WB 11 The eleventh hour

W B 11 The Eleventh Hour

Things were going wrong. No one knew why. 

People started walking through walls without the use of doors. 

Nuclear power station outputs varied erratically, 

One week two hundred people won the jackpot on the lottery - the following twenty weeks, none.

Traffic light started behaving erratically, red was sometimes followed by more red, rather than the expected amber and green - it didn’t help much with the traffic.

Bathwater started changing the direction of the eddy as it swirled down the plug hole.

Trains and buses started arriving on time.

Politicians started telling the whole truth.

Something was amiss with the world, chaos was taking over, one of those poxy butterflies in Brazil again probably but which one, there were several of them there and Brazil is a big place. Bigger even than Wales, some say.

People demanded that the government did something.The government did what it always did when it had no answer to a problem; it postponed the issue so it didn’t have to do anything while seeming to be strong and resourceful. It set up an enquiry led by a ‘past his sell by date’ lawyer. It would almost certainly last a long time and cost a lot of money. That is what lawyers are good at. The government fulminated publicly against the years of delay while being privately delighted at the time wasted. They didn’t worry about the cost, after all it wasn’t their money.

The lawyer, Sir Cholmondly - Smythe, was not quite as daft and doddery as he appeared. He had a sharp and enquiring mind, hidden behind a mild air of bewilderment when asking the witnesses who appeared before his panel, questions that pierced the hyperbole adopted by most civil servants and got quickly to the nub of the matter. One of his favourite strategies was to allow a civil servant to witter on until he was confident that he had cast enough wool over the eyes of the panel and mildly ask, ‘why did you do such a stupid thing when even a four year old child would have known better?’ This almost invariably brought out some gems that the witness would have preferred to remain hidden.

The government Chief Scientist was summoned to the enquiry and was quite certain that he was a match for a bumbling lawyer. Sir David Smart was to find out that he was wrong. He was dressed in pin striped, dark grey trousers and a white T-shirt with the slogan “Statistics means never having to say you’re certain.”

Sir C - S as we will call him, to save paper and ink, looked at Dave and thought he would have a go at tying him in knots - bowlines mainly - as he was an amateur sailor.

‘So tell me Dave, err may I call you Dave?’

 Sir David Smart had a hatred of being called Dave but knew, if he admitted to that, the number of ‘Daves’ he heard each day would increase a hundred fold so he mildly answered, ‘Not at all Smudge.’

‘Well then Dave, perhaps you can explain to us simple, non scientific folk, what is going on and what started it all?’

‘It all started when we were told, nay commanded, by the European Union that we had to change to binary decimal time’

‘Explain please.’

‘The SI unit of time was decided to be the second, which would be unchanged and determined by the speed of light, which as you know is constant - in a vacuum of course - at 299,792,458 metres per second. This also defines the metre so other units of length and time are calculated from this. There are now 100 seconds in a minute - now known as a centiminute and 100 centiminutes or 10,000 seconds in an hour.The day is determined by the rotational speed of the Earth and consists of 86,400 seconds. This means that there are now 8.64 hours in a day, or 8.64 x 10⁴ seconds in scientific notation. There were a few adjustments required to accommodate this new clock system but over all it made things a lot more simple and precise. Big Ben’s clock had to be changed from analogue to binary digital of course, as did all the other analogue clocks in the country. It also pushed Switzerland out of the watchmaking business so they now rely on cuckoo clocks, triangular chocolate bars and dodgy banking to earn a living.

That is only the first step, of course as the time units had to be expressed in digital binary - DB rather than just digital and in scientific notation, but I am sure that everyone in the country remembers the conversion calculation and can manage it quite easily. What about you then Smudge?

Sir C - S could of course, do this standing on his head, just not so well when sitting on his brain but he didn’t want to admit to this so he replied in his assumed persona, ‘not really, I have always found it to be a problem, perhaps you could explain it for the benefit of us dimwits?’

‘Certainly Smudge,’ came the reply. If there was one thing Dave was good at, it was patronising the intellectually challenged.

‘Take the time of half past five in the afternoon or 1730 as you maritime types used to call it. This is of course seventeen hours and 30 minutes through the day. if you first convert this to seconds you get;

17 x 60 x 60 = 61,200 seconds

Add 30 x 60 = 1,800 seconds

Total = 63,000 seconds

Convert to scientific notation = 6.3 x 10⁴

This is simple and straightforward.

Now convert to binary using the simple method gives 1111011000011000

So instead of saying half past five in the afternoon, you simply say 111011000011000. This is also the number of seconds since the last midnight. I think you will agree that this is simpler and more precise and it makes the design of digital clocks that much simpler. People soon got used to reading time in this way.

The main problem was that computers are very good with this method because time is now expressed using their language but it increased the data storage required and because if the increase in accuracy, it reduced the amount of randomness required. This meant that the randomness had to be increased  in other areas by exactly the same amount to keep the quantity of randomness at the same level. This is known as the third law of thermodynamics or random entropy, to give it its other name.

Quantum theory predicts that atoms will be in random places. A few that make up a person have a very low probability of being on the other side of the wall. This probability is normally so low that is does not really occur in the real world but since the increase of randomness…

Also is you look at a mass of plutonium for example. Its common allotrope, Pu-239 has a half life of 24,100 years. This is known and predictable but there is a problem. If you look at one molecule of plutonium, there is no way of knowing when it will decay, it can be in the next couple of seconds or in many thousand of years time. It is identical to all the other plutonium  molecules but they will decay at a different time. The timing of this decay is totally random, as predicted by quantum theory. The problem is now, because of the increase in randomness, this half life will have decreased by an unknown amount and so all nuclear reactors will have to be shut down until they have been redesigned and rebuilt.

‘Why has the lottery gone very strange?’

‘It is because of the strange effect called the common occurrence of unlikely effects. The odds of one ticket winning the lottery is 14 million to one so it is very unlikely that one person with one ticket will win it. But, the big prize is won by someone almost every week. The increase in randomness has to be shared with the lottery which now has more of it and the odds against winning can no longer be calculated and they change every week.

Don’t get me started on the problems with traffic lights, bath water and, and.’

‘What is the answer then Dave?’

‘Leave the European Union and go back to old fashioned time with 24 hours in a day.’

‘How much time to we have? Tell me in old money please.’

‘It is now very late in the day and we have no time to lose. I’d say we are now at the eleventh hour.’

‘Thank you Dave. I’ll notify the Prime Minister, I am sure he will be very pleased to hear that. I’ll also put it in the report of the Smudge enquiry.