It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.

Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.

Thank you.

 

Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.

 

Our measurement of Time is wrong?

page: 3
17
<< 1  2   >>

log in

join
share:

posted on Jan, 17 2013 @ 11:52 AM
link   
Pi


How accurate is Pi?

How accurate is our measurement of the movement of objects through space? If we increase the resolution by which we can measure to the micro-micro particle level...were WAY WAY off...

The above gif illustration of Pi can also reference the earths rotation and orbit.

Plato describes "distance" with a conundrum that in order to travel from point A to point B you have to travel and infinite distance.

Time isn't static and we use "static" time measurement systems (solar time)

Sidereal time is more accurate yes but time that is constantly changing isn't practical or useful but it is still important to understand.

Time is a measurement of the movement of objects through space...without movement you cannot measure time and therefor it doesn't exist without movement.

In regards to Plato's conundrum everything is moving an infinite distance between two points because the measurement can get smaller and smaller infinitely and thus...so does time.

Time isn't very concrete but in order for it to be a useful measurement it has to be so the time we use will NEVER be 100% accurate.



posted on Jan, 17 2013 @ 12:14 PM
link   
WOW. My head hurts after reading this thread.




posted on Jan, 17 2013 @ 12:44 PM
link   
Time is theoretical and was invented by man to better understand the "timming" of the univers, just like Math, an invention of man to better understand, doesn't mean it is right !



posted on Jan, 17 2013 @ 01:58 PM
link   

Originally posted by Sovaka
I thought about this a day before christmas of 2012 and I have wanted to post it for quite some time.

Having discussed the measurement of time with a couple of friends, I came to the conclusion, that we aren't actually in 2012 (at the time), now being not in 2013...
The reason for this is our time scale is wrong.
We measure days in 24 hours, years in 365 days... Discounting of course our Leap Years that are supposed to make up the difference (which they do not).
Undisputed, check your watch or time piece


However, according to Earth, it takes 23hrs, 56mins and 4 seconds to complete a single turn, which gives us a time discrepancy of 236 seconds or 3 minutes and 56 seconds.
And it takes 365.256363004 days to make one complete 360° orbit of our Sun.

My initial thought was how do our watches keep pace and how do we not go out of sync with the planet?
IE if we are over counting by nearly 4 minutes, over the span of a month, Noon would actually be only around 10am... compounding as time went on... yet it doesn't?
I wonder if watches are made with this discrepancy in mind and automatically compensates?

Anyway, I decided to run the numbers on how many seconds, minutes, hours, days and years have actually passed since Year 0.
This is what it came to;
687,061 ACTUAL days VS 735,261 counted by our inferior measurement...
So instead of it actually being 2013, we are actually in the year 1881.

Quite an amusing number and quite a large discrepancy no?

Just for giggles... I ran my age through the calculator and instead of being 31, I am actually 29 Earth Years.

Now I know a lot of people hate it when Wiki is referenced... but in this context, I am sure it will be acceptable

Reference: en.wikipedia.org...

How could we have got it so wrong?
Oh I know how... Convenience of the 24 hour cycle to make everything neat and tidy...


Interesting post. I have always wondered this myself as far as what day is it really? Plus. It might not even be 1880. If you think about it, when did we start keeping track of time? We could be off by way more.


Gs



posted on Jan, 17 2013 @ 04:26 PM
link   

Originally posted by alfa1

Originally posted by Sovaka
However, according to Earth, it takes 23hrs, 56mins and 4 seconds to complete a single turn, which gives us a time discrepancy of 236 seconds or 3 minutes and 56 seconds.



Its the difference between sidereal and solar time.

Sidereal - the actual time it takes for the earth to turn, relative to the universe = 23hrs 56mins.
Solar - the time it takes for the sun to go from noon to noon = 24 hours.


The difference is because the earth is orbiting the sun, and that makes the sun a "moving target" with respect to the earth rotation.
In the 23hrs 56 minutes that it takes the earth to turn, the earth has also moved along a bit in its orbit and it needs an extra bit of time to turn a bit more for the same part to face the sun.

So... it depends what you're interested in.
If you're as astronomer, you might have more of an interest in Sidereal time. If you want to meet friends for lunch, you'd better pay attention to Solar time.


edit on 16-1-2013 by alfa1 because: spellinh mistakez



Excellent Explanation! Did everyone not read this and do some research???
(Is the original post a joke, or the response? Or just possibly misled)

We are not off by a huge amount years. geesh people. Look at the definitions. You are talking about two different scenarios.

A Day is defined as the time it takes to spin on it's axis ONE time in relation to the SUN. NOT in relation to space itself (the universe). A day is 24 hours exactly. Noon to Noon is 24 hours.

What the OP is referring to by mistake, is the time it takes to spin around (as if it is not moving). If the Earth were to stop rotating around the sun and just spun by itself in the universe, it would not be 24 hours. HOWEVER, the earth is spinning and rotating around the sun. And so it takes more time to catch up which equals 24 hours.

As an example. Picture a protractor where The earth is a ball is at the Edge at the 0 degree position, and the SUN is in the middle. Note the start point of the ball where it face the center of the protractor. If you spin the ball in place, without moving, that would equal the "less than 24 hour day". Now, at the same speed, if you spin the ball while moving up in degrees on the protractor, it will take longer in order to get back where the start point is directly facing the center, i.e. 24 hours for a real earth day.

So in terms of a day, a day is a day is a day, which is 24 hours.

Now for the calendar year, YES it is off, but at most no more than 1 day. We approximate 365 days, but we are off by a couple of hours. Over the course of 4 years, we add a day, to account for this. We are never more than 4 years off from a true year, and never more off than 1 day. Hours off, yes, but not more than one day.

Now in terms of time overall. Time is just what us as humans used to perceive WHERE WE ARE in the UNIVERSE, and possibly when. Forget about time as 3:45, but think more of where the sun is, and what season it is in. If we know that the SUN is the highest at a certain time, and does this repeatedly, then we can log that, and divide that, which is where we got the importance of hours.

It was also important to keep track of the days or year to know when to GROW food, or prepare shelter. You can take where the sun rises and sets each day and make a mark, and pretty soon you find the summer and winter solstices. From there you can backtrack to the number of days in a year, which is useful and important.

Yes we as humans dictate our work lives by time, and I can see why some would think that time is made up. Like Why wake up at 6am? eat breakfast at 7am? work from 9am-5pm? I would like to RE-PHRASE that, and say that TIME is real, but that our social activities and what WE as humans do with time is what is FAKE. Because all time is, is just the relation of our planet with the sun or stars, adn that is REAL. Whether we count how many times it goes around the sun, doesn't matter, because it does go around the sun multiple times. Whether we divide the amount of time it takes for the sun to come back, doesn't matter, because the sun always will come back.

so overall Time is important and real. Humans are just measuring it using different factors. We as a species are just choosing to do things like ANTS according to certain dividends of time, but blame that on social factors, not on time itself.

;-)



posted on Jan, 17 2013 @ 06:24 PM
link   
reply to post by Sovaka
 


Time should be measured in meters.

Giving it some weird measure of its own makes it harder for most people to see it for what it is.



posted on Jan, 17 2013 @ 09:29 PM
link   
Perhaps we are a little lost in our place in the universe. I found this article back around the alignment time and while looking up at the stars on that nights I felt I had a better sense of where I was for some reason.

The Sun's Astral Companion



Historic and mythological descriptions of Sirius provides further insight into the nature of the relationship between the Sun and Sirius. A shaft leading from the Queens chamber of the Great Pyramid of Egypt was -- and still is -- aligned precisely with Sirius. Given the high probability that it was constructed that way, and considering that the pyramids form a star map in and of themselves, it shows how many epochs Sirius has been in a stationary position relative to the movement of the other stars.


In regards to the Mayan;


We choose the Sun as our reference point, and this is obviously highly inaccurate. Every 4 years a day has to be added to keep accurate time. But even Sirius was not accurate enough for the "Keeper's of Time", the Mayans. With their remarkably advanced astronomy they quickly detected the inaccuracies in using Sirius as a marker for the passage of time, and switched to an even more accurate cycle involving the Pleiades. There is however an even more stable reference point than the Pleiades and that is the Galactic center, which from the perspective of our galaxy is the ultimate center of rotation.


This leads me to believe that ancient civilizations had a better sense of where they were within the universe than most of us today.

We are traveling through space in helical orbits.


edit on 17-1-2013 by starshift because: add vid



posted on Jan, 17 2013 @ 10:24 PM
link   
reply to post by starshift
 


It was precisely the helical orbit thing that got me to thinking and posting about the speeds we're flying (falling?) through the galaxy, and the speed the galaxy is flying (falling?) through the universe.

I say falling because...you know...gravity.



posted on Jan, 17 2013 @ 11:47 PM
link   

Having discussed the measurement of time with a couple of friends, I came to the conclusion, that we aren't actually in 2012

We're not. It's not the "21st century". Its the twentieth. 2012. Not 2112. We are off a year because the first year was not called "year zero" it was called year "1". As well the first century was not called century "zero", but century "one".

So we are a year off. That is like saying the sun "rises" though. It doesn't... the earth turns.

No matter where you manage to go the place will always be called here.



posted on Jan, 18 2013 @ 02:47 AM
link   
You might be onto something here but I'm getting a headache trying to figure out the math.


So I can complain to my bill collectors my monthly bill is actually overcharging me?


I just go with the sun being in the same position each day and gradually changing as seasons come and go. I don't pay much attention to time. I'm not a clock watcher.

What about the daylight savings times? How does that come into play in this equation?



posted on Jan, 18 2013 @ 11:35 PM
link   
Actual wall clock time, whether sidereal or solar, is relatively unimportant. It gets adjusted occasionally anyway to account for things like the earth's rotation slowing or speeding up as a result of earthquakes and other natural phenomena (plus the earth, in general, is very slowly slowing down over time).

The only thing that matters is having a perfectly synchronized master clock system and standardization of "one second". Which we do, and while it originally came from the 24 / 60 / 60 calculation of a solar day it is now defined as 9,192,631,770 transitions between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of a caesium-133 atom.

This cycle is broadcast (glossing over details here) as a continuous "tick" across the entire world via radio and the Internet so that all computers and other capable electronic devices can synchronize exact time.

We no longer need solar or sidereal time other than as a convenient offset to the continuous master signal. Eventually in the distant future, as the Earth's rotation slows, it will become noticeable that this clock no longer matches solar time as there will be more than 24 standardized hours in a day.



posted on Jan, 19 2013 @ 12:20 AM
link   
Following up to my previous post.

An interesting fact is how the time is adjusted when it has been determined that the earth's rotation has/will slowed down enough to require correction (so the Sun is where it should be at Noon).

Occasionally (years), an additional second is inserted into the "ticker" signal exactly one second before midnight Greenwich Mean Time on the first day of either January 1st or July 1st. This adds one second of time on all clocks simultaneously.

(A second could actually also be removed at that time, but this has never happened.)

That means that every few years or so the last day of June or December will last for 24 hours, 60 minutes and 61 seconds. Some clocks will actually display this as XX:59:60. It also means that your New Years countdown is sometimes wrong and you are celebrating New Years too early.

The last leap second was June 31, 2012 and was responsible for a number of Internet software issues across the globe. There is consideration and support for abandoning the entire scheme but there is no consensus on how exactly it would be replaced. The issue will, ostensibly, be decided by the World Radio Conference in 2015.



posted on Jan, 19 2013 @ 12:41 AM
link   
I thought that every few hundred years they adjust the calendar to fix these errors? I know that they did when the catholic church ran everything.

This is interesting though. There was an article a few weeks back about some Russians that claim our historical dating is off by hundreds of years.



posted on Jan, 19 2013 @ 01:06 AM
link   

Originally posted by CB328
I thought that every few hundred years they adjust the calendar to fix these errors? I know that they did when the catholic church ran everything.


Leap years divisible by 100 but not by 400 are actually not leap years. That's probably what you are thinking of. That accounts for the remaining systemic error in the length of a year not being exactly 365.25 days, but it doesn't account for the Earth's rotation slowing down. It isn't slowing down at a constant rate due to seismic activity so it must be accounted for every few years (between two and five, usually).




top topics



 
17
<< 1  2   >>

log in

join