Time

Time is relative i.e., the more relatives you have visiting at one time, the slower it moves. I’m not sure this is what Einstein was referencing with his theory of relativity, but it makes as much sense as other explanations I’ve heard.

In a recent announcement of an upcoming high school reunion, the advancement of time was brought into stark focus. The number of classmates who were on the “In Memoria” list was 200. For each of us, our time here is limited.

I’ve always had an interest in time. I got my first Timex watch when I was rather young.  How young I was, I don't know because I just got my new watch and calendars would have to wait.  I remember that commercial where they attached a Timex watch to an outboard motor propeller. John Cameron Swayze told me “it took a licking and kept on ticking.”  I wasn’t sure when I would need to mount a watch on a boat propeller, but it was nice to know that option was available.

1954 Timex Commercial

Time is a way to divide up our day, keep appointments, and know when your carriage would turn into a pumpkin. A 12-hour clock is divided into two periods of am and pm or as we say in Latin, ante meridiem and post meridiem. Why Latins have anything to do with time is beyond me as most take pride in being late for everything. My Cuban friends call it “Cuban Time.” Most of the Caribbean has the same attitude. Now that I’m retired, I’m beginning to see their point.

The military uses a 24-hour numbering system to confuse civilians and almost everyone else in the military. The mere fact that you now have to subtract twelve in your head for anything event past noon is ridiculous. This is especially true when all accuracy goes out the window at the cocktail hour by saying, well, it's five o'clock somewhere. Then there is the ever-amusing, oh-dark-thirty.  This is only amusing to those of us sleeping in but not those who need to do something in the early morning hours known as zero-dark thirty.

This brings us to a different type of clock, the Mu Meson. These Mu Mesons, aka Muons, travel in the fast lane at around 0.9998 times the speed of light. They have short lifespans that result in decay.  I was first introduced to them in 1965 by accident. Through no fault of my own, I found myself in the college library. My roommate and I were looking for some cheap entertainment and we previously discovered that the library had films we could watch. In their vast collection of 16mm movie celluloid were many of the original Twilight Zone dramas.

All the films were only listed by a sometimes abbreviated title without a description. I guess students would get assigned to watch something and were given the title for the assignment. In order to find the Twilight Zone episodes, we had to guess which titles sounded like something Rod Serling would have come up with. This evening we saw the simple title, Mesons. Thinking that Mesons could be creatures from outer space we ordered the setup of the film.

A library attendant brought out the large aluminum film canister and threaded our evening’s entertainment. Much to our dismay it was a film for the physics department and its’ real title was, “Time Dilation, An Experiment with Mesons.”

Study this chart, there will be a quiz.

The opening of the film was promising as it showed a truck driving up a snowy road to the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. The spooky music and sound of the wind howling around the truck soon gave way to a scientist pouring a liquid onto a disc. So far so good.  Our bubble burst at the one-minute mark when a physicist in a plaid shirt turns to the camera to tell us, “One of the most startling predictions of the theory of special relativity, is that moving clocks run slower by a factor of one minus the square root of v-squared over c-squared.”  Huh?

For the next 35 minutes and 53 seconds, we were "entertained" by these two nerds at a chalkboard explaining how exciting it was to count the mesons as they gave off a neutrino and an anti-neutrino as he could measure with his oscilloscope. I know all of these things, not because I have an eidetic memory, or that we watched the movie a second time, and a third, but because I found this 1962 gem on YouTube. In the film experiment, their muons lived twelve times longer than muons at rest. The moral of the story, keep moving.

We actually did memorize some of the jargon from the film and would use it in banter at a bar to make nearby females of our species think we were smart. It never worked, but we had fun with it anyway. We would discuss that, "special relativistic time dilation means that the faster the relative velocity, the greater the time dilation between one another, with time slowing to a stop as one approaches the speed of light."

“One of the most startling predictions of the theory of special relativity is that moving clocks run slower by a factor of one minus the square root of v-squared over c-squared.” 

I would later find out that, in 1971, these experiments in time dilation would be repeated by two physicists who flew atomic clocks on commercial airliners in opposite directions around the world. As the atomic clocks were accurate to within 1 billionth of a second, they were able to confirm Einstein’s theory. They did it again in 1975 flying a U.S. Navy plane at 270 knots over Chesapeake Bay. The onboard clock lost 5.6 nanoseconds, just as I would have predicted. My Timex lost that much in a single day, give or take an hour or two.  I would assume, based on these experiments that, had I strapped my Timex to an outboard motor prop, it would have lost even more time and the clock face would have been very hard to read.

If my calculations are correct, this article contains just over 800 words and you have been sitting in one place for all that time. Further calculations predict that, at a normal reading speed, you just wasted a total of 5 minutes. I would go on but it's time for my nap during which, all time stands still.

Postscript, you knew there would be one, didn’t you? Rod Serling wrote the original teleplay for the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse in 1958. It was the concept script for what would become The Twilight Zone.  That story was called, “The Time Element.”