- Standard time, it's just an illusion created by trains.
(electronic music)
If you went and asked Albert Einstein
what he thought time was, he'd probably say
it's what clocks measure.
But if you were to ask, I don't know, Flava Flav,
he might tell you the time is something necklaces measure.
The point I'm trying to make here is that time
is really tricky to define in a way that's not circular,
but I'm gonna give it a shot.
Time is not a thing.
Instead, it's an individual experience,
so my time is not your time, which when you think about it,
is a pretty good line for someone who's paid hourly,
but this is fundamental physics.
But you might ask well, how is this possible?
I mean, aren't days based upon the fixed rotation
of the Earth?
And how can something so physically crucial as time
be subjective?
Let's take a little historical detour to observe
a peculiar timekeeping convention we've had for a while,
daylight saving time.
There's misconception that this has something
to do with farmers.
It doesn't.
It has to do with coal and World War I.
Coal was used to light lamps late at night,
and they were using an awful lot of it,
and in World War I that's a necessary resource.
So how do you stop people from using coal?
Simple, you steal an hour of daylight from the morning
and you just plop it on at night.
The U.K. did it.
Germany did it.
Everyone else followed suit.
Farmers, not so crazy about the idea.
It means that they have to get up an hour before
sunrise to stay on schedule.
Now it might mean we get an extra hour of sleep
every now and then, but the question is
can you really mess with time?
And the answer is yeah.
It turns out we have a really long history
of trying to standardize time.
You see, when railroads were built,
it became really important that your time
and the railroad time matched up, because if you wanted
to catch the 5:19 to Paris, you had to make sure
you were at the station at 5:19.
So in other words, in order to make the trains run on time,
we had to make time run on time.
The railroads synchronized their clocks
and everyone else followed suit, and standard time is born.
So does that mean universal time is a real thing
that we can all set our watches to?
No.
Universal time is just one big, fat illusion.
Timekeeping tech has been on a long, slow incline
toward greater precision, and the next generation timepiece
is the quantum logic clock.
Now this is not gonna lose a second for 3.7 billion years.
We've gotten really good at keeping local time,
but remember my time is not your time.
So what happens if I want to synchronize a clock, say,
on Earth and one on an outpost that's on a planet
light years away.
That's when we run into some real problems,
because even if you could synchronize those clocks,
they wouldn't stay in sync for very long.
Now keep in mind, ever since Einstein's days
we have known that the mass of the planet you are on
and the speed at which it travels through space
determines your experience of time.
(mimicking explosion)
Let's not get too deep into relativity.
That's a whole other show.
The point is the further we venture out into space,
the harder it's going to be to make sure all of those clocks
are running in sync with one another.
It's going to be more difficult to make sure
the clock on Earth is matching the clock on the space ship
or the other planet or whatever.
If we get faster than light drive or warp drive
somehow down the road, that's really going to wreak havoc
with the archaic ways that we keep time.
And even if we never make it off this planet,
we're still going to have some issues,
because that fixed rotation is not so fixed.
Since 1972, time surgeons have had to insert
several leap seconds a dozen times or so
to make sure our clocks stay aligned
with the Earth's rotation,
because they're not quite synchronized,
and that rotation is very gradually slowing over time.
So in a few hundred million years,
the day-night cycle of Earth is going to look as alien
to us today as, I don't know,
a planet 400 light years away from us.
The point is, in the future we're just going to have to
completely rethink the way we approach time.
There's no standard.
There's no universal.
It's all a subjective experience,
but here's the bright side.
Your consciousness is quite literally a time machine.