Q.E.D.

The title of this week’s offering should serve as a warning that the discussion will be of a scientific nature.  If the reader finds such material to be painful, confusing or sleep-inducing, they may wish to abandon this missive and try again next week.  This topic has a bit of the “Chicken or Egg” element to it, but as we unequivocally established that the Egg came first (see The Chicken or the Egg, 5/30/13) we will skip over that part of the discussion and jump right in.

Fabric of Space Time

We know from universally accepted scientific dogma that the Universe, as our limited sensory perspective interprets it, is measured in four dimensions: Height, Width, Depth and Time.  This can be simplified by stating that every event occupies an identifiable location at some measurable moment.  But which is more important; identifying the coordinates or the moment of the measurement?

This is a tricky question to answer (not a trick question, which would be a question leading to an unexpected obvious answer when the shroud of misdirection is removed) but I believe worthy of the effort as it addresses the fundamental nature or all existence.  Are you getting sleepy yet?

Astronomer Edwin Hubble

Once astronomer Edwin Hubble established that the Universe is expanding (The Big Pffft! 5/16/13), location of any observed event necessarily required the addition of a time element; because event identification became temporal.  Essentially; if you looked for it where you saw it last time, it wasn’t going to be there.  Perhaps this explains why it is so difficult to locate ones house keys.  It underscores the invalidity of the question asked by spouses in all languages, “Where did you last have them?”  A man of courage would respond, “Aha!  It doesn’t matter where I last had them, you old battleaxe, because Einstein has assured us that they are now in some different part of the Universe.”  In our eternal quest for harmony we have adopted the more congenial, “If I could remember that dear, I wouldn’t be searching for them. Thank you for your helpful suggestion.”  But I digress. 

With very little thought, the answer becomes self-evident.  Time is the more important element!  Our experience with motorcars and body repair has demonstrated that we cannot locate two (or any integer larger than one for that matter) independent objects consisting of matter in the same spatial coordinates at the same time.  We can so locate an infinite number of said objects in said spatial coordinates at different times without negative consequence.  But run one red light and, wham! –Q.E.D.

Now I know what you are thinking, “But Dale, what does this have to do with trains?”  Well, I’m going to tell you.  A couple decades before Hubble and Einstein more clearly defined the nature of our universe and peaceful coexistence within, the North American railroads (including Canadian, ay) discovered that scheduling train movements under the then popular solar time, in which every community set its own clocks to correspond with the local “noon” time, was not only impossibly difficult but extremely hazardous.  If you’ve ever sat yourself down on a heretofore non located porcupine, you know of which I speak.  Just imagine the consequence of two speeding trains asserting their inertial right to use the same stretch of railroad at the same time: Cataclysmic!

U.S. Naval Observatory

So, as the tracks are the tracks and run between fixed points in space, the variable we must turn to in hopes of avoiding the above described catastrophe is time.  If time were standardized, scheduling could be completed safely within the ever present limits of human performance.  Note we still have the occasional train collision, but it’s not because the time zone suddenly changed itself.  To accomplish this safety improvement, and time management facilitation, the railroads joined together in 1879 following the suggestion of Mr. Cleveland Abbe to establish what we now know as the five (Canada has one more than the U.S.) standard time zones.

It became the responsibility of several major observatories (e.g. the Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. and Harvard University) to send a telegraph signal each day at noon Eastern Standard Time by which operators would set their clocks as necessary for their time zone; e.g. San Francisco (Pacific Standard Time zone) would set its clocks to 9:00 A.M. when it received the signal that was telegraphed at Noon (12:00 PM) from the Eastern Standard Time zone. And they accomplished feat of non-compulsory cooperation before the government could get its spindly hands into the batter. 

So there you have it.  Before the Big Bang Theory, before the Theory of Relativity, American entrepreneurs using good, old-fashioned, profit-driven motives solved the problems associated with traveling through four-dimensional space-time... in a train!