Friday 14 November 2008

Just A second

It's funny. So far I've only managed to say time does not exist, but I still pursue measuring the speed of light in seconds. When I have done so, I am imagining seconds as the gentle tick-tocking of a clock, (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XNwhwwuRnB0&NR=1 ) whose second hand is turned by each conscious thought. Every ....1 conscious....2 thought....3 becomes.....4 a ....5 segment...6 of.....7 time....8. I am still holding on to the idea that a variable time can be relevant to a variable rate of perception. The more I am absorbed in the theory, the more I am letting go of my previous conceptions of time. There really is no such thing as time and it becomes impossible to apply it to this new model. I popped over to Wiki to try and understand what is meant by a 'second':


"Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.[1]"

This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K (absolute zero). The ground state is defined at zero magnetic field. The second thus defined is equivalent to the ephemeris second, which was based on astronomical measurements.
The international standard symbol for a second is s" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second

"How does it all work?
Cesium is evaporated at the cesium source to form a beam of well-separated cesium atoms that travel without collisions at about 250 m/s, through a vacuum maintained by the vacuum pump.

Simple electronics counts the output cycles of the quartz oscillator, and issues a pulse every 10 million cycles - exactly 1 second apart."
http://inms-ienm.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/faq_time_e.html#Q10

The cesium atom is not travelling at 250 m/s though, it is my rate of perception which is implying that it's travelling at 250 m/s. If I was to observe this beam of cesium atoms, where my rate of perception was twice as fast as normal - the speed at which the atoms travel would appear to slow down to 125 m/s (with-in my experience of time). The output cycles of the quartz oscillator would slow down, and the pulse which is issued at every 10 million cycles, now appears to take twice as long - count it ..1...2. It becomes more apparent that distance is nothing more than a product of time, and time a product of distance. The atomic clock is nothing more than an overly dramatic way of measuring the distance travelled by neurons in the brain, and the speed with which those signals are processed.

Time and space are meaningless. How on earth are we going to try and quantify the rate of perception where neither time or space exist? Time is an intrapersonal experience. Have you found how time flies when you are having fun, and how it slows down when you are bored? When we are active we are using more energy. Does our metabolic rate define the experience of time?

Hertz (Hz) is a measure of frequency, informally defined as the number of cycles occuring per second. A clock might be said to tick at 1 Hz. What is very interesting is that this frequency is the same for the heart rate of a healthy adult at rest - 60 beats per minute, or one per second - 1 Hz. The human race is coming home to the heart at last.




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