There’s a great band that has a lot of hit songs, songs that our own rock band used to play often and well, if I do say so myself, and that band is called “Chicago”, and you can probably guess where they are from. Not that it matters, what matters right here, right now is that they wrote a great song called “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” which is not only a great song, but a great question.
And the answer, as answers to existential questions often are, is: Well, yes, and no.
As we all remember, according to the world’s most famous Swiss patent office clerk, Al Einstein, ‘time is relative’. This means that time slows down when relatives come to stay at your house. Also, when objects move at very high speeds, time takes longer, which is illustrated by those very fast and very loud motorcycles and sports cars that scream around at 1:00 am and keep you awake for what seems like an hour but is actually only 59 minutes.
This notion of “wibbly wobbly time” (not a quote from Einstein) is clearly demonstrated by Albert E’s famous equation E=MC2 which nobody really understands including trained physicists who pretend to explain it by saying, “It’s obviously a quantum entanglement black hole nuclear expungement due to a Big Bang Vulcan Mind-Meld gravity infarction.”
When it was, in actuality, Einstein doodling on a Post-It note whilst trying to figure out that week’s Wordle.
But according to incomprehensible spacetime theories that say the faster you go, the more time slows down, we can never really know what time it is on account of it changes on you, especially when you manage to drive at the speed of light on your way to London Drugs before it closes at 10:00 p.m.
But hold on, how is it that we can all “agree” that it’s, say 2:10 p.m. here and some other time plus one half hour in Newfoundland? Because the good people at the “Prime Meridian” at the Greenwich Observatory in England say so. It’s called "Greenwich Mean Time” which is where the expression, “in the meantime, I’m going to have a beer” comes from.
They use fancy non-exploding atomic clocks that measure the sun path (or something) that tell everyone around the world precisely where the little hand and the big hand and the clicking tiny hand are at any given time, simply by typing in E=MC2. into a non-exploding atomic keyboard.
And then everyone “agrees” to adjust their clocks accordingly, except those who don’t like Daylight Savings Time and members of the Flat Earth Society who don’t believe in anything at all.
But, Harley, I can hear you groaning, why are you on about time this time?
Well, I just read a little article that said – get this! – clocks in the Middle Ages had only one hand! Clock towers, etc., only displayed the hour hand, circling just four marks on the dial—the quarter hours. Wow, that’s like having a bicycle with only one wheel! (No, that’s a unicycle.) Or a toaster with one slot! (No, those work fine.) Or a hockey game with one net! (Bingo.)
Thing is, one-handed clocks clearly serve to illustrate how much slower life was back when Monty Python made the “Holy Grail” movie, when Knights’ and peasants’ wristwatches only had one hand and they couldn’t tell that they were 6.5 minutes late for the daily public hanging.
Historically speaking, the need for the addition of the minute hand for more accuracy on clocks didn’t become common until the 18th century, when Donald Trump insisted on having a better Tee Time than anyone else.
Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. Reach out to Harley with any thoughts or ideas at harleyhay99@gmail.com.
