Time Stands Still 

(Transcribed from Professor Elbon’s notes)

Time is a funny thing. It can stand still or it can disappear. It is a subjective thing, it serves no purpose other than help us organise our lives. A clock makes time seem real, but the time the clock records is an artifice. It’s based on the revolution of the earth. But not quite; because the earth is moving round the sun and it has to turn a bit more to arrive at the same position relative to the sun at high noon. That may take a bit of thinking about!

Anyway the apparent movement of the sun from high noon to high noon was divided into 24 sections called hours. This then had to be measured so clocks were invented which gave us time, but in fact they measure movement! Since the earth is a globe, at the equator it forms a circle that can be divided into degrees. The convention is to allot 360 degrees to a circle and so to divide that by 24 gives 15 degrees, therefore an hour measures 15 degrees movement of the earth, (or relative to the earth 15 degrees movement of the sun), therefore a clock ought to read degrees rather than hours!

The Babylonians, by the way, simply divided the daylight hours by 12, and then had longer and shorter hours during summer and winter! (Interesting fact.)

The time at midday varies across England by 16 minutes. The coach and horses Royal Mail in 1800 were sticklers for time, and to correct for the difference in time between London and Bristol (120 mile - 11 minutes) they set the coach drivers clocks to run slow by 11 minutes going and 11 minutes fast coming back so they were always at the correct time at the pickup points ! (Railway time tables put paid to that, it was decreed in 1880 that the time across the whole of Britain would be the same as determined at Greenwich, and so Greenwich mean time came into being .) Additional note from Del-World 

So what is time? Well its quite clear that it has an illusionary side to it, but what is it exactly. Because of our ageing process and the passing of events it seems to measure our lives and gives substance to time itself. Historical events are recorded as so many years ago and so gives rise to the idea of time passing and so there must be a past, present and future, as defined by the movement of time.

Let us consider the past first. The past has gone, and if we had no measure we would not know where it was, it would exist only in our memory. In our heads we can recall something that happened a day ago or fifty years ago, but for us they are of the same, there is no measure in our heads. So all historical events are of the same when we recall them.

So where as the past gone, well its kind of slipped away and become as one when we choose to recall it. We can chose to measure it by time, but in reality its more to do with the number of times the earth has revolved around the sun - that makes it less real, because the earth is still revolving and has not slipped away into the past! So what of the future. This is more easily dealt with.

Because of our time pieces we can plan for an event, but we cannot predict the outcome, so the passage of time becomes a less tenable idea as if we were getting on and off a flowing river. So what of the present. Well here we come to the nub of it. Concentrate carefully.

You can only be conscious of now. Using old father time we cannot know one second ahead or one second behind, we can only know now. This is not necessarily a precise moment because we are not measuring it by any mechanical method, but by our senses.

These can encompass a wide range of feelings, and can seem to go on for ever, an example is listening to music, which is one of the great mysteries; how can we hear a tune which is made up of passing individual notes, another nail in the idea of time being a substance. But if we take on a dangerous mission or activity it will concentrate our minds so that there is only Now!

Note from Professor Elbon. I indebted am for DEL-World turn my English broken to unbroken. I haf long pondered time and think slippy it is. More I haf to say. Enough this for now is.

Gustav Elbon 300205