🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep30.073018.13232@nuscc.nus.sg> matmcinn@nuscc.nus.sg (Mcinnes B T (Dr)) writes:

>I am holding in my hand a baloney sandwich. I hereby declare that this
>is an instance of a clock. Now I note that as the baloney sandwich
>decreases, so does my hunger. Since time is what a clock measures, I
>deduce that: Time is hunger.

An interesting clock.  And you're right: numerous experiments have
shown that psychological time is closely correlated with metabolic
rate.  If you shut people up in caves, for instance, their circadien
rhythm will drift, and after a week or so they will indeed start
measuring time in terms of hunger, or fatigue.

The effect is far more pronounced in animals that are not endothermic.
There is an almost exact relationship between the chirp frequency of
a cricket and the ambient temperature.  In the tropics especially,
the slowdown during dusk is remarkable.

The point of this being, that in default of any better clock, a race
of intelligent crickets would perceive the night as lasting a lot
longer than the day, which would make for some interesting astronomy.
And for us, since "worldlines" are imperceptible (indeed, I might
even call them mathematical fictions, but we know that only quantum
mechanics has mathematical fictions) we need some operational means
of determining the vales of the time coordinates in our equations.

Those means are clocks, and it always makes sense to ask how good our
clocks are, and what unknown influences might be perturbing them.