Continuum

~kyle

When I was a kid, I literally knew by heart the script of the Back To The Future movies (speaking of geeknes, hey ~tskaalgard?). But only a few years after I grasped the meaning of (space-time) continuum.

For some reason, I found myself thinking about time zones, during lunchtime. I honestly don't even remember how I got there.

I know that time zones are a complicated beast, not for direct experience, but because I watched this interesting video on the topic:

What I learned from it is that the apparently simple task of ordering two events by time of happening can be horribly difficult. Regardless of the problem complexity, however, I *think* that a total ordering exists. Perhaps I'm wrong, and to be honest I didn't even bother checking what science tells us about it. But in my opinion there's no such thing as "simultaneous events".

My reasoning is simple: time is a continuum (thanks Doc!), which means I can zoom infinitely, using smaller and smaller time units. As I zoom progressively to the milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-…second resolution, two arbitrarily close events will start to be distant (with respect to my time unit of choice). By extension, the probability of two events being *exactly* on the same moment in time must be infinitesimal.

Obviously this says absolutely nothing about the complexity of the problem of correlating two events. Our machines are unable to deal with infinite precision, and even if they were, two events happening in physically distant places would be hard to correlate: the signal propagation speed is bound by the speed of light.

…

Lots of thinking in a couple of seconds. I obviously spoke no word about my thoughts with my wife, who is usually bored by my overthinking (and I can't really blame her).

Oh well.

Time passed, and the day turned to an end. A bunch of hours till Midnight. In the afternoon the parcel arrived: packed in cardboard, although certain parts of it were kept in place by rubber bands.

Cutting that rubber band turned out to be more practical than removing it, and that's how I ended playing with a piece of broken rubber band, as I did as a young boy many years ago.

Stretch the bowstring and …release! It is probably funnier if I put some weight on the other end of the rubber (the one that will whip the air). I couldn't conveniently grab anything that served the purpose, so I figured that a little knot the whip end would probably do.

One knot was not changing much. I added another… and another. The knots can gain a certain mass as long as they're overlapped. But overlapping knots on a rubber band is not as simple as it might look. Not horribly difficult either, but the band must be stretched before knotting, so that two knots end up to be closer when the band is released.

Just like events in time, they're close if you watch time with a big time unit, but if you stretch time, you'll see them more distant.

In short: God uses time as it was a crappy whip made of rubber band.