News flash: Due to concerns about the possible collapse of global society due to 2012 chaos, it is reported that Mars intends to delay all traffic from Earth until the crisis is over.
Flash forward into the present in order to address the confusion that many of us feel during this time of the year. And it doesn't matter if you're a x'tian, muslim, jew, hindu, buddhist, bahai, or of no belief at all, because the eve of December 31st seems foisted upon all of us one way or another. It's been said that 'he who controls the calendar controls the world', but time remains one paradigm that seems impossible to escape from. Or is it?The speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, is how we started measuring time in modern times, but did you know that before the 20th century no universal, uniform time scale even existed? Today, there are several ways of measuring time. Solar time (ST) is derived from the apparent position of the Sun in the sky, while Universal Time (UT) is equivalent to mean solar time at the Greenwich Meridian, or GMT. If this is not complicated enough for you, Sidereal and Ephemeris time scales are used in astronomy, and Atomic Time (AT) is based on the microwave resonances of atoms in a magnetic field obtaining accuracy to within a few billionths of a second.
So when do you think it will be midnight on the net, and will it be GMT, EST, WST, or UT?
Confused? Join the queue, because no one has yet defined time in an abstract domain existing in a dimension only recently glimpsed by advanced mathematics. Midnight on the net cannot be conceived of in terms relative to ordinary reality, it must be thought of as a set of changing space-time co-ordinates so thank you for understanding that cyberspace may be somewhere that escapes time; a place where code describe tomorrow, today, or yesterday.
Schwann
