The Ethics Of Changing Time, Or 10 Minutes To Absurd

There are 24 hours in a day. This is one of those truisms you learn when you’re eight, like “You put your tongue on that frozen pipe there’s gonna be trouble,” and “You eat that entire bowl of cashews there’s gonna be trouble.”

Time differs from salty nuts and metal pipes. It’s less digestible, less huggable. Is that why something odd happens to the natural order of 24–hour days?

Let's recap. Hours were first detected thousands of years ago by antique Egyptian scientists. On a sunny morning in 3,500 BCE they invented paper, pyramids, mummies, sand, and—according to select historical records—alien spaceships. After a leisurely siesta the Egyptians rounded up 24 tidy chunks, nicknamed them hours and called it a day. Ancient Egyptian executives later expanded the 24–hour system into the vertical marketplace: sundials, clocks, watches, Playgirl calendars. This is how history comes down to us today.

Perfect, right? Who would trifle with timely refinement? With ancient wisdom? With the fourth dimension? Today’s government and citizenry can accomplish the task! By messing with time they alone do the incomprehensible. In the dark of a spring night one hour disappears like a cashew snatched by a grabby child. Then, perhaps more strangely, a night in autumn is stuffed with an extra hour.

This is legal? Multiple theories try to make sense of it. Technically these are conspiracy hypotheses—proposed explanations, tentative theories—but because folks believe their favorite to be true, theories is the accepted terminology. Plus who goes around saying they’ve got a “conspiracy hypothesis”? Thus, you’ve got your Grand Unified Theory, your Economics Decision Theory, and your Plate Tectonics Theory. Unfortunately, these are babbled about by the same citizenry that blindly participate in hour swapping. Isn’t it time to bring science back into this? What would brilliant genius and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein say about corrupting our clocks? Al is the closest we have to a brainy ol’ Egyptian. After all, his E=mc² equation rates up there with the sharpest pyramid scheme. Unfortunately, the other point he shares with the ancients is that he’s dead.

If Egyptian scientists of yore were still around they’d surely find a way to communicate with Al’s remains and tell us what to do. He’d probably suggest what any sensible 8–year-old would: set all clocks ½-hour in between and permanently leave them there.

But in a world filled with inaccurate opinion maybe it’s science that’s dead. Just like clockwork.

A version of this story appeared in the December 2006 issue of "The Masthead". Clock image from Library of Congress.