A couple of weeks ago I was teaching a Kindergarten class and
we went out for recess at 2:15 in which dismissal was at
2:45.
Well, I get all the kids lined up to go home and look up at
the mighty clock and it says 3:15. My heart starts pounding -
what will I tell the parents, what if all the buses already
left, what am I going to do with 20 Kindergateners.
It turns out we had entered a strange time warp - not really
- the secretary said it was the weirdest thing she looked at
the clock at 2:40 then a second later it was 3:10. This
happened to every clock in the whole school - elementary and
middle.
It was a strange feeling - took me about 30 minutes to shake
it all off. I knew the clocks were wrong, but strange because
I could not find a clock that referenced the "real" so to
speak.
Now these clocks are definately what one would call socially
constructed. At one time the only clock in a village would be
the church - the center of the community. Now, every
classroom has a clock and when one is not in your vincinity
you feel sort of loss.
I find myself at a loss when given a sharp distinction
between construction on one end and objectivity on the other
as if they were oppposite poles. Why would a clock - socially
constructed as it is - be any less objective as let's say the
movement of the earth around the sun or moon around the
earth. I would think that in many ways the clock is much more
of an objective existence for many of us than revolutions of
earth and moon.
From the time machine
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hgwells/works/1890s
/time/index.htm
“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from
the present moment.”
“My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just
where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting
away from the present movement. Our mental existences, which
are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the
Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the
grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our
existence fifty miles above the earth's surface.”
“But the great difficulty is this,” interrupted the
psychologist. “You can move about in all directions of Space,
but you cannot move about in Time.”
“That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong
to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I
am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the
instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you
say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means
of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a
savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground.
But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this
respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and
why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop
or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even
turn about and travel the other way?”
“Oh, this,” began Filby, “is all—”
“Why not?” said the Time Traveller.
“It's against reason,” said Filby.
“What reason?” said the Time Traveller.
“You can show black is white by argument,” said Filby, “but
you will never convince me.”
“Possibly not,” said the Time Traveller. “But now you begin
to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of
Four Dimensions. Long ago I had a vague inkling of a
machine—”
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