My Condo Was Trapped in a Time Warp
Do you know the feeling of not knowing what time it is when you wake up from sleep? Well I woke up this Friday morning ready for work and discovered my bedside alarm clock is one hour behind. I know this even though the sun wasn't up yet and the alarm clock did not beep its familiar unwelcome beep. Throughout the years I've come rely more on my rather accurate biological clock to wake me up and somehow I sensed that the bedside clock wasn't being truthful! So I fired up my cellphone to check the time and sure enough, the bedside clock is one hour behind.
Of course this is not unusual because the bedside alarm clock gets its power from a power adapter plugged into one of the mains power outlet. That means whenever there's a power outage or even a grey out at my condominium, the clock will be inaccurate.
I was forced to use the power outlet because the clock's huge red LED digital display sucks up quite a lot of juice if I plug in batteries instead.
Here comes the weird part...after showering, I glanced at the wall clock in my living room and it is exactly one hour behind too! My wall clock runs on independent batteries so this is quite a surprising coincidence for me. Why did both my clocks slowed down exactly an hour? If the wall clock's batteries are weak, why is it still running at a perceptibly normal pace?
Maybe it's too early in the morning but I was rather confused so I turned on the TV to check the time again. Unfortunately, gone were those days when RTM would display a test screen with a clock on it. Remember how our parents used to synchronize our clocks and watches according to RTM 'standard' time? NTV7 and 8TV showed clock-less test screens while there's either a clock-less news program or insipid talk show on TV channels 1,2 and 3.
By now I'm rather desperate to know the time so I switched on my Internet connected PC to check its system clock and the local time according to Google. I must admit I'm slightly disappointed when my PC clock agreed with my cellphone clock.
Ok, so why did I say my condo was trapped in a time warp? According the theories of special relativity, time can slow down with respect to another system. This phenomenon is called Time Dilation.
So either my condo was travelling at or greater than the speed of light, or was in a mini-black hole!!! I suppose it's a good thing I wasn't home when it happened or I'll be ripped apart into my constituent atoms! (Imagine that...it'll be gorier than being exploded into gooey bits by Dr. Manhattan!)
.
.
.
Then again, the two slowed down clocks at home even though one runs on batteries might just be a coincidence...Sigh! How mundane! :(
Do you know the feeling of not knowing what time it is when you wake up from sleep? Well I woke up this Friday morning ready for work and discovered my bedside alarm clock is one hour behind. I know this even though the sun wasn't up yet and the alarm clock did not beep its familiar unwelcome beep. Throughout the years I've come rely more on my rather accurate biological clock to wake me up and somehow I sensed that the bedside clock wasn't being truthful! So I fired up my cellphone to check the time and sure enough, the bedside clock is one hour behind.
Of course this is not unusual because the bedside alarm clock gets its power from a power adapter plugged into one of the mains power outlet. That means whenever there's a power outage or even a grey out at my condominium, the clock will be inaccurate.
I was forced to use the power outlet because the clock's huge red LED digital display sucks up quite a lot of juice if I plug in batteries instead.
Here comes the weird part...after showering, I glanced at the wall clock in my living room and it is exactly one hour behind too! My wall clock runs on independent batteries so this is quite a surprising coincidence for me. Why did both my clocks slowed down exactly an hour? If the wall clock's batteries are weak, why is it still running at a perceptibly normal pace?
Maybe it's too early in the morning but I was rather confused so I turned on the TV to check the time again. Unfortunately, gone were those days when RTM would display a test screen with a clock on it. Remember how our parents used to synchronize our clocks and watches according to RTM 'standard' time? NTV7 and 8TV showed clock-less test screens while there's either a clock-less news program or insipid talk show on TV channels 1,2 and 3.
By now I'm rather desperate to know the time so I switched on my Internet connected PC to check its system clock and the local time according to Google. I must admit I'm slightly disappointed when my PC clock agreed with my cellphone clock.
Ok, so why did I say my condo was trapped in a time warp? According the theories of special relativity, time can slow down with respect to another system. This phenomenon is called Time Dilation.
So either my condo was travelling at or greater than the speed of light, or was in a mini-black hole!!! I suppose it's a good thing I wasn't home when it happened or I'll be ripped apart into my constituent atoms! (Imagine that...it'll be gorier than being exploded into gooey bits by Dr. Manhattan!)
.
.
.
Then again, the two slowed down clocks at home even though one runs on batteries might just be a coincidence...Sigh! How mundane! :(
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