A Rational Cosmology: The Independence of a Uniform Time Scale from Physical Phenomena

Some will object to the claim of time's absolutism and uniformity by stating that our very ability to have a time scale depends on the dynamic nature of certain specific entities, our days owing their existence to the rotation of the Earth, our years -- to its revolution around the Sun, our months -- to the cycles of the Moon.

These thinkers would argue that, were the aforementioned entities to enter a period of stasis, our entire time scale would collapse, since they could no longer be used as reference points. Such an argument, however, is flawed in a multitude of ways.

First, it is fitting to note that certain of our units on a time scale have absolutely no relevance to the behavior of external entities. No celestial cycle occurs during a period of precisely seven days, for example, yet we maintain the keeping of weeks as essential units around which our time scale is organized.

No external phenomenon necessitates a week to be seven days. A ten-day week was, for example, tried during the French Revolution. No external phenomenon requires a day to be split into twenty-four hours, or an hour into sixty minutes, or a minute into sixty seconds-all inventions of the Babylonians. These are arbitrary divisions, and, excepting a given individual's familiarity with and thus preference of one system over another, the accuracy of an individual's analysis of the temporal behavior of entities would not differ had the divisions been undertaken differently.

My claim is not meant to critique the correspondence of a time scale with physical phenomena, which may be useful for anticipating cyclical weather trends or coordinating one's daily plans with the availability of sunlight. However, correspondence and dependence are two different relationships entirely.

Were the Earth's period of rotation about the Sun to increase by a second, for example, "altering" the length of the year to fit this change would be absurd, as, it would imply that, in reference to our time scale, the Earth's period would not have changed at all, since it would still, via this adjustment, take a year for the Earth to orbit the Sun!

This would imply an overt evasion of recognizing that an actual event that had taken place. It is not reality that must be adjusted to our systems, but rather our systems adjusted to reality, and, if the Earth's period about the Sun did, in reality, increase, our system would need to accommodate the fact that the period would now be a year and one second rather than merely a year.

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