European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - September 10, 1990, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Magazine my a e our life whatever it is National geographic hat is time ask six people to explain it today and you May get six answers. A physicist for instance might say time is one of the two Basic building blocks of the universe the other being space. For a banker time is Money. For a Buddhist Monk time is contemplated in nature s eternally returning cycles. Graffiti on a cafe Wall in Austin Texas attempted an answer Quot time is natures Way of keeping everything from happening All at  Quot we have Given More attention to measuring time than to anything in nature Quot says Gernot Winkler director of time services at the . Naval Observatory in Washington . Quot but time remains an abstraction a Riddle that exists Only in our  in reporting recently on the Enigma of time in National geographic John Boslough wrote Quot we have come to place a Premium on measuring the flow of time a As if by measuring it we could begin to understand  today More than half a billion watches a year pour off Assembly lines with some 300,000 sold daily in the United states alone. The worlds largest timepiece manufacturer Japan s Seiko group produces More watches than All Switzerland. More timepieces have been built Boslough theorizes than All other machines combined. Without the clock and now the watch there is no modern world says David Landes a historian of timekeeping at Harvard University. Quot it is the difference Between a Complex intricately coordinated society and a primitive one Only vaguely aware of times  a vast global timekeeping system keeps All civilization synchronized a to within a billionth of a second a Day. In today s technological world a navigator at sea or aloft plotting his location by satellite relies on a time signal accurate to within a single Millionth of a second. Deep space probes Are guided by radio signals timed to billionths of a second nanoseconds. Physicists tracking motion inside an atomic nucleus reckon in picoseconds trillionth of a second or even femtosecond thousands of a picoseconds. There Are More femtosecond in one second than there were seconds in the past 31 million years. At some 50 timekeeping stations around the world atomic clocks allow this remarkable splitting of seconds by counting the oscillations of atoms to Tell time. The most precise . Atomic clock located at the National Institute of standards and technology in Boulder colo., is accurate to within one second in 300,000 years. A second is virtually infinite says David Allen a time theorist at the Institute. It can be split into As Many pieces As technology allows. The notion that time is absolute was shattered by Albert Einstein s special theory of relativity. For Einstein time depended on How fast one is travelling. Events determine How fast time passes instead of the other Way around. National geographic killing time takes but a Millionth of a second for a Bullet shattering a watch. Air molecules compressed before Impact ignited into a Silhouette of the Bullet As it travelled at 3,200 feet a second. Such photos in which a Flash of Light acts As the cameras shutter freeze time revealing action invisible to the human Eye. Not time but the Speed of Light 186,282 Miles a second is the Only absolute explains theoretical physicist Stephen hawking of England a Cambridge University. In a sense the Speed of Light is Einstein s master clock since there can be no velocity without time and the Speed of Light never varies. So the Speed of Light is the Best Way to measure a distance. Yet Gravity affects both Light and time. In the universe of Einstein s relativity Gravity is caused by the intrusion of a Large chunk of matter like the Sun into space and time. Gravity bends both space and time. In the presence of a Large Stellar object Light has to travel farther Between two Points and time slows Down relativistically speaking. This presents a problem. On the surface of Jupiter with 318 times the mass of Earth an atomic cerium clock would run noticeably slower. A Black Hole a super dense body created when a massive Star collapses of its own gravitational pull has a Gravity Field so intense that not even Light can escape its surface. There time would stand still. Quot this shows us Quot says John Wheeler the Princeton University physicist who gave Black holes their name Quot that time is a measuring tool not an absolute flow or a  without an event there is no time. This Means Wheeler believes that time May be a secondary feature of nature not a Basic one. Quot but we re Only talking about the physics of time Here Quot he notes. What is time Boslough concludes Quot i believe that professor Wheeler s concept of time comes the closest to an actual explanation that it is a dimension and like any other dimension Only a secondary Quality in  but he adds humans have internalized it so powerfully that time has taken on a meaning All its own. Monday september 10, 1990 the stars and stripes a a a Page 13