Someone recently told me that when humans are kept in isolation from a cyclic light pattern, they develop a 25 hour day pattern on their own. In other words, if they are kept indoors and away from natural light patterns, they still keep a 25 hour day cycle.
So, this causes me to propose a question, or perhaps a thought experiment. First, some additional data: The earth is slowing down in its spin. Surprise, there's a wee bit o' friction in all that space up there. Also, there are three different kinds of "day," the civic, solar, and sidereal day. The civic day is 86,400 SI seconds, or 24 hours exactly. The solar day is the time a planet takes to rotate once with respect to its star. For the Earth, that varies depending on the time of year, and the average is our fabulous 24 hour day. The sidereal day, however, is the amount of time a planet takes to rotate with respect to distant stars. For Earth, this is about 3 minutes and 56 seconds shorter than our normal 24 hour period.
So, let's do a little math, figure out how fast the Earth is slowing down, and then "calculate backwards" to figure out how long it took to slow down from 25 hours per day to our current time of 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds.
Of course, I'm not actually going to do all that math in my blog. Especially seeing as I'm ill right now. Instead, I'll ask my physics Professor to explain it to me. Perhaps he will also be interested to see the order of time in which our "day" has changed from what our bodies "expect" a day to be.
1 comment:
There is a major logical problem in this post. If the world is slowing down, then going back in time would make the day shorter, not longer.
I have another psycho-physiological explanation for why humans default to a 25 hour day, but that's quite unnecessary.
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