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

This is Essay XXVIII of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

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.