Seemingly insignificant factors mess with our timekeeping, too. In 200 million years’ time, it will be 25 hours (and a year will be 335 days). When dinosaurs were last on the planet, a single rotation of the Earth took about 23 hours. “The cosmos doesn’t cooperate,” says Lowe. But a day isn’t exactly 24 hours and, due to the gradual slowing of the Earth’s rotation, these are getting longer all the time. We all know, for instance, that a day is the time it takes for the Earth to rotate once around its own axis. It works well, but the rest of our temporal system gets more and more complicated as it scales and we reconcile the atomic and cosmic, requiring tiny adjustments along the way. Since 1967, we’ve used these to define seconds in terms of the predictable cesium atom: A second is the amount of time it takes for 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation corresponding to how cesium vibrates between two energy states. Lowe, an engineer in Time and Frequency Services-are amazingly accurate, and will run, and run, and run. These clocks-generators, really, says John P. There, enormous cesium fountain clocks use atomic properties to set the time across the United States. In Boulder, Colorado, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is doing their best to keep track of time. Until the 1800s, every town had its own little time zone, with clocks synchronized to the local solar noon.
Bringing into focus something that is, at once, as precise and fuzzy as a moment means taking a closer look at what time is and how we understand it, through linguistic, scientific, neurological, and philosophical lenses. Time, even in its most fiat-based forms, is a slippery beast that seems to defy our attempts to define, cage, contain, and regulate it. What are these moments? Are they singular, discrete? Are they all the same? When do they begin and end? How long is a moment? The moment the wheel began rolling down a hill. In this last subset of moments-the quick ones, the instants, the markers of some kind of change-perhaps there is something to understand about how we perceive time. Sometimes, simply changing “a” to “the” truncates moments to instantaneity: “I seized the moment,” “The moment had come,” “That was the moment I knew.” It can mean the barest speck of time or it can stretch over hours, days, weeks-with so many different meanings that trying to pin it down might seem a fool’s errand. But modern English doesn’t treat the word this way. For centuries, and as late as the early 19th century, a “moment” was something quite specific-a 40th of an hour, or around 90 seconds. You often know when “the moment has passed,” but can you say how long it was, or precisely when it ended? The Oxford English Dictionary lists nearly a dozen idioms that pivot around the word “moment.” Each suggests something slightly different.Īt this point, medievalists are probably rolling their eyes. And when you’re “in the moment,” you act without regard to time. “At any moment” is a rolling succession of distinct hypotheticals, like beads on a string. “At the moment” refers to an indefinite period of time: however long now is, or until something changes. “For a moment” is somehow instantaneous-a flash of misunderstanding or emotion that passes like a gust of wind. When you take “a moment to think,” how long do you need? “In a moment” probably means quite soon.
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