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Now you can tell the difference between an unusually quiet Sunday afternoon and a total breakdown in time with Wagster Industries' new Time Detector.
This ingenious device features a battery powered rotating sweep arm mounted in front of a round fascia. A light recessed into the fascia is powered
by the same battery.
While the arm is rotating, the presence of time is indicated. In the absence of movement, it is possible that the battery has failed - this situation will be accompanied by the failure of the led. If however the movement ceases while the led is still illuminated this will be due to an absence of time preventing the arm from progressing from one position to another.
The absence of time either locally, globally or universally will cause a number of problematic issues (failure of earth's rotation, cessation of heartbeat, indefinite postponement of the Big Brother finale, bafflement of thermodynamic arrow) as well as some benefits (lack of ageing, indefinite postponement of the Big Brother finale) there is nothing that you can do about it as any remedial action or in fact any action at all will be impossible. However, armed with the Wagster Industries' Time Detector you will at least be alerted to the cause.
Buy this amazing scientific instrument today for the reduced price of £299.99 or buy the Deluxe Time Detector equipped with 1/60th rpm and 1/1440th rpm sweep arms and twelve numbered calibration points to enable exact calculation of time's progression for only £599.99.
Don't get caught out in a temporal paradox without one!
Two_20Cups_20Of_20Coffee
[pertinax, Jun 12 2007]
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Annotation:
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Marked for deletion, too expensive.+ |
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When time stops, so do you, so how would you notice that time had stopped? |
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That's just a minor detail: look at the big picture! |
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I see one problem with this clever
indicator. If time stops, so will the
propagation of the light wave from the
LED
to the observer. The observer will only
know that time has stopped when the
arm and LED
spontaneously shut off (time stops) and
then begin rotating and light again
(time restarting). |
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Oddly arcane measurement system - I think you should go with metric. |
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Time for two cups of coffee, [wagster], to get your afternoon moving again. |
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I think you have described a time _indicator_ rather than a time _detector_. There is a subtle but important difference. |
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I would be more inclined towards bunnage if you had invented the latter. |
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What are the indicated units? If you take one on a spaceship and accelerate to close to c, will one left on earth still detect time? |
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Could it be designed as a count-down timer to the next big bang? I've always been interested to know when the next one would be (I've got places to go, people to see, and that sort of stuff, you know.) |
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Since we already have the means to slow time down (denstist's drills, divorce hearings, final exams), as well as the means to speed time up (the halfbakery, alimony payments, final exams) it is apparent you have found a niche where noone has gone before. But is it portable? Can it detect daylight savings time? |
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I wonder what is the characteristic of things, where they can both slow up and speed down time. |
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But as time slows down, so does your perception of time - time moving at half-speed when perceived by your half-speed brain will appear to be moving at full speed. By extension, when time stops, if it is perceived by your frozen-in-time brain, it will appear to be normal.
The only way this Time Detector will work is if it is used to detect localised pockets of sluggish time - so, if you suspect that things in the corner of your kitchen age more slowly than elsewhere in your house (perhaps cut flowers in a vase last longer there?) you would put this Detector there, stand back (so you are not affected by the temporal anomaly yourself) and observe the Detector from the other side of the room. |
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//you would put this Detector there, stand back// I'm not sticking my arm into some localised pocket of temporal disturbance! No, I want to be able to gingerly throw the detector into any suspect corner of my kitchen from a safe distance, like from behind the sofa. Perhaps, if there was a bit of string attached, I could retrieve the device after having thrown it, to see if it's gone weird (e.g. covered in pre-ordinal mucus, or hyper intelligent moss from a billion years hence, that kind of thing) |
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Of course as time and speed are ultimately inter-related, you can also use this as a speed detector. If you notice the arm slowing noticably you can infer that the speed of the wall upon which it is hanging is starting to approach c. Get out of the way fast. |
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You could also use this technique to determine whether you are about to be punched in the face, by measuring the apparent time dilation experienced by your assailant's wristwa...erm I mean wrist-mounted time-detection unit. |
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// I would be more inclined towards bunnage if you had invented the latter. // |
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Ladders have been baked for some time, so I'll bun this rather new, free-thinking idea. + |
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//// I would be more inclined towards bunnage if you had invented the latter. //// I had one only this morning in Starbucks.
I'm concerned about what happens if the LED fails. Have you considered this possibility? I mean, most LEDs have lifetimes measured in the hundred thousand hour range, but this detector unit might be operating for some considerable amount of, ...erm, detecting period. |
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Given that the end of time is an infinite time away (give or take a few years), this product will only last an infinitessimal amount of it's potential useful operating period no matter how long it lasts or how well we build it, so we have decided to build it badly. |
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It will provide a useful alert to relativisitically induced temporal problems during your lifespan, but the end of universal time is out of it's scope. And yours. |
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Does it make a noise? If so, at what frequency? |
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//If so, at what frequency?// Well, duh, that depends how fast time is passing. |
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BUN! This is totally half baked! |
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//current temporal minimum energy
event// - that's what I find: time is
quantised. Moments don't flow smoothly
from one to another, passing through all
intermediate times along the way, but
flick, almost instantaneously, to the next
moment and then the passage of time is
suspended and nothing happens for about
a second. |
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//£599.99 ?!?! Way too expensive. I'm going to wait and get one second hand.//
Why? The standard model already comes with the two hands. |
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Glad to hear this idea isn't a wind-up. [+] |
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I will for-go the reasons why this idea is self-defeating because all have been mentioned in detail, above. I will however say that this has great market potential. I know, myself, how useless the damn thing would be, and I still want one. |
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It would work.....if it could work. I don't need to explain why this wouldn't work, everyone else already has. But it was well-written. + |
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