Getting prepared for work this morning, I noticed that my favorite college football roundup was not on ESPN and, when I arrived at the hospital, the access door was locked, forcing me to buzz the security guard. It was not until I turned on my computer that the explanation for these unexpected events became clear: it was only 5:15 in the morning. Busy at work this week, I had been shielded from the semi-annual deluge of warnings about the seasonal time change, leading to this cascade of disorientation. Indeed, this blog post is a product of that ignorance.
It is now clear that we have "fallen back" to standard or daylight savings time (I frankly can't remember which) and will remain there until we spring forward sometime in March or April. Apparently designed to reduce energy consumption, this human decree has never made much sense to me; after all, we will now be turning on the lights earlier in the evening. Then there are those regions of the country, including the State of Arizona, that do not adhere to the time change, shifting time zones through the course of a year and confusing travellers in the process.
In reality, human time is a mathematical approximation based on the Earth's periods of rotation and revolution and must be adjusted now and then. Of course, Einstein and others have pointed out that, as a component of space-time, it is not the simple, one-way, linear factor that we prefer to imagine. Though we use it to govern our daily routine and to measure our progress through life, time is a dimension of the Universe that is altered by other physical forces. Personally, I find it difficult to understand the scientific ramifications of space-time and much prefer the wise philosophy offered by Chicago: "Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?"
