A Rational Cosmology: The Proportionality Requirement for Time Scales

Essay XXIX

This is Essay XXIX 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.

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.