Mind Fuck: Day 14

Mind Fuck: Day 13

Today I found out... The ancient Egyptians divided the time between sunrise and sunset into twelve periods, and that between sunset and sunrise into another twelve, the origin of our twenty four hours.  Their hours actually had variable length, since sunrise and sunset varied throughout the year, and the astronomers of ancient Greece – in around 150 BC – decided that this was too complicated, so decided that all hours should be of the same length.  They used the ancient Babylonian system of dividing things into 60s to develop ‘first divisions’ (or minutes as we call them) and ‘second divisions’ (or seconds as we call them). Sexagesimal measurements as they called them were used as 60 as it was one of the most versatile and divisible numbers.

Mind Fuck: Day 12

Today I found out... Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, reaching full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago...

The age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years. This age is based on evidence from radiometric age dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples...

With some simple Maths...
200000 / 4.54 x 10^9   =    0.000044
50000 / 4.54 x 10^9   =    0.000011
...we are able to work out that humans, as we know them anatomically, have only existed through 0.0044% of the earths age...

Mind Fuck: Day 11

Today I found out... An atomic clock is the most accurate type of timepiece in the world, designed to measure time according to vibrations within atoms. NIST-F1, the United States' standard atomic clock, is said to be so accurate that it would neither gain nor lose a second in over 30 million years.

The big difference between a standard clock in your home and an atomic clock is that the oscillation in an atomic clock is between the nucleus of an atom and the surrounding electrons. This oscillation is not exactly a parallel to the balance wheel and hairspring of a clockwork watch, but the fact is that both use oscillations to keep track of passing time. The oscillation frequencies within the atom are determined by the mass of the nucleus and the gravity and electrostatic "spring" between the positive charge on the nucleus and the electron cloud surrounding it... I.e they can't possibly be wrong.

Without atomic clocks, GPS navigation would be impossible, the Internet would not synchronize, and the position of the planets would not be known with enough accuracy for space probes and landers to be launched and monitored...

Mind Fuck: Day 10

Today I found out... The Mayans developed a calendar that had a unit called a "Baktun" which was 144,000 days long. They believed that after a great cycle of thirteen Baktuns the world would be destroyed and recreated again. Because their astronomical records were so precise, we can work out that the most recent great cycle started on Wednesday 8th September 3114BC.  This means that it - and, according to the Mayans, the world - will come to an end on Sunday 23rd December 2012. Pack your bags and don't say you haven't been warned...

Mind Fuck: Day 9

Today I found out... That by doing a lot of maths and spending hours observing particle accelerators, scientists believe they can look back to 10^-47 seconds after the moment of creation...  It is perhaps worth being reminded that 10^-47 is ten million, trillion, trillion, trillionths of a second, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds ...


Some experts believe that there may have been other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason why we exist in this particular one is that, this is one that we could exist in.  Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, a scientist called Tryon from Columbia University emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts !

Mind Fuck: Day 8

Today I found out... another way of viewing the third dimension.

Imagining the third dimension is easy for us because we experience it daily. A three dimensional object has length, width, and height. However there’s another of understanding the third dimension: if we were to imagine an ant walking across a newspaper which is lying flat on a table, and we pretend that the ant is completely two dimensional when walking along this two-dimensional newspaper world... the paper can be folded around so that the two ends meet, thus creating a way for the Ant 'jump' across to the other side of his newspaper world instantly while everything still remains two dimensional.

In effect the Ant has “magically” disappeared from one position in his two-dimensional world and be instantly transported to another. We can imagine that we did this by taking a two-dimensional object and folding it through the dimension above, which is our third dimension. It is apparently more convenient for us to imagine the higher dimensions if we can think of the third dimension in this way... the third dimension is what you “fold through” to jump from one point to another in the dimension below.

Mind Fuck: Day 7

Today I found out... Russia has 9 time zones! This has recently been reduced from 12 to avoid further confusion... To be fair, Russia is enormously big. It could fit the whole of Europe inside it quite comfortably about 3 times and so to have the same idea of time throughout the country would mean people waking up in Moscow at 3am to start their day while people in Chukotka in eastern Russia after midday to do the same. 

I have always been quite confused about time zones. They have always seemed unnecessary in my eyes, but then how else would we attempt to grasp time. It is simply about where you are in relation to the worlds daily cycle at any given point. London GMT is 15 minutes ahead of time than Bristol for example, but it would be silly for everyone to keep different time on such a small scale.

Hourly measurements are simpler ways of controlling this, to allow people to not only keep in time with each other but, to enable maximum hourly day-light.

Time is purely subjective but some pretty cleaver people have created a pretty straightforward way of keeping it no matter where you are in the world... You don't have to follow it but it's there if you need it. 

Mind Fuck: Day 6

Today I found out... Honey-Bees have an incredible grasp of time. They are able to time their flights with internal clocks. They can also work out how fast they are flying by measuring the speed at which objects pass by their eyes. They can combine these two things to work out how far from their hive a particular patch of flowers is. What's more they can communicate all this to their hive-mates...

When a scout bee finds a particularly good patch of flowers, she collects some pollen or nectar and buzzes back to her hive. Other bees cluster around while the bee performs a dance. If the flowers are nearby the bee just dances round in circles. But if they're more than 50 meters or so away, she performs a special waggle dance, running up and down the comb wagging her tail from side to side then start circling round and starting again. The angle of her run up the comb tells the other bees which direction to go in relation to the sun. The number of tail waggings she does tell them how long they need to fly for at a particular speed to reach the flowers considering wind speed too...

Humans had to invent clocks...

Mind Fuck: Day 5

Today i found out... T.S.Eliot's Four Quartets has some very interesting philosophical mentions of time. Here's one from Burnt Norton:  

 

Time present and time past,
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

 

And how about this from Little Gidding:

   
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from….

Please Note...

 Your Clocks Have Changed...

Mind Fuck: Day 4

Today i found out...that we humans have established a functioning method of measuring time, based on the orbit of our planet around the sun, our moons orbit around us, and the rotation of Earths axis... well i knew all that before, but today i wondered... What time is it on Jupiter? Despite being a dense uninhabitable gas cloud, if you were visiting Jupiter, you would probably want to know what time it was when you landed... 

Well, it takes 11.86 years for Jupiter to orbit the sun, and it has 63 know moons and fully rotates on its axis every 10 hours... CLOCKS DON'T WORK ON JUPITER STUPID!!!!

Mind Fuck: Day 3

Today i found out... that writing a Googolplex, in numerals, would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides...


The time it would take to write such a number also renders the task implausible: if a person can write two digits per second, it would take around about 1.51×10⁹² years, which is 1.1×10⁸²times the age of the universe, to write a Googolplex.

Mind Fuck: Day 2

Today i found out...Time travels at the speed of light. So if you were to travel at this speed but turn around and face behind you... What would you see? Yourself? A dark void? A blurred form reality? 
Trouble is no one knows because it would be impossible to do so without your face falling off, or dying a horrible death of some kind.

Mind Fuck: Day 1

Today i found out... that as a fraction of the lifespan of the universe (as measured from its beginning, to the evaporation of the last black hole) life as we know it, is only possible for one thousandth of a billion, billion, billionth, billion, billion, billionth, billion, billion, billionth, of a percent.....

And as if that wasn't enough... if you were to try and calculate the time left until the end of the universe (when it is completely void of matter, and time ceases to exist)... well there just aren't enough atoms in the universe to represent the number of years until that happens.