Time View Of The Earth Man

By Zheng Lei

It is said that babies are born without seeing the outside world, and then slowly they can see things that are "upside down.". It took a while to see the same things that we saw. This process is actually a process in which infants establish their cognition of "time and space". What is the time? Such a simple problem has long been ignored by ordinary people, and has become a fundamental problem of the universe that philosophers and theoretical physicists have been exploring. The author of this book is an Italian physicist. From the perspective of the cognitive development process of human beings on space-time, the author gradually deepens the thinking on the concept of space-time.

When the sun shines on people or other upright objects, it will leave a shadow. With the change of the position of the sun and the earth, the length of the shadow changes from large to small, and then from small to the earth, until night falls, and the night when you can't see your fingers. After the dark night, a new day starts again, and the shadow comes back again. The change process is still the same as the previous day, so people have mastered the law of time change in the day.

In order to organize social activities, such as labor or assembly, it is necessary to unify the time in the tribe. Therefore, sundials appeared. A column was placed on a place that everyone could see, such as a high platform. As long as everyone saw the shadow of the sundial, everyone knew the different time of the day. There is no sun at night, and the method of calculating time has become a clock leak, which is a rule explored by the ancients. The clock is similar to a huge hourglass. It starts from dark. When a bucket of water runs out, the day is bright. Then use the sundial timing method.

Later, the ancients found that the time of each day was different. For example, there was a significant difference between summer and winter. The day was longer than the night. It has been found that from a cold day, the days become longer and longer. After a hot day, the time of the day begins to become shorter and shorter. These two days are called "winter solstice" and "summer solstice" respectively. With the development of agriculture, the ancients noticed that the growth of crops was different in different days, but with periodic regularity. Thus, the concept of solar terms in the lunar calendar was gradually formed. The time of a year was divided into four quarters, twelve months, twenty-four solar terms, thirty-six ten days, fifty-two weeks and 365 days.

The concept of time mentioned above is the time of human beings on earth. It has two important characteristics: one is closely related to the sun, the other is a certain degree of "sociality". If you can't see the sun on a planet, people there won't have the same concept of time as us. Or in the particle world, such as quantum space, another concept of time should be used, so earth people use a kind of "solar time". In addition, this kind of time is not uniform, there will be seasonal differentiation, and everyone has their own "solar time", that is, the "biological clock". After the use of sundial night leak timing, people actually adopted a common "sun time", ignoring the seasons and individual perception of time. This is a natural selection made by human beings due to the needs of social life.

Taking time as a measure of uniform change is also the method adopted by physicist Newton. In Newtonian mechanics, t stands for absolute real "time". This idealized and mathematically treated way was questioned by the theoretical circle at that time. Leibniz, a German mathematician who invented calculus at the same time as Newton, is an opponent of this view of time. It is said that the correct spelling of his name is Leibnitz, but he firmly believes that Newton's absolute time t does not exist, so he just removed the T from the name. The real subversive understanding of "absolute" time came from Einstein. The author has always been puzzled by the two arguments of Relativity: at different altitudes from the earth, the speed of time is different; The speed of time of moving and stationary objects is also inconsistent. Later, we finally realized that Einstein was talking about "solar time", and we have long been used to using mechanical clocks made according to the uniform time standard in our daily life. This timing device with uniform time variation was invented in the 14th century, and human history can be traced back at least 2.6 million years ago.

Modern people are used to adopting standardized unified time. In fact, in the near past, people were still troubled by this. When Einstein was young, he worked in the Swiss patent office, mainly dealing with patents related to the synchronization of the clocks in various railway stations. He was inspired by the fact that clocks in different places are not synchronized. This idea, like hitting Newton's apple, eventually led to Einstein's special theory of relativity. Although people living in different parts of the world have different solar times, the residents of the "global village" finally negotiated a compromise. They adopted the time zone system and used the same time in each time zone. Then, the time difference between different places in the same time zone was up to half an hour, which had little impact on daily life.

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