Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.
I just finished reading "Cell" by Stephen King. What a great story. King has this knack of writing horror stories that keep you thinking, "Man, this could actually happen!" I had started reading this book about 6 months ago but did not get much past page 100 before it was due back at the library. I contemplated buying a copy of it so I could read it at my normal slow pace (a few pages a day) but gave up on the idea. With the wife being sick all last week, I had plenty of time to myself each evening as she slept and I got through the entire book in about 8 days.
Along with that book, I had also started on a non fiction book called "Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps" by Peter Galison. I was reading about the whole Daylight Saving Time thing the other day and found a list of books about the subjects of time and the calendar and was really looking for something like that (in the 520 range of the Dewey Decimal System) but instead came upon this book. I think I half wanted to read it and half wanted someone to see me reading it and be impressed. Either way, I am only about 60 pages into it. It is not exactly a page turner but early on in the book Galison describes something that troubled Einstein early in his career. He was very concerned with synchrony.
You see, he wanted to know what it really meant for 2 things to happen at the exact same time. He was trying to account for the difference between time and how we perceived events happening. An example was this. Suppose that there are 2 people with high powered flashlights that are positioned away from each other exactly the distance it takes light to travel in one second. Suppose then also that you are 1/4th of the way between them. This would mean that you are 3 times as far away from one person as the other. Now, if both persons turned on their flashlights and you saw both lights (assuming you could look in both directions at once) and it if appears to you that they turned them on at the exact same time then you would say with some certainty that the lights were turned on at the same time. You would be wrong since it took 1/4 second for the person's closest to you light to reach you and 3/4 second for the second person's light to reach you. In reality, they did not happen at the same time, they just appeared to happen at the same time. This is exaggerated to prove a point since in order to have things set up this way, the 2 people with lights would need to be 300,000 km apart and you would need to be able to see light that far away as well. But this illustrates the point.
A friend of mine works for Cerulean (makers of Trillian). As such he was able to let me test the newest version of their instant messaging software. Not much works at the time other than basic chat and a few other things but we were able to test the ability to use your microphone and speakers to talk to each other. Since this was an early version of the software, it did not work perfectly. In fact, the longer we spoke, the greater the delay of our conversation. We wondered how much of a delay there was so we decided that if one of us started saying, "one, two, three" and the other would chime in on the "three" then we could tell how much of a delay there was. After the test we concluded that there was a 2 second delay. After thinking for a moment I deduced that there was only a one second delay actually. You see it took one second for me to hear the word "three" and one second for my "three" to reach his ears. This is about the same kind of thinking Einstein used for his sync issues. In an small way, my thinking is like Einstein (an extremely small way). It makes me feel better anyway and helps me to press on in the book (secretly hoping that I think like the other genius Poincaré). I will have to let you know.
Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.
Jon
No comments:
Post a Comment