some day perhaps we’ll make those journeys by virtual reality.
OF ALL the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest. We can say where and when standard time for the world started: Bandoran, Ireland, in June 1876. We can say who created it: Sandford Fleming. And why? He missed a train. His fault? No, a misprint. Why a misprint? Because, unthinkingly, we double-count the hours of the day and
A.M .
can be printed as
P.M .
and we’re too lazy to count above twelve. That moment of frustration in 1876 became an infinitesimal pinhole through which history and culture were projected.
Arguably, standard time has exercised the deepest influence on everything to come afterwards. The various manifestations of world standard time—the Greenwich prime meridian, the international date line, the unification of the various professional “days,” the twenty-four-hour clock, the counting of longitudes west and east from Greenwich, the definition of the “universal day,” and, by implication, the most
The surveyors’ instruments have their great and small applications, from establishing the earth’s longitudes and building railways, to determining property lines. They have analogies to timekeeping. Verniers and theodolites date from the sixteenth century, and both were in Fleming’s trunk carried from Scotland. When John Sang and his sons were forced to sell their instruments in a bankruptcy proceeding, they were giving up the tools of their identity.
ON THE quantum level, as we now say, 140 years later, time and space are indistinguishable, as they are in relativity, as they presumably were before the big bang, and as they are over the “event horizon” of the black hole. Time and space are, in some ways, identities; they can be expressed in mutual terms—“a day’s ride,” “a ten-minute walk.” A student of mine in Montreal, fluent in English but foreign to some of its idioms, once listened to a weather forecast of “five quick inches” of snow on an English-language radio station and asked, panicked, “How big is a ‘quick inch’?” Space, like time, has been measured civilly, legally, astronomically, and politically.
The meter, which is one ten-millionth of a quarter-arc of the earth from equator to pole as measured by the French two centuries ago, and offered to the world as the objective standard for all measurement, can be alternatively defined as the distance light travels in .000000003335640952 of a second. But the fact remains: we have measured time with extraordinary precision, and we still haven’t seen it and can’t say what it is. And of course, the meter is not “objective” at all; it’s merely French. The Germans measured the same quarter-arc in the 1880s and came up with a different figure, a German meter. Today’s measurements by laser from orbit revise it further: an American meter. We are post-Heisenberg; we know that we can’t escape our subjectivity. We’re postmodern; we can’t ignore our cultural bias.
We know that time and space are being “created” (like ourlives, like the expanding universe, like the future) and that those times and places will be rich and deep—but that we’ll never see them. It is an insult to our intellectual vanity, our Faulknerian and Keatsian and Trekkie souls that we’ll never leap ahead to the future we imagine, nor ever walk the streets of an historic Else-when. We yearn to. The dream of stopping time and shrinking space is a marker of our humanity. Our dream is of universal, eternal, and instant communication. Our minds soar with instant connection, but our feet are stuck in temporal boots. At the outer rim of our soaring ambition, we are still confined by time, the unbreakable barrier of the speed of light, which is another way of saying the speed of time. Some day perhaps we’ll make those journeys by virtual reality.
OF ALL the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest. We can say where and when standard time for the world started: Bandoran, Ireland, in June 1876. We can say who created it: Sandford Fleming. And why? He missed a train. His fault? No, a misprint. Why a misprint? Because, unthinkingly, we double-count the hours of the day and
A.M .
can be printed as
P.M .
and we’re too lazy to count above twelve. That moment of frustration in 1876 became an infinitesimal pinhole through which history and culture were projected.
Arguably, standard time has exercised the deepest influence on everything to come afterwards. The various manifestations of world standard time—the Greenwich prime meridian, the international date line, the unification of the various professional “days,” the twenty-four-hour clock, the counting of longitudes west and east from Greenwich, the definition of the “universal day,” and, by implication, the most
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