A Rational Cosmology: The Proportionality Requirement for Time Scales

We have previously shown that a genuinely uniform time scale does not depend on the motions of any physical entities, including celestial bodies. For example, if the Earth began to take one second longer to rotate about the Sun than it did previously, this would not give us license to "redefine" the year as having one additional second.

Of course, we would be at leisure to invent a new interval on our time scale that would correspond to the new period of the Earth's rotation about the Sun, but, relative to a year, such an interval would always be one second longer.

It should be remembered that, to be an accurate measurement of real phenomena, a time scale can include units of any magnitude and any relationship of one unit's magnitude to another's. A day can be equivalent to 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds, or 3e^-4 of some conceivable unit X of time that somebody might choose to invent for some purpose.

However, the requirement of uniformity on a time scale implies a proportionality of every given time unit to every other time unit. Two days, must, therefore, be equivalent to 48 hours, 172,800 seconds, or 6e^-4 of unit X.

Similarly, so long as a time scale adheres to the requirement of uniformity, it does not matter which location on the time spectrum (which, again, is a part of a mental model, not any actual point on a real entity) is the time scale's "zero point," or the temporal arrangement of entities to which the scale relates all future configurations with a positive magnitude of a unit and all past configurations with a negative magnitude. The "zero point" may well be the birth of Christ, or the founding of the French Republic, or the time at which George Washington signed the United States Constitution.

Nor is it necessary to have only a single "zero point" to which all other events are always related. For example, when I state that I wrote a poem "a day before yesterday," I am using yesterday, not the birth of Christ, as the "zero point" of the time scale which I presently happen to be employing.

This time scale is perfectly consistent with the one describing the Christian Era, as is evident by the faultless nature of the suggestion that I wrote written the poem "a day before yesterday, on June 8, 2007," since there exists a uniformity of and proportionality among all the units used, in this case, days and years.

As a matter of fact, whenever we introduce a multiplicity of different time units into our consideration, we employ a combination of different time scales by definition, with the scale of seconds having different intervals from the scale of days having different intervals from the scale of millennia.

These scales need not rule each other out; they are different instruments at our disposal for different tasks. Much as a meter-stick would be useful for measuring one object's length, while the length of another could better be determined by a satellite electronically recording distances of hundreds of kilometers, so are different time scales suited for different purposes, but always within the same absolute reality, describing non-contradictory qualities involving real entities.

Since no particular physical phenomenon is inextricably necessary for the keeping of a time scale, it is possible for us to conceive a condition of hypothetical universal stasis in which a time scale could still be kept and would be of necessity in describing the conditions pertaining to entities in such a state.

We would not be able to think about time scales while in stasis ourselves, since our thinking is in itself an act that involves the change in some qualities of some, indeed, many entities. However, we presently can grasp soundly and with certainty that the quality, time, accumulates uniformly for all entities, in all conditions, in all environments.

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