I sold a painting through my Etsy shop! My take on Pirate Queen Grace O’Malley—from Eve Bunting’s P Is For Pirate—has found the perfect home. My patron and his girlfriend are pirate history aficionadoes whose house they transformed into a pirate museum, Musee Libertalia. “It’s named after Captain Mission’s fabled pirate paradise—Libertalia, on the Island of Saint Marie off Madagascar.”
She looks right at home.
I’m so happy. What an honor!
Post scriptum—If ye’ve a mind, shape a course in this direction for a fantastic reading of Treasure Island.
So that’s it—with the exception of a few odds & ends that didn’t fit into the story, that’s all I got for Time and Space. I’ll tell you, this was even more fun than I thought it would be. I hope you learned a few things. I sure did.
We started with Sumerians, their Base Sixty counting and 24-hour days; Egyptian sundials and waterclocks; Greek units of distance; the Roman calendar; the hourglass; the geocentric universe; the Mideastern astrolabe; the Silk Road; the Chinese compass and Venetian trade routes; Columbus’ discovery of the New World; the race to find longitude; pendulum clocks, chronometers, steam engines, internal combustion engines, the quartz crystal movement, atomic clocks, GPS; and ended with Einstein’s theories. Whew!
What’s next? So many things! I want to turn this series of blog posts into a book. I’m thinking of doing one of those Kickstarter campaigns. The book version of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space will have the same feel as the blog: lots of bits of information crammed in with lots of lame gags and cartoons. My rough pencil sketches will become finished illustrations. There will be QR codes so you can access links to sources and music while you read it.
Aaaaaaand—in the next couple of weeks I’ll be starting a new Western Civ User’s Guide with a different topic.
Thanks for following this, you weirdos. I can’t even begin to tell you how grateful I am somebody actually reads these posts.
Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space
Einstein also theorized that really big objects, like planets, warp the TimeSpace continuum around them. The example often used to illustrate this idea is a bowling ball on a trampoline. The bowling ball is so heavy that it makes a big downward bulge in the surface. Then you roll a marble around the edge of the trampoline. The marble feels a pull toward the bowling ball as it circles around the trampoline. A huge object like the Sun is so enormous that it bends TimeSpace around it. Like the marble, planets are pulled toward the Sun as they circle around. Don’t worry—the planets don’t go crashing into the Sun! Why not? Because they’re set in their orbits around it. There’s a balance between the Sun’s gravity (pulling Earth closer) and the Earth’s centrifugal energy (pulling Earth away) as she orbits. This situation has existed for billions of years. https://nineplanets.org/questions/getting-closer-sun/
It seems Time and Space aren’t two separate things after all. They’re 2 parts of one thing: TimeSpace. They’re what’s called a continuum.
(kon-TIN-you-uhm)
1 : a coherent whole characterized as a collection, sequence, or progression of values or elements varying by minute degrees https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/continuum
The Sweet-Salty continuum
I suppose a piano keyboard could be considered a continuum: lowest note on one end and highest note on the other, with the keys in between playing both low and high. You could draw up a continuum of food—from, say, the sweetest food you ever ate to the saltiest food you ever ate. Where is barbecue—both sweet and salty—on your continuum?
The continuum of TimeSpace has extreme ends, too—one end nothing but time and the other end nothing but space. This is really hard to think about. Time passes on one end but nothing physical is there. There’s physical stuff on the other end but nothing moves because it’s outside the medium of time. We live in the middle. We’re physical beings in a physical world who walk around and grow older and have kids and live our lives while plants sprout, bloom and die and the planets and stars whirl around in space.
(Does any of this remind you of Sunday-school? I mean how the Bible starts: “In the beginning…” and then God creates the universe, the Earth and the heavens, separates day from night. It’s how the Bible explains time and space. Which means God exists outside the TimeSpace continuum, which is too much for my brain to handle.)
Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space
Getting back to our satellites—traveling around Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, a satellite’s time slows down, according to Einstein. Also according to Einstein, since gravity is weaker up where the satellites are, time moves a little faster. If that’s the case, wouldn’t a satellite’s GPS signal be inaccurate?
As I researched this question online, I got 2 answers to it: yes and no.
Yes. The satellites’ times slow down, but those amazing scientists who put the satellites up there in the first place cleverly adjusted their signals to compensate for it. Each satellite carries an atomic clock and sends a time & location signal at the speed of light, slightly adjusted (through programmed computer chips) for Einstein’s Special Theory. The clock takes into consideration both the slowing down because of speed and the speeding up because of weak gravity. https://www.physicscentral.com/explore/writers/will.cfm
No. The satellites’ times slow down, but since they’re all zooming along at 17,000 miles per hour, all their times will be slowed down by the same ratio. So, it doesn’t matter. If all the satellites’ times agree with each other, the GPS system will be accurate. Or, the slowing down is cancelled out by the speeding up caused by weak gravity, so it’s what they call a ‘wash.’ Or, Einstein’s theories are a bunch of baloney so we shouldn’t pay any attention to them. http://www.alternativephysics.org/book/GPSmythology.htm View at Medium.com
Um. I don’t know what to say here, gang. As you must be aware, I’m just some shmo who is learning as I write this. If you put me on the spot for which is the right answer, I’m going with the bloggers who have better proofreading/grammar skills and citations. If any of my loyal readers want to chime in, please do!
UPDATE: Regarding a satellite’s time difference because of relativity, our indefatigable physics consultant, Ms Physics, says:
“Infinitesimal difference, yet a difference. You need to approach the speed of light 3.0 x 10^8 m/s (670,616,629 mph) to have a significant difference. Any way John you remember the precision of the Cesium clock, these differences would really become significant in GPSA calculation using General Relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by 45 microseconds per day.“
The speed of light stays the same—186,282 miles per second in a vacuum. It doesn’t change relative to other objects. If you switch on a light in your rocketship while cruising along at 12 parsecs, the light doesn’t travel at 186,282 miles per second plus 12 parsecs. It stays at 186,282 miles per second. This is because light is an electromagnetic wave and has no mass. Signals from a radio station are electromagnetic waves, too. They wouldn’t speed up or slow down if the radio station were moving.
I say ‘in a vacuum’ because outside of a vacuum light’s going to be slowed down by atmosphere: dust particles, car exhaust, hairspray from actors in 1970s sci-fi movies, bird poop, cigar smoke, &c, &c. Beyond Earth’s atmosphere, in outer space, it’s a vacuum.
My vacuum seems to have a lot of dust particles and dog fur in it, so that slows the light down somewhat.
A lightyear is the distance light can travel in a vacuum—at 186,282 miles per second—in one year. Earth-year, that is!
As you move faster, time slows down for you. Even though that’s true when you’re riding in a car, the slowdown is so teeny-tiny that it’s not worth measuring. But, if you were to travel to another galaxy at almost the speed of light, time would slow down—for you—to the point where you would age more slowly than your pals back on Earth.
When you got back from your trip, your friends would be old and wrinkly but you’d be ready to graduate from high school.
Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space
Believe it or not, we’re coming to the end of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space. I would be cheating you customers if I didn’t spend a little time talking about TimeSpace.
The name Einstein has come to be shorthand for genius. It’s still difficult to imagine the abstract way he trained his brain to think about time and space. Back in 1905, Albert Einstein published his theories about Relativity. He had 2 theories, a Special and a General Theory. But first, let’s talk about Classical Relativity.
Classical Relativity: everything moves relative to everything else.
If you’re riding in a train going 45 miles per hour and throw a ball from the back of the car to the front, the ball seems to you to travel at 10 mph. To a cow standing in a field watching you throw the ball, the ball is traveling at 55 mph: 45 mph for the train plus 10 mph for the ball.
A speedometer can say we’re driving an automobile at 45 miles per hour, but that 45 mph is the car’s speed relative to the surface of good ol’ Planet Earth. Earth is also spinning around and circling the Sun. The Sun also circles around in the Milky Way, taking us along with him. The Milky Way circles around in the Universe. Even the Universe is moving—it’s expanding. How fast something is moving can only truly be measured as it relates to something else. That’s Classical Relativity.
I once tried talking my way out of a speeding ticket using this concept but the trooper wasn’t buying it. Just kidding! Actually, I started sobbing uncontrollably and he walked away in disgust.
So atomic clocks saved the day—yay! Satellites are synchronized with each other to nanosecond accuracy. Their signals let our GPSs figure out where we are because even though those satellites are hurtling through space at 17,000 miles per hour, their atomic clocks will always show the correct time, right? Nothing’s gonna interfere with each satellite’s time, nothing! No sir! Not one thing!
Okay, maybe one thing: Einstein.
I can see you loyal-yet-exasperated readers flinging your half-eaten peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches across the room and yelling, “Oh, come off it, Manders! Have you finally gone around the bend? Should we have you fitted for a straight-jacket and a drool-cup? What’s Einstein got to do with my global positioning system?”
A cesium atom oscillates 9,192,631,770 times every second. That never changes.
What does change is the atoms’ energy state. The excited cesium atoms bounce off the detector every time the microwaves hit the same frequency as the atoms’ oscillations. The detector sends a signal to the microwave resonator, so that the microwave frequency is adjusted to sync better with the atoms. This is called a feedback loop. The detector sends a signal, the signal adjusts the microwave frequency, the microwaves excite the atoms, the atoms bounce off the detector, the detector sends a signal, the signal adjusts the microwave frequency, the microwaves excite the atoms…over and over and over. The time between each signal is exactly one second. No gears, no moving parts to oil, nothing mechanical.
That’s it! That’s how the atomic clock works. Thanks for sticking with me for an entire week on this. Finally, we can get on with our lives!
As with my explanation of the liquid crystal display, this is a simplification. I left out a lot of stuff. It’s the idea, the principle, that I was interested in explaining. Luckily for you, here are links to click on if you’d like more exact, in-depth info about atomic clocks.
John Manders' Blog 