His species only lives for a minute, but he has a long bucket list. (via the Presurfer)

This gets a bit detailed — which is where the fun is! — but in short it goes like this. We have two systems to measure time: our everyday one which is based on the rotation of the Earth, and a fancy-schmancy scientific and precise one based on vibrations of atoms. The two systems aren’t quite in synch, though, since the Earth counts a day as a tiny bit longer than the atomic clocks say it is. So every now and again, to get them back together, we add a leap second on to the atomic clocks. That holds them back for one second, and then things are lined up once again.

This has to be done every two or three years, so why not just adjust the length of a day or year or something? The detailed explanation is at Bad Astronomy. Link

While some scientists are working on an invisibility cloak to hide things, Cornell postdoctoral researcher Moti Fridman and his colleagues have been working on a “temporal cloak,” to hide events in time.

A physical object or even another beam of light in the laser beam’s path could create a change in the laser light that the detector would register. But with some clever optics, Fridman and his colleagues were able to open up a brief time gap in the beam and then close it back up as if the beam had gone undisturbed, and such that the detector did not register the interruption. The gap allows anything that would have otherwise affected the beam to instead slip right through [see animation below], leaving no trace for the detector to pick up.

The events that can slip through the cloak have to be very fast: the gap is only 50 trillionths of a second. The video at the link explains the process much more clearly. Link -via Monkeyfilter

Have you ever wondered what your online life was like a year ago? Well then, Timehop might just be for you. Just enter a bit about yourself and the program will email you a summary of everything you posted on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare.

Link Via Laughing Squid

This kooky yet innovative clock features a masked figure that contorts into the shape of numbers throughout the day, so your clock face becomes a miniature stage for interpretive dancers.

Called the Hone Hone clock, it is mesmerizing to watch, and will bring a sense of life to your boring old clock. Now, you’ll want to watch the seconds tick by all day!

Link –via Geekosystem

Clients checked their timepieces against the Belvilles’ silver “chronometer”, which was called Arnold after its maker, and paid for the privilege.

Such was the reliability of Ruth Belville and Arnold as distributors of GMT that competition from the electric signals of the Standard Time Company could not put them out of business, despite a “dirty tricks” campaign, through lecture halls and newspapers, to undermine Ruth’s old-fashioned practice.

Belville continued to ply her trade up to the age of 86, including making the twelve-mile journey on foot to Greenwich.

Link -via Nerdcore | Photo: Futility Closet

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m a sucker for colorized antique photos and these 40 images of Wales from back in the Victorian Era are simply stunning. They really give you an idea of what life was like at that time and place.

Link

Flickr user le nompourflickr created this clever photograph (or is it series of photographs) showing how time marches on … via Booooooom

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Photo link

If I lived on Neptune I would be less than a Neptune year old, how old would you be?  This nifty calculator allows you to figure out your “age” on different planets (including dwarf planet Pluto). Every grade school student knows we measure years by how long it takes the Earth to travel around the Sun. However it’s interesting to think how time measurement would be different if we lived on a world like Mercury that takes only 88 Earth days to travel around the sun. Link

Have you ever looked at a group of cheerleaders or acrobats and thought “I wish they would do something useful with all those fancy moves?” Well, now artist Billy Chasen has conceived The People Clock. It’s a digital web based clock where the digits are composed entirely of people. Instead of half past noon, now you can tell people it’s half past Susan. Link

Rob Cockerham constructed a chart of TV shows that were set in a time period other than the one they were produced in. This may be especially useful for young people who weren’t watching at the time, like my children, who thought the series Happy Days was produced in the 1950s. Still, there are some surprises for all of us. Really, who knew that Lost in Space was set in 1997! Shown here is a small part of a much larger chart. Link

Crosscultural studies dating back to 1911 have shown that people tend to operate in 3-second bursts. Goodbye waves, musical phrases, and infants’ bouts of babbling and gesturing all last about 3 seconds. Many basic physiological events, such as relaxed breathing and certain nervous system functions do, too. And several other species of mammals and birds follow the general rule in their body-movement patterns. A 1994 study of giraffes, okapis, roe deer, raccoons, pandas, and kangaroos living in zoos, for example, found that although the duration of the animals’ every move, from chewing to defecating, varied considerably, the average was, you guessed it, 3 seconds.

“What we have is very broad research showing that we experience the world in about these 3-second time frames,” says developmental psychologist Emese Nagy of the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom.

The Olympic hugging study was produced by watching videotapes of televised athletes. They tended to hug their coaches a bit longer than three seconds, their opponents for a bit less, but they averaged out at, yes, three seconds. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(Image credit: Flickr user Craig Maccubbin)

1. New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson proposed the idea of shifting clocks in summer in 1895, so he could spend more time collecting bugs after his day job at the post office. New Zealand did not adopt his idea until 1927, after Hudson had retired from the postal service.

2. London resident William Willett independently came up with the same idea in 1907. He published a pamphlet outlining the idea. He died in 1915 before his plan was implemented.

3. Germany became the first European country to try DST in April of 1916, in order to conserve energy during wartime. Germany’s allies quickly followed. England tried it in May of that year. The US first tried DST in 1918, but dropped it after two years. Except for a federal mandate during World War II, DST was optional among the states until 1966, after which states must legally opt out if they choose.

4. The only states in the US that do not observe DST are Arizona and Hawaii (and several tropical territories). Arizona found that any savings in lighting costs were more than offset by the extra cost of air conditioning for that evening daylight hour. The Navaho reservation in Arizona does observe DST, while the Hopi reservation contained inside the Navaho reservation does not. Hawaii follows the lead of many tropical areas that do not benefit from DST as the amount of daylight doesn’t vary much near the equator.

5. Antarctica has 24 time zones. However, since the continent also has continuous daylight in the southern summer and continuous dark in the winter, research stations keep the same time as their home countries, in order to co-ordinate work, communication, and shipping schedules.

(YouTube link)

Dad wants to remind you that Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend. These guys don’t sing all that well, but they care. By the way, do you need anything from CostCo?

The NIST experiments focused on two scenarios predicted by Einstein’s theories of relativity. First, when two clocks are subjected to unequal gravitational forces due to their different elevations above the surface of the Earth, the higher clock—experiencing a smaller gravitational force—runs faster. Second, when an observer is moving, a stationary clock’s tick appears to last longer, so the clock appears to run slow. Scientists refer to this as the “twin paradox,” in which a twin sibling who travels on a fast-moving rocket ship would return home younger than the other twin. The crucial factor is the acceleration (speeding up and slowing down) of the travelling twin in making the round-trip journey.

NIST scientists observed these effects by making specific changes in one of the two aluminum clocks and measuring the resulting differences in the two ions’ relative ticking rates, or frequencies.

In one set of experiments, scientists raised one of the clocks by jacking up the laser table to a height one-third of a meter (about a foot) above the second clock. Sure enough, the higher clock ran at a slightly faster rate than the lower clock, exactly as predicted.

The second set of experiments examined the effects of altering the physical motion of the ion in one clock. (The ions are almost completely motionless during normal clock operations.) NIST scientists tweaked the one ion so that it gyrated back and forth at speeds equivalent to several meters per second. That clock ticked at a slightly slower rate than the second clock, as predicted by relativity. The moving ion acts like the traveling twin in the twin paradox.

So if you want to age more slowly, you should run as fast as you can on a beach or a valley below sea level. The time you gain would not offset the difference in the time you put in, but you might live longer due to the benefit of the physical exertion. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Loel Barr)

John's post about scientists measuring the shortest interval of time ever inspired me to actually Google a question that I've pondered for quite some time: is time quantized?

For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of quantization, one of the fundamental things ever discovered in physics occurred in 1900 when Max Planck worked out that energy is not infinitely divisible - there's a minimum unit of energy that is indivisible. That unit of energy (a "quantum") is so small that for us humans, it seems like energy (say, how hot something is) is a smooth gradient.

So, back to my original question: is there a fundamental unit of time, which is not further divisible into smaller units? In other words, is there a quantum of time?

Some physicists pegged the smallest unit of time that have any physical meaning as Planck time, the amount of time for a photon to travel the distance of 1 Planck length (a unit of length, equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m, where gravity, space time and "regular" physics cease to be valid and the effects of quantum mechanics dominate). 1 Planck time is about 10^-43 seconds).

The closest answers that I found was provided by Scientific America circa 1999:

"The brief answer to this question is, 'Nobody knows.' Certainly there is no experimental evidence in favor of such a minimal unit. On the other hand, there is no evidence against it, except that we have not yet found it. There are no well-worked-out physics theories incorporating a fundamental unit of time, and there are substantial obstacles to doing so in a way that is compatible with the principles of General Relativity. Recent work on a theory of quantum gravity in which gravity is represented using loops in space suggests that there might be a way to do something roughly along these lines--not involving a minimum unit of time but rather a minimum amount of area for any two-dimensional surface, a minimum volume for any three-dimensional region in space and perhaps also a minimum 'hypervolume' for any four-dimensional region of space-time."

The article describes 3 more answers (tldr: "dunno") to the question: Link

Do we have any physicists in the audience that can provide a better answer? Say that there is a quantum of time - what does that mean to our understanding of reality?

When light is absorbed by atoms, the electrons become excited. If the light particles, so-called photons, carry sufficient energy, the electrons can be ejected from the atom. This effect is known as photoemission and was explained by Einstein more than hundred years ago. Until now, it has been assumed that the electron start moving out of the atom immediately after the impact of the photon. This point in time can be detected and has so far been considered as coincident with the arrival time of the light pulse, i.e. with “time zero” in the interaction of light with matter.

The scientists tested the assumption, and this is what happened:

Their measurements revealed that electrons from different atomic orbitals, although excited simultaneously, leave the atom with a small but measurable time delay of about twenty attoseconds.

In the comments, provide practical illustrations of the shortest intervals of time.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: Thorsten Naeser / Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics

It takes a clever person to create good similes, but it takes a genius to create one as non-sensical as this one above! Well played, sir!

Update 7/22/10 – Groucho Marx! Thanks everybody!

Professor Senovilla, and colleagues have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down. At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured

The team’s proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.

Link – via The Presurfer

(YouTube Link)

]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2010/05/29/the-secret-powers-of-time/feed/ 7 http://www.neatorama.com/2009/09/14/the-woman-who-sees-time/ http://www.neatorama.com/2009/09/14/the-woman-who-sees-time/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:15:25 +0000 Alex http://www.neatorama.com/2009/09/14/the-woman-who-sees-time/

Space time continuum may be the stuff of Star Trek, but it’s not mere fiction to Holly Branigan. The Edinburgh University psychologist can actually "see" time:

"I thought everyone thought like I did, says Holly Branigan, also a scientist at Edinburgh University, and someone with time-space synaesthesia.

"I found out when I attended a talk in the department that Julia was giving. She said that some synaesthetes can see time. And I thought, ‘Oh my god, that means I’ve got synaesthesia’."

So what exactly does she see?

"For me it’s a bit like a running track," she says.

"The track is organised around the academic year. The short ends are the summer and Christmas holidays – the summer holiday is slightly longer.

"It’s as if I’m in the centre and I’m turning around slowly as the year goes by. If I think ahead to the future, my perspective will shift."

BBC News science reporter Victoria Gill has the story: Link

In a stunning result, the winner of the third annual TIME 100 poll, and new owner of the title world’s most influential person, is Moot. The 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, whose real name is Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes and an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100) to handily beat the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Oprah Winfrey. To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it’s worth noting that everyone Moot beat out actually has a job.

Link

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service is the organization that monitors the difference in the two timescales and calls for leap seconds to be inserted or removed when necessary. Since 1972, leap seconds have been added at intervals varying from six months to seven years — the most recent was inserted on Dec. 31, 2005.

Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Flickr user slack12)