Do you have the time for this?

Ankita Rajasekharan

What season is it as you are reading this? Is it morning, late evening, night or maybe the afternoon? Do you have to attend to some work soon after or are you at leisure? At this moment, are your thoughts focused on what you read earlier or in anticipation of what you will read next or are you simply getting tired of this rather twisted sentence as you are reading it now? NOW, is a moment in the present, is it not? But it is already in the past now. And what you are about to read is in the next moment, in the future. Are you now wondering if this is really worth your…time? Aha, time… what may your experience of time be? If you had to explain what time was to another individual, what would you say? How would you describe time? Give it a shot and put it in words here:
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Often, people experience time passing at different paces. Time flies by for some and moves at snail’s pace for others, sometimes one doesn’t even realize where the hours went by and sometimes every minute feels like an hour! A second is the agreed upon base unit of time. 60 seconds make a minute and 60 minutes or 3600 seconds make an hour. So how is it that we have an experience of 3600 seconds passing in the duration of a single minute sometimes?! And some other times, an entire hour has passed, 3600 whole seconds, but in our experience, it feels like just about say, 15 minutes (or 900 seconds)? Have you had the experience of appearing for an examination? In those rare coincidental times when our preparation for and the level of the exam paper match, we might have experienced time as moving at a reasonable pace. And then there are those times when the three hours stipulated for the exam seem to have flown by and we are racing against time to complete the paper! Another example could be from our experience of sitting outside a clinic, in anticipation of being injected. For those of us who are absolutely terrified of this experience, time seems to have stood still! Or better yet, when one is at a restaurant and ordered the best thing on the menu, the wait from the order to the delivery of the food can seem exceptionally prolonged! And yet, if one’s favourite game is on play during this wait or one is having a spirited conversation with others at the table, time seems to have passed effortlessly! How is it that something as seemingly objective as time seems to be a rather individualistic and subjective experience?

Let us try and find out what may dictate our experience of time!

Physics has a term for this variation in experience of time, although it isn’t dependent simply on the state of the mind. Time Dilation is when time passes at different rates for different observers travelling at different speeds. This is to say, for an individual in a rocket, moving at enormous speeds, time will pass at a slower rate than for the one standing on earth, moving at the slower pace of the earth’s rotation. Even while time is subjective and we may experience the passage of time at different rates, there is something called Proper Time. It is the actual time between two events as measured by a clock. What about before the clock? When did time really start? How do we know that this is year 2020? Science agrees on the idea that time started at a specific point, 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Before Big Bang, space as we experience it wasn’t accessible to us and neither was time. With the existence of space, also came time. We can choose to move through space, from point A to point B, but time is inevitable. Time seems to move in a specific direction, always into the future. Arthur Eddington, a scientist, called this direction from past to present to the future, The Arrow of Time. Modern physics, however, holds that time simply is, like space. It does not flow, there is no passage as such. Einstein went on to even propose the concept of Timelessness. It states that if one were to move at the speed of light, one would be in a state of timelessness. In theory, nothing can move at a rate faster than the speed of light. The speed of light is absolute, and space and time are relative.

The distance that light travels in the course of a year is known as a light year. Sunlight, once emitted from the sun, takes about eight minutes to reach our eyes and so the sun is said to be eight light-minutes away. The moon is one light-second away. The closest star system to our planet is the Alpha Centauri, which is at a distance of 4.3 light-years. This is to say that there is a time delay in our perception of the light emitted from the sun and other stars. The stars we see in the sky are few to a billion light-years away and we are seeing their twinkle from that much time in the past! We are seeing what they looked like few to a billion years ago, not what they look like at this moment! If the sun were to die and collapse into itself as stars do, we wouldn’t know of it for a full eight minutes after!

Lucky for us, we still have the sun burning and washing the earth in all its glory and brightness. What would initiate daybreak and nightfall if not for the rising and setting sun! In fact, before clocks and watches, the passing of a day, or a year, and time for that matter was recorded in the rising and setting of the sun! Well, not simply based on the sun but in relation to it, by the passing of seasons which is essentially a result of the earth’s changing position with regard to the sun. Agumbe, a forested settlement in Karnataka, until even the recent past and maybe even to date, has people who would answer to ‘how old are you?’, with ‘I have seen 60 monsoons’, which is to say 60 years. It was and continues to be common among many communities to note the passing of days by the cycle of the moon’s phases or the lunar cycle. And then there are tribes like the Hopi in the USA, who like the modern physicist seem to believe time just is, without a fixed linearity. Their vocabulary has no words for past, present or future, except for something vaguely equalling to sooner and later.

Today, across the globe, we have agreed upon a common understanding of ‘clock time’. At any given point, we know what time it is in our place of existence and in any other part of the world. This is the standard time. In 1884, 26 countries met at the International Meridian Conference in the United States of America to discuss and agree upon a prime meridian for international use. What came of it was that Greenwich (where the royal observatory is) in England was agreed upon to be the prime meridian and marked at 0° longitude. This divided the rest of the world into 24 time zones, each at a distance of 15° longitude. Every 15° shift from the Greenwich meridian adds or deducts an hour; moving east of the prime meridian, every 15° would see an addition of an hour and moving west would see a deduction of an hour. This is expressed as UTC- or UTC+ (UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time). India, for examples goes by UTC+5:30, whereas Dubai goes by UTC+4 and Montreal (Canada) by UTC-5. UTC is sometimes used interchangeably with GMT which stands for Greenwich Mean Time and is actually a reference to the time zones. Each longitude, running straight from the north to the south, cuts across state and national borders. This means that within a large country, there may be multiple time zones and people in the east and west would follow different time even within a single country. For example, Montreal (East of Canada) follows UTC-5 and Vancouver (West of Canada) follows UTC-8. Then again, there are countries like China which has five time zones but follows one standard time across the country, which is the one at Beijing, at UTC+8! This results in rather interesting experiences; for example, it is not uncommon to see people in the western most states of China enjoy the summer sunset at midnight while people in the eastern states of China are experiencing a dark night! In India, too, while technically Arunachal Pradesh and Gujarat fall under different time zones, the entire country follows one standard time, or “Indian Standard Time” (IST).

What before the GMT or the UTC? How did the world function before standard time and what triggered the need for standard time? Until 1879 or so, different parts of the world had their own local times. Time varied country to country, and even within the country, town to town. Each place worked out a local time based on the movement of the sun, such that the sun was at its highest point at noon in that given location. This was in a time when transport between and across places was slow. As trains came in and mobility increased as did the pace of these transfers, it became tedious to adjust for time differences between towns. It began to affect transport and as a result trade. This was the beginning of the search for a standard and a uniformly agreed upon time system. Till date, trade continues to affect time systems among nations. At 180° longitude, there runs a line in the mid-pacific called the International Date Line (IDL). This is an imaginary line that, unlike the lines of longitude, doesn’t always cut through country and state borders but curves around some. It marks the change of one calendar day to the next. Moving to the east of the date-line, one would deduct a day and moving west of the date line, one would add a day. An island called the Samoa, on 4^th July 1892 moved from the west of the date-line to the east in order to keep with the time of the USA for trade purposes; thereby, deducting a day and practically living the 4^th of July twice! Then again, on 29^th December 2011, it went on to re-draw the IDL, to move from the east of the date-line to the west in order to sync with Australia who is now a strong trading partner for Samoa; thereby, adding a day and skipping 30^th of December altogether!

There is more! Many countries participate in something known as Daylight Saving Time. As in the name, it is a concept invented to ‘save’ daylight in these countries, to essentially have more daylight during the waking hours. Every summer, the clocks are advanced by an hour in these countries in order to have an extended hour in the evening while the sun is still up. It was first proposed in 1895 by George Hudson, an entomologist. He suggested the extension in order to have sunlit time to enjoy in the evening after the day’s work. He also had a personal motive of wanting more sunlit time to spend collecting bugs! It was, however, properly first implemented only during World War I. The reasoning was not so much about leisure, but to save fuel. More natural light in the waking hours meant less use of artificial light which equalled less fuel use. It is now a rather common practice to add an hour in spring and deduct the hour in autumn. Not every country participates and even within the participating countries, there are differences across states. For example, Arizona in the US does not participate; in Brazil, only the southern parts participate, etc. If one is used to waking up at 6:00 a.m., when daylight saving kicks in, one essentially loses an hour’s sleep for it is already 7:00 a.m. when it was supposed to be 6:00 a.m. There are cases where this shift isn’t as seamless and causes emotional distress, tiredness, lack of productivity, etc. The human body, however, in most cases, adapts rather effortlessly to this change. Other than it being only a small shift, our body’s internal clock makes it easier to adapt. This internal clock is also known as the Circadian Clock or the Circadian Rhythm. It is an autonomous, self-supporting system within our body that works in tandem with light/dark and day/night cycles. It works on a 24-hour cycle and is regulated by a pin-head sized area in the hypothalamus region of our brain, called the suprachiasmatic nuclei. This is a collection of about 20,000 neutrons that regulate our sleep, feeding, alertness, core body temperature, brain wave activity, hormone production, glucose and insulin levels, urine production, cell regeneration and more. It adjusts and synchronizes with the environmental cues (light, temperature) called zeitgebers, which in German literally translates to time-givers. This is why some of us are early risers and most active in the early part of the day (morning larks) and some of us in the later part of the day and are able to work late into the night (night owls). Our body rhythms are impacted by our life-styles which include diet, rest, routines, etc. Often, the circadian rhythm is disrupted by life-styles and routines that are tangential to nature’s rhythm and cycles.

It isn’t only human bodies that work on a circadian rhythm. Animals, birds, insects and even plants and trees have their own synchronization with the rest of nature. One must have noticed the significant increase in mosquitoes during certain times of the day as opposed to others. In the hills, bird-watchers are in for a treat during winter mornings as the overcast mornings keep the birds out feeding longer into the day as opposed to when the sun is stronger in the summer season. Carl Linnaeus, an 18^th century Swedish naturalist, designed a floral clock in which time was indicated by when different flowers bloomed at different times of the day! Maybe you could make a note of the creatures in and around where you live and observe their cycles and rhythms through the day and see if you find any interesting patterns.

Time plays out in all our lives, human and non-human. It may not always be understood and experienced in the same units of measurement but it is definitely experienced intuitively by us all, for even butterflies know when to fold their wings and rest as the sun goes down and the jungle comes alive with the night crawlers!

How teachers could use the project

The project may be used by the learner independently as a simple read through, stopping for the activities along the way. Another way to work with the project may be to break it into smaller parts based on the different concepts. It may be used as reading material for the facilitator and then conveyed to the learners via discussion and additional video aids specific to the concept. Visual aids (videos, maps, globes) will definitely make grasping the concepts more effective as a lot of the concepts are rather abstract.

References
1. Time zones and daylight saving | australia.gov.au
2. China Only Has One Time Zone – and That’s a Problem – The Atlantic, November 5, 2013
3. Einstein Believed In A Theory of Spacetime That can Help People Cope with Loss | www.forbes.com
4. https://www.wired.com/2010/02/what-is-time/
5. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/04/050415115227.htm
6. www.exactlywhatistime.com/physics-of-time/

The author has been working in the field of education as a teacher for four years. She is currently freelancing and working with children on socio-emotional skill development while indulging in making art, spending time in nature and reading leisurely. She can be reached at 27.ankita@gmail.com.